Episode Podcast Transcriptions 9 of The Markcast® podcast talking about the CFL, UFL, and other “alt-football” news, stories, insights, commentary, and more!!!

Episode transcriptions 9 of The Markcast®. The Markcast® is a sports-centric podcast, covering the CFL, UFL, and other alternative football leagues. Tune in for the latest CFL, UFL, and alt-football news. Episodes are listed in the order they were recorded. *Please excuse any spelling or typographical errors.

UFL 2024 College Draft Results!

Well here we are, back here, live UFL College Draft recap Wednesday here. Thanks everyone for joining. Please like and subscribe by trying to get up to 4,000 subscribers. We'll probably do a couple giveaways here when we hit 4,000. I know Dustin over at Royal Retros and we'll get a couple of those custom jerseys, whether you're a CFL fan, we can do XFL stuff, USFL stuff. I have my, mark has one, my XFL Dragons one, we will showcase big guest list standing by Anthony just logged in as well. That was my battle. I'm like, where the heck is Anthony Miller? And then, well, I had never actually sent over the link so that it's usually always my fault, which it is now. But this is exciting. Let me bring in everyone and then we'll do a little preface. We have Evan here, Greg Parks, Anthony Miller, everyone standing by fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice. I'm always so used to these drafts. Hey, it's happening at 7:00 AM and then we get a press release sometime in the afternoon. I go, there's no way today they're going to post this. We will go live at five. Everyone could have notes and everything, which we have. And then of course this all went out in a really timely manner here. Greg, I feel like we've lived through this many times. I know Evan and Anthony have as well, but this seemed to go pretty smooth today. Greg, introduce yourself and what do you think? Because I said, normally this is something that comes in and press release earlier it felt like they tried to make this be something today And yet it wasn't all that people wanted it to be either. There were people saying, why don't you televise this and things like that. It's like, no, no, no. So they released the picks on social media. Each team's social media account tweeted the picks out I think for what this draft is and we can get into the weeds a little bit and talk about what this draft is and what this draft is not. I think having it play out the way it did today, certainly it's better than dumping them all in a press release, which we've seen before. This is kind of the norm I'm expecting now. I think Reed you and I were on, we run with Pat for the super dispersal draft back in January and that's how they did it. We were on live and they were doing the picks in a very similar way on social media. Each team's account was releasing who they were picking and that's how they did it today. So I think if there a draft in the fall, I'm not sure there will be, but if there is, I think we can probably expect the announcements done the same way. And we'll get Evan in here. I thought we pre-show. I think Evan did a fantastic job of kind of explaining because still a lot of questions when we're, have Anthony here as well. And Anthony has this article. I'm ready to pull up and Greg as well. And Evan said he has notes, which is great. Again, normally I always try to go live like, oh, the draft's going to be at 10:00 AM Eastern, let's get on at seven, let's do it. And then we kind of sit around and pontificate for an hour, kind of waiting for the results to come in. This time they came in on time. Of course we're late now, but now we're here. It's five o'clock. I was doing lawn work all day. I fell off a ladder, I put on a shirt, but I think I might have elbow injured. My elbow very poorly here trying to shave one of the hedges outside. But we're here and we have a lots of things to talk about, Evan, for people in the chat. Philip's checking in. Abdul here, we'll pull up the comments. But Evan, can you explain the draft today because this very much is the US L'S college draft now with the UFL merge. Can you, Evan, what is going on here today for people checking in? What are we and how does this work? Right. Well, a lot of the players that you saw today, it's not a guarantee that they play in the UFL. This is essentially a rights draft. The USFL back when they were a separate entity had one back in 2023 and they actually did theirs prior to the NFL draft, which was an interesting strategy because a lot of the players that were selected in that draft ended up signing NFL contracts or NFL draft picks and they never appeared in the USFL. I would expect similar things here. A lot of the players that you saw that were drafted today are currently under contract in the NFLA majority of them are undrafted free agents. I thought Houston's draft class in particular was interesting because I believe they only drafted two players that had signed into the NFL and the rest of their class was current free agents. So that's an interesting strategy and one that might work out better for them considering the position they were in last year. But the idea is that the chances of all 80 players that you saw taken today in the draft playing in the UFL in 2025 are slim to none. Hopefully there's some, my guess would be, I don't know, maybe a quarter. So 20 out of the 80 and I have notes on I think 20 or 21 guys today that I really want to touch on. Not saying that those are going to be the guys that actually come, but just to give a better idea or understanding to people out there who are new to this process, because like I said, the USFL had a college draft. It was just like this at the beginning of 2023 and then last summer the XFL had a ton of drafts, rookie drafts, supplemental drafts, things of that nature. And those were a similar process where they were all just acquiring rights and not all those guys ended up actually playing in the league Because it is weird because obviously we have, and Mike reported and we have coaches laid off here at the end of June, we're in the middle of July. A lot of the team kind of DPPs are involved in a lot of this stuff. The coaches want to come out to do any of the showcases, they'll get paid for kind of that. But it is just like this weird time where we're acquiring new talent. We don't necessarily have League Scouts. We have a lot of DPPs taking care of that. Anthony, what do you make of all this? Because I'm sitting there. I am a commanders fan, Sam Hartman, right? Our third string quarterback. He's drafting the league. What do you make of all this? I do think, I don't think the league and I know poor went out to Jeff, Jeff, the VP of comms for the UFL, he's gone. It just feels a little like they don't do a great job of explaining what's going on here. Anthony, what do you make of this? Yeah, it's hard to get excited about these drafts sometimes because like Evan said, a lot of these guys are probably not going to end up in the UFL. A lot of them are in the NFL right now and they're probably going to either get on the practice squad or be a third string on an NFL team. So I mean it does build some excitement. It has been pretty quiet. I think there's only been 14 players that have signed to the NFL, which is lower than what we're usually seeing. And then usually around this time last off season, there were teams that were assigning players, they were assigning free agents and stuff. We have not seen that at all. This is really the first time. But we've talked about teams like I guess acquiring the rights of a player, but they're not really getting them unless they commit to it. So it's been a fairly quiet offseason and hopefully a lot of these guys will be able to join the UFL. I think it'd be a great thing. There's a lot of good talent that's coming out of this draft. But yeah, it is just these drafts sometimes can be matic and I think that's why they don't put it on television and stuff like that because it's like you're only getting the rights of these players. That's why the CFL never does anything with their negotiation lists and stuff like that. I mean we don't even know if these players are going to play or not. Yeah, no, and I think that's a great way to look at it. You get a lot of this. I've seen players, they've been selected and they tweet like, okay, what's going on? This is fake. It's not fake. It really is like the negotiations list. I think Anthony is correct. The best way to kind of phrase this where if your opportunity in the NFL doesn't work out, if you choose to play in the NFL, this is the team that kind of has your rights. I think that's a good way to look at it. I would never like to see this televised. I just don't think that Evan, everyone here has a wealth of knowledge of these players. I don't think the casual person coming on would know a deep dive into a lot of the names that are involved in this. I think it's good that we have some time to work through that. I wanted to read and then we'll get to Greg's initial thoughts into the players that were drafted. So I'm covering myself here to read my press release here. So this came out on July talking about the draft. The UFL will hold the callers draft today. They'll select from over 12,000 draft eligible players. Players must be eligible to have been selected in the 2024 NFL draft and were not selected. UFL teams will hold exclusive rights to those players. They select until players reports to the team or the team gives up their rights. All players eligible for the draft much must have been out of high school for at least three years and exhausted or waived their college eligibility. All players who signed the UFL contract, including players who remain under contract from the 2024 season will have an NFL out until December 31st. So now that we've gotten all that Greg initial thoughts today, how did the teams do? And I have your article here we can pull up if there's anything specific, but what was your general takeaways? It really is hard to analyze a draft of this type because so many of these players are never going to step foot on a UFL field. So you can't apply the usual analyzation techniques that you would to an NFL draft or to an NBA draft. So I mean if you want to look at the draft as far as pure talent, I mean you can do that and you can say what team drafted the most talent, but it's very hard to look at it and say, oh, so-and-so filled their need, they drafted two or three offensive linemen because those offensive linemen probably are under NFL contract, probably will either make the team or make the practice squad. So I really struggle with how to analyze and assess a draft of this nature. It is kind of an amalgam of the USFL college draft from last year, the XFL rookie draft in terms of the timing and then the CFL writes draft or the negotiation list, which you guys mentioned. And it makes sense because there are representatives from all three leagues, Jim Pop who's been in the CFL front offices, Doug Whaley who was with the XFL, and of course Moose Johnston with the USFL, they're all a part of the UFL, so it does kind of feel like they've taken a little bit from each league's draft and put it into this. So it is hard and I think the other thing that's hard about it too is if you get to the end of the NFL season, let's take a player, Keon Slovis quarterback out of BYU for example, he was drafted by DC let's say he spends the NFL c's not a practice squad end of the year, he gets offered a futures contract by an NFL team. If you're the UFL, naturally you want him to choose playing in your league over signing that futures contract. But really what can you offer? Because what we've learned about the UFL is that at least publicly, they're not paying players over and above other players. Their salaries are the same. Whether or not that's true, we don't know, but this is not a league based on what we've seen and how it spends money that's going to spend a lot of money and compete and say, yeah, you can make this much in an NFL futures deal, but we'll pay you X plus to be in our league and you can't even offer opportunity in years past. You could say, well you can sign a futures deal, but you can also come and play in our league, show out and sign with an NFL team in the summer and maybe better positioned with that NFL team going into training camp. I mean you look at the numbers, 14 players at this point have signed into the NFL. That's not a lot and no quarterbacks, so you can't even offer, you can offer the opportunity to play in risk injury in the spring, but you can't even say, look at the past, look at our numbers, look at the number of players we've put in the NFL. If you just take advantage of this opportunity, the league MVP, we're on the eve of training camp, some training camps have already started and the league MVP, Adrian Martinez best quarterback in the league hasn't signed with an NFL team now I expect him to. But you can take a futures deal and you can be with that team's playbook during the off season and you can go through mini camps and OTAs and give yourself a chance to compete there and then go into training camp with a leg up or you can play in the UFL get signed by a team. Best case scenario, get signed by a team whose playbook you're not familiar with going into camp behind other players who've been in many camps and who have been through OTAs and who have studied the playbook, even rookies and U DFAS at that point. So I don't really even see a selling point for the UFL for these guys, these fringe guys who might be considering signing futures contracts next January versus playing in the UFL. Well, and I know that last year when it was the XFL did their, it was the rookie draft, right? It wasn't the college draft, it was for rookie draft and it felt and they had said, well this is for players that maybe missed out and don't have an opportunity. Anthony, I saw you nodding your head thoughts on that and then we'll toss to Evan and then I do, we'll actually talk some players here in teams to kind of stand out. So I do think it's important to just contextualize what's going on here. Anthony, thoughts on anything Greg said and just kind of the purpose of this draft, if that makes sense? Yeah, I mean get why they do these drafts. One, I think it brings some news to the league. I mean if you look these squares up on Google, the first article is going to pop up is, Hey, they were drafted by the UFL. That's good. I mean it may be, I don't want to say it's fake publicity, but any publicity is good publicity, right? The UFL is going to be on people's radars today. I think Greg just had it on that. The article was that 65 players are under NFL contracts. So who knows if they, most of 'em are probably going to end up being in the NFL, but at least that's good exposure for the UFL to they have their names next to the players now. I mean, again, they're going to sign 'em, probably not. But again, any kind of publicity the league can get is important, especially with it being a very quiet off season where I'm not going to lie, it's been, Mike and I have really struggled to write articles for Sports Illustrated because we're trying to figure out what to write because there's just not a lot of news going on right now. Not a lot of players getting signed, even though two have signed this week, which has been at least good for the league, at least they're making progress there. But it's been very quiet, no players have been signed. It's just been a very dead off season. So at least this gives us something to talk about. There have been good players that have come out of these rookie college drafts that have ended up either doing well in the UFL this year or have done well in the NFL or the CFL. So at least there's been talent that's come out of it and there's been some good stories from it. There's not going to be many, but hopefully there's going to be some players out of this that end up being stars in the league next year. And the one thing I was really interested in with Greg's article is talking about only eight players that were not FBS related, which is really interesting because I think the league should try to push for more of those smaller school guys. A lot of talent in FCS and division two and division three that are being overlooked and not really getting those opportunities. They may get more opportunities in, I don't know, the European League of Football or the indoor football leagues and something like that. But they really should try to get some of these guys that are from these smaller schools. I think the league should try to get players that are going to stay in the league for a long time and I think those guys are more likely to maybe become stars and be household names within the league in the next few years other than these guys that are from these big division one schools like Georgia and Alabama because they're more likely going to go to the NFL or if they don't see a future in the UFL, they'll just retire. Yeah, I don't really know what spurned this week of any week to do this. I know there's been a lot of talk about that. I was talking with Producer Max, I don't know if the week that the college football game came out. I don't play a lot of video games and college video games, but I know that there's a lot of communication with a lot of that stuff going on. I know that is the week to try to draw some football attention. I will just say in Anthony in regards to just, it really has been a quiet off season. And I would just say, and I know that we're moving through Comm Directors here with the UFL, but I know the CFL reached out to Anthony and said, Hey, we have a lot of rookies coming in, trying out running combines. Would you like to interview them? Anthony did a series of articles about that. Shoot, I would pay if anyone like, Hey, re we're doing St. Louis come out, we'll give you some interviews. I paid to go out there or do it on Zoom for free. It has been very quiet. I mean we're doing the money recaps that Jason Hussey and I for the CFL, but it has been quiet. It has been quiet. Not a lot of that. Evan, any other thoughts on this and the place that stands that we'll get into kind of teams here and I got Anthony's article we can pull up as well. Yeah, I mean I think everything Greg and Anthony have already said is right. I would add that in terms of timing, right? I mean you talked about the NCAA game coming out, but I also think with the UFL starting to do some of these showcases, I think they've done St. Louis and DC already with them ramping those up, it's kind of time to get more into a player focused mindset. That's what they're trying to focus on. They are really trying to get the ball rolling on what has been a very quiet off season in the past. I guess it's already been a month since we had the championship game. And then yeah, I really like what Anthony said about drafting more small school players, which are FCS and below. I'm going to make sure to touch on a lot of those guys today. That's who I have a lot of in my notes. That's who I focus on. That's what I know. And Anthony's totally right. Those are the guys who are going to more than likely play in your league because those guys aren't getting the same number of NFL opportunities, especially like HBCU players. I don't think there was any of those guys drafted this year and they fall into the FCS and division two categories, so maybe keep pushing that. I remember the XFL, I guess it was in 2022, had the HBCU showcase in Jackson State when Dion Sanders was the head coach there. So just keep doing things like that and I mean it's good to see that we're getting more players involved at least. Again, there's probably only a quarter of these guys are a little more that are going to end up in this league next year, but it's better than nothing in my opinion. And again, we're doing this and we're still doing the showcases. We're going to have a draft later. Abdul had a question about that here talking about is there still going to be more drafts. Greg said, we presume there's going to be. Anthony, let's start with you. I have your article here, big takeaways and we can do a little team. We're not going to do every player here. And again, some of these is diminishing results of going through every single one of these, some of the guys lesser known. Anthony, what are standouts for you and then we can start going team by team here. Well, I want to start with everyone's been complaining about LeBron James and Bronny James and that situation, how he got drafted, and then no one's talking about how Drake stoops got drafted by Bob Stoops here. But no, in all seriousness, I think the big takeaway is the big takeaway from this draft is offensive line. I mean that was obviously a very big position. I think the tackle position had the most from any position, I think 12 total got picked. So it's very apparent, and I know I've talked about this before, the number one position that's always a struggle for these for spring football leagues to find is good offensive a linemen. And I think that's what's good about these college and rookie drafts is that you can get young offensive linemen that maybe still need some development and probably won't play in the NFL. They can develop in the UFL and be able to get better and then maybe move on to the NFL. So it was very clear offensive line was a big factor for a lot of teams. Today, I will say looking at the quarterback positions, a lot of mobile quarterbacks, which I think is always a really smart way to go just because again, offensive a linemen are not the strongest. They need a lot of development. So you need a quarterback who can be mobile and roll out of the pocket and be able to throw on the run. So I would say just my biggest takeaways was big emphasis on offensive a linemen drafting, I think 12 tackles and then yeah, I love how the quarterbacks, it's all mobile quarterbacks, which I think is a really important thing for the spring football leagues to have is have those young quarterbacks who they have strong arms, they give 'em the run, but maybe there's some development they need there. So those were my takeaways from the draft. Greg, I'll pull your article. Like Anthony said, a lot of quarterbacks taken, right? The number first one off the board draft major takeaways for you here in terms of the actual player selected Absolutely quarterbacks, three quarterbacks going in the first round and not necessarily teams that you would expect. Memphis, we talked about a lot of holes on that Memphis team, right? They take a quarterback number one overall, and they don't take an offensive lineman, which was their Achilles heel on offense until the sixth round. So I thought that was interesting. You look at Arlington, they take a quarterback in the first round of all the teams, you would think that Arlington was the most set. If Luis Perez comes back, the numbers he put up, the performance he put up in 2024. And even if he doesn't come back, you've got two really strong young players behind him and Lindsey Scott and Holton AERs, and yet they take a quarterback. You look at Houston, probably one of the most quarterback needy teams, and they don't take a quarterback. DC takes two quarterbacks, so it makes you wonder what's going on there. St. Louis, I had them in my mock draft taking a quarterback in the first round, just kind of AJ McCarran getting older, don't know if he's going to come back. I don't think they have the backups behind him that Arlington does that you could plug in if McCarran doesn't come back as starter. So they take Shavan Cordero there. San Antonio doesn't take a quarterback. You would think somebody like AJ Smith would always be wanting to take a quarterback every year just to have somebody to develop in that offense. But they don't. And Michigan takes a quarterback, Birmingham takes a flyer on Sam Hartman late to your commanders. He may end up making the 53 man roster of the Washington commanders, let alone the practice squad. So explains why he went in the ninth round here perhaps, but quarterback, quarterback, quarterback, very interesting to see as Anthony talked about what quarterbacks went, what their skill sets were And they went. Evan, I know this is a tough question for you and I apologize. Obviously you're involved in player scouting and everything getting signed on here. We've just spent here in the first 20 minutes talking about how this draft kind of doesn't matter, it kind of matters, but kind of doesn't. Like how would you approach if you're someone, if you're one of these teams, not like, well this guy's guaranteed we can draft 80 across the board, but 80 players, it doesn't hurt us. We're just having the rights that they want to come. How would you approach this if you were someone involved in one of these teams? And I guess we'll go from there. Yeah, well, you're picking from a pool of undrafted players. So you want NFL caliber guys, guys that are signed to NFL teams. I mean, it's not written in the rules, right? You're going to take guys that are signed to NFL contracts because those are typically the best players, even if they're not also technically available, which I understand that's all complicated, but if I was in a position doing a draft like this that was for rights and you had to kind of pick from a pool of NFL guys, I would use my existing connections in the NFL with NFL teams to figure out which guys of your undrafted pool, I'm not talking about your draft class, but your undrafted pool that you brought in after the draft, what guys are going to be on the fringe is essentially what I'm trying to say. What guys do you think they don't have the greatest chances of making the 53? Maybe they're cut in the preseason as opposed to being a part of the final round of cuts or whatever. Just kind of making those very small, I guess changes of note just to determine what kind of pool you have. So let's go here. Let's go team by team. I thought I had, here we go, Anthony, first, since you're the Arlington Renegades fan here, not fan, you're the reporter, right? Sorry, standouts here. I know we talked that you made the joke, Bob Soup done and all that thoughts here, Arlington Renegades that any players have? No, we'll kind of go around the horn here for each of these teams as we go through. I make the joke about Drake Stoops, but I actually do think that's a pretty solid pick. I think he's somebody who can actually come in and be that slot receiver for the renegades and he has that chemistry having been, obviously he's very close to his dad, so he knows the type of offense he wants to run. He knows how he works as a coach. So I actually think that's a really solid pick to get him in the 10th round. And I think Sups is somebody, if Drake doesn't, if the NFL doesn't work out, he would definitely go to the UFL and join him. Obviously Plumley is the big name here going in the first round. I actually don't mind the pick. I think there's a lot of uncertainty with Louise Perez if he is going to come back, but I think if Plumley comes in, I think he's going to end up being the third quarterback on this team. I still think Lindsay Scott just has better traits and better skill sets than Plumley has. Plumley, it has a tendency of turning the ball over a lot and I think that's something that he really needed to clean up when he was in college and what he'll need to work on when he goes into the pros. So I still think Lindsay's Scott Junior, I don't think he'll be a threat to him. I think Lindsay still ends up being on top of him in terms of the dev chart. So I think it'll be really, can plumb beat out Holton for that third string quarterback job. But I like Plumley mean he's got all the skill sets that you want. He's got a good arm. He's obviously very mobile, so he's fast when he's out in the open field he can put on the burners. So I really liked seeing that offensive line. I think the offense line is kind of shaky for Arlington at the beginning of the year. It got better throughout the season, but I think adding three guys in the offensive line is really important there. So I like that they kind of focus on the offensive line defensively. I would've liked 'em to actually done something in the secondary. I think they got a good group of linebackers. They got some defensive linemen, but I think the corner and safety was where, well, I wouldn't say safety. I would say corner was their weakest spot throughout the team and I wish they would have drafted some more corners. I wish they would've kind of built that up a little bit more because I think it was really lacking. This was a team that allowed a lot of big plays in that secondary. So I would like to have seen more corners pick, but I think overall it was a solid draft for the team. Coach Craig here checking in co-signing a lot of what you're saying about Plum Lee, talking about played baseball. So we should had Coach Craig, coach Craig. This was kind of like, Hey, we're doing this and we all wear cards here, but kind of like what effort can we do to put in? So we need to get Coach Trigon again here to talk through all that stuff. Greg, any stand out players from here? We'll rotate around and then we'll go to Evan. What stands out to me about Arlington is the linebackers. They chose three linebackers. I had them choosing a linebacker in my mock draft. I thought linebacker was a bit of a weakness on defense for them, especially in past coverage over the middle. Their linebackers are getting older. Donald Payne in the middle. So they've really infused some youth into the second line of defense there. Ka and Delo kind of a linebacker safety hybrid. People talk about him being miscast maybe as a linebacker better suited for strong safety given his size. So he's an interesting pick there. Amari Gainer out of UNC, Bo Richter out of the Air Force. So I think they did need to replenish and add some youth to the linebacker Core gives some guys who can maybe cover over the middle a little better. I mean, we saw so many plays that were just routes over the middle, easy routes for quarterbacks and for receivers and that was what Arlington was burned by quite a bit. So three linebackers in this draft really stood out to me for them. Evan, for you? Yeah, I mean Drake Stoops I think is obviously the one that a lot of people were talking about because Pop Stoops is the head coach and he's drafting his son to me. This doesn't really confirm he's coming back next year. It doesn't really change much for me because right now Drake Stoops is in the NFL with the Los Angeles Rams and it's worth noting that he had a huge senior season or final season, maybe fifth year compared to the rest of his production during his time at Oklahoma. So I won't focus too much on him. The guy I really want to talk about is Griffin McDowell, the tackle out of Chattanooga. This is a guy I interviewed during the pre-draft process last year, transferred down to the FCS level for his last season. He played five seasons at the University of Florida, has a wealth of experience at numerous positions. Not only did he play offensive line, but he played defensive line, tight end special teams. So he was a bit on the slimmer side, kind of 285 pounds, not exactly what you'd want to see for a tackle, but when he went down to the FCS level, put on some weight, got back up to 300, was able to start turned to a very good performer there, signed with the Kansas City Chiefs as an undrafted free agent, likely projects more as a guard at the next level. Again, just given his size and kind of his skillset, but that's an interesting one that I don't think is going to get talked about enough. And then John Reese Plumley, I was going to talk about all the first round quarterbacks in one go, so I guess I'll just do that now. There were three quarterbacks taken in the first round. Obviously we've got John Reese Plumley here, a quarterback out of UCF Chevon Cordero quarterback out of San Jose State previously at Hawaii, was selected by the Battle Hawks and then Jason Bean, the quarterback from Kansas, previously played at North Texas and was drafted by the Showboats. So all of these guys are mobile. I thought that was an interesting trend. I mean we talk about just in draft circles in any league mobile quarterbacks becoming more important. The previous N-F-L-M-V-P was Lamar Jackson, and I know maybe that wasn't the most deserving MVP ever, but the idea is that mobile quarterbacks are starting to become more valuable. You look at what Jalen Hertz has done with the Eagles, things like that. So they're all mobile guys. So I like that. Worth noting that Cordero is the only one of the three that's not currently signed at the NFL. He was previously with the Seahawks let go. So that's something to note in terms of odds of the guy actually coming to the league. And then if I had to pick the most upside out of those three, I'd probably pick Jason Bean from Kansas just because I think he has the most Power five starting experience. I've actually seen John Reese Plumley throw around. I was standing right next to him watching him go through progressions in drills when I scouted at Tulane in the a c championship game in 2022 against UCF. So I've got a pretty up close and personal look at him. He's a guy I could see coming to this league. I think it would be beneficial for him just because I don't know if he's fully ready for the NFL yet, just given where he came from and just some of the tools that he has. But all three are very intriguing options. And again, I guess it's nice to see three quarterbacks all that fit, the more modern standard being taken in the first round of this draft today. Anthony, last question for you about the renegades here. Obviously we joked the stoops and Drake and all that, I dunno, yeah, confirmation stoops. I guess we're all set now rather are we operating and then Greg can co-sign as well if he wants. But obviously these are the eight teams stoops back. I think at this point we would know if anything is shaken out. Do you feel differently about that? I mean, we asked Stoops and that last media availability for the Renegades last week of the season. Do you want to come back or what's your future look like? And he said, I want to come back. I think the only thing that's going to hold him back I think is going to be the financial, I don't know if he's exactly said financial, but he's like, there's going to be uncertainty after the contracts are released that I think the financial part is probably going to play a factor in it. But I think he has every desire to come back. I think he's enjoying it. He always talks about he doesn't have to go to the grind of what college is like and going out and scouting and worrying about are the kids going to class and stuff like that. He doesn't want to worry about that kind of stuff. He wants to work with professionals and he wants to have a shorter schedule so it makes sense for him because he'll have his time off in the fall and stuff like that to spend time with his family and then in the spring, just three months go coach in the UFL. So the schedule fits him and he seems to still have a passion for it. So I think there's still a chance he comes back. It's really just going to depend on what is the UFL going to offer these coaches for 2025 and beyond in terms of salary. If it's not going to be a lot, then maybe he, it makes no sense for him. But I mean Arlington's a good location for where him and his family is around the area sort of in Oklahoma and stuff like that. So I think I am under the assumption he's going to come back unless it's something drastic financially that the UFL offers. Greg, any thoughts on that? I know I saw someone comment like, oh, the means there's no expansion, but a teams we're moving forward and then we'll move on to Birmingham after that. So any thoughts on that? And then we can segue into thoughts about the stallions. You're not going to trick me into talking about expansion on this show. Re don't even think about it. So no, I agree with Anthony. I think it's really unfortunate the situation that the head coaches find themselves in through no fault of their own. I think Bob Stoops is good for the league and so I hope that they're able to agree on a contract and he's able to return. So let's get in here to the stallions. The rich get richer here obviously. I want to make sure I have the right thing here. We bring up, obviously we just were in St. Louis and all that. Greg, thoughts on anyone standing out that the stallions brought on? Well, they were in a unique position, very different than I think a lot of the teams in this league in that they didn't have any glaring weaknesses or holes positionally that they needed to look to fill here in this draft. So they could really kind of sit back and take the best players available that fit their scheme. And so you look at the first two picks, offensive lineman, Frank Crumb from Wyoming, I think he was at the NFL combine. Some people had draftable grades on him in terms of the NFL draft and Mon Bailey is in the interesting pick out of TCU or running back again, the four offensive lineman, Sam Hartman, Birmingham is different also because if you're a player who's on, I used the example of Keon Slovis earlier in the show, and if you're a player who's kind of on the fringe of signing a futures contract and then you're looking at the UFL prospects and you're like, do I really want to go in there? I mean, if somebody has their rights owned by Birmingham, they might want to take that risk. I mean, Birmingham playing for skip holds, you're going to put up numbers, you're going to be a part of a successful team. So I don't know how much that plays a part in people's thinking when it comes to these spring leagues, whether it's just they look at the league overall and what can this league do for me? Or they look at a team and say, well, Birmingham owns my rights. I know they're a really good team. I know Skip Holtz is a really good offensive coach. I'm an offensive player who wants to improve that certain parts of my game and I know that he can do that. Maybe I will take this jump where if it was the Houston Roughnecks, they might not have. So when you're looking at that aspect of it from a player acquisition point of view, some of these guys may find Birmingham more attractive than if they were drafted by another team. I want someone to pull a Kale Williams. Yeah, I'm not going to the Showboats here. I really would prefer to go to seventies Evan standout players from this part here as we go through. Yeah, I've got two of 'em. I mean, the first one is kind of the elephant in the room to a degree, and that's obviously Sam Hartman, the quarterback from Notre Dame, probably one of the bigger college quarterbacks that a lot of people have watched in recent years. Spent several seasons at Wake Forest and then transferred to Notre Dame for his final season. I think the pick has garnered the most media attention just because Birmingham has a track record of developing quarterbacks really well, especially this past year, not only with the League MVP, Adrian Martinez who came out of Kansas State and signed with the Detroit Lines and then eventually ended up with Birmingham, but also Matt Corral. I'd give them credit for getting him in there and kind of I guess in a sense, saving his career, it looked like he was never going to play football again with everything that happened between him and Carolina and him and New England. So Sam Hartman threw for over 4,000 yards and almost 40 touchdowns in 2021 at Wake Forest transferred to Notre Dame for last season and had the highest quarterback rating of his career. It was about the same. It was just like a tick over what it was in 2022 at Wake Forest. And that's according to ESPN. And then like you said, Reed, he's currently signed with the Washington Commanders and I don't know, he's a guy that I think does actually have a decent chance of making it on the 53 or at least being a practice squad player and sticking around in the NFL. So I don't know if he comes to the stallions, I don't know if that's in his best interest, but if he does, I think that would turn a lot of heads and I think he would play really well in this league just based off the college tape. And I don't know, it's weird. Obviously I'm a Commanders fan and Jane Daniels and all that, but there's been a ton of for basically being, because we have Mariota for being the third string, fourth string quarterback. There's been a ton of pub coming from obviously the commanders and then you get all the aggregators and there. I don't know if it's just because he's good looking. I think Mike Mitchell said he kind of looks like Pat Rafino with longer hair. I've just seen this ton of him. I am a Commanders' fan. I dunno if I'm a Commanders' fan enough to know who's the fourth string quarterback or who's kind of on the fringe to come on. I'm like, I'm like, oh yeah, Sam, I know. I am aware of that. So it's just weird to me that and obviously kind of being the notable name there. Anthony, thoughts on Sam or anyone else here coming out from the stallions? Yeah, I think Sam Hartman's an interesting choice. I wouldn't compare him to the skillset that guys like Alex McGoo and Adrian Martinez had at the quarterback position. I would say he may be a little bit more of a pocket quarterback. He may be a little more like a Jaymar Smith type, but I think he could be somebody that could develop in the UFL. I don't ever see him wearing a stallions jersey personally. Maybe a couple years down the road. I can definitely see him making the Washington Commanders team as a third string quarterback. So I mean unfortunately I don't think we're ever going to see him in that. The two guys that really that pointed out to me was Amani Bailey, which he had a really good season last year for tc over 1200 yards rushing. Not the fastest guy, but I think he actually fits the stallions offensive system really well. If this is a team that wants to be able to run the football, you don't need to be a fast running back to be in that backfield for the stallions. So I actually think Bailey is actually a pretty good fit for what they want to do. So if he does end up playing for them, I think he could succeed in that system. And then Jeff Co for Arkansas, I like him as well. I think he kind of got buried under depth charts when he was at Missouri and Arkansas, but he's had some really nice moments. I think he's a good pass rusher. I think he could even play hybrid outside linebacker as well. I think he's got that talent to do it. So those are the two that I really like. I think Bailey, if he can get into this offense for Birmingham, if he ends up going to the UFL, I think he can maybe be that number one running back that I know they're running back by committee team, but maybe he could be that replacement for both Scarborough. Evan, you want to move on here? We want to talk to Fenders and we'll circle back to Greg here. I think he said two quarterbacks. I actually had one more player for the staff. Yeah, go for it. Just real quick, down Ker the tight end from Colorado State. He gained a lot of attention when Colorado State played Colorado. I'm sure a lot of people remember that game kind of chippy. I think that was the game. Travis Hunter got injured, but this guy down, he had six catches for 109 yards and two touchdowns in that game. And then he finished the season as a first team all Mountain West and second team, all American performer. He's currently signed with the New Orleans Saints just because he's a group of five guy. I wanted to give him a shout out. But again, we talked about in terms of odds of guys actually coming into this league and doing something, he's a guy that I could see just, I could see him in stallions uniform, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Well good, I appreciate that. All right, let's keep with you here. Let's go to Defenders and then we'll circle around again here. Like I said, I think Greg had talked a couple quarterbacks taken thoughts, what the Defenders did. Yeah, I have four players to talk about with the defenders and two of them are the quarterbacks. So I'll start with that. Kean Slovis is the first one. I know Greg's already mentioned his name a couple times, breakout first year at USC in 2019. I mean, he looked like he was going to be the future of that program and get them back on track. Kind of like what Caleb Williams ended up doing breakout year in 2019 and then just never was able to capture that same energy. He played decently at USC for the two seasons that followed, but could never really get it together. And then transferred to Pitt, had an OK season there, transferred to BYU, had an OK season there, so kind of dropped off a bit, but I can definitely see him as a project guy, somebody that could develop and obviously I think that's why he wasn't one of the first quarterbacks taken in this draft. He wasn't the first round pick. Interestingly enough, he's currently in training camp along with Jason Bean, who was the number one overall pick with the Indianapolis Colts, Jason Bean going to the Showboats of course the first round. And then Tanner Mordecai, the quarterback from Wisconsin. He started his career at Oklahoma, but he was obviously much more remembered for his time at SMU in 2021 and 2022. He had a combined 7,152 passing yards and 72 touchdowns over those two seasons combined was good enough to transfer up back to the power five level, which wasn't much of a surprise. Went to Wisconsin, which was kind of an interesting decision, but had a down year there, only threw for nine touchdowns, but just because of what he did at SMU, that was enough for a team to want to bring 'em in. The San Francisco 49 ERs signed him as an undrafted free agent. So I don't know if either of those guys are going to come. I mean, I think if they were to come to DC they'd be, if both of them came, they'd be probably competing for a backup job. And then the other two guys I wanted to talk about real quick, Garrett Greenfield, the offensive tackle from South Dakota State. He's not the only South Dakota state guy I'm going to talk about in the draft. They took a lot of 'em. He's a three-time FCS, All-American. That unit was one of the best that I've seen in a hot minute. North Dakota State has a lot of NFL ready too, but South Dakota State as well, who just won the FFC S championship, and I think that's why they had a lot of draft picks. But one of his teammates, Garrett Mason McCormick, was actually drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the fourth round. And then Greenfield is currently with the Seattle Seahawks who signed him as an undrafted free agent. So maybe somebody to watch again, you just talk about high upside guy coming out of a small school, maybe something there. The last guy I'll talk about for DC Dallas, Gantt, the linebacker from Toledo started his career at Ohio State, played three or four seasons there, didn't really do a lot, didn't get on the field much. Then he turned up at Toledo in 22 and exploded. Had 233 tackles over the past two seasons combined, added 14 and a half tackles for loss and eight passes defended. It's interesting because his two seasons at Toledo were almost identical. I think he had one more tackle this past season that he did in 22. Anyways, he was a two time first team Mack performer and the Minnesota Vikings signed him as A-U-D-F-A. What was interesting too, a number of guys I noticed it was, I think the Vikings and the Raiders were taken in terms of, like I said, teams, the NFL teams have these guys as U dfas. When I was looking around, I noticed there was a lot of Raider guys and a lot of Vikings guys that seemed to be in this draft. So again, maybe some preexisting connections there between personnel people. I don't know, but just something else to note. Greg Circle, do you hear thoughts on the defenders? Yeah, I'm looking at my list right now, and I think the Vikings stood out to me too as a team that I think six of their undrafted free agents were drafted by the UFL today. So that was a team definitely that as I was noting them as the draft was going on, that stuck in my head. If you're looking from a pure talent standpoint, I think DC might've had the best draft up and down this list. I think this may be the most talented draft class, which isn't always the best thing because if it's the most talented, it's probably the least likely to get these guys into the UFL. So it's kind of a double-edged sword for DC there. I thought that Michael Wiley, I liked running back out of Arizona, I thought was a nice pick. I think Slovis has a starter ceiling in a league like the UFL, so bringing him in would be interesting. I will say about Tanner Mordecai, he comes from a spread system in SMU and as Evan mentioned, had a down year at Wisconsin. Part of that was they were transitioning first year under Luke Fickle and offensive coordinator, Phil Longo. They were transitioning from traditional Wisconsin power football to the spread offense. And I don't think you can make a bigger transition in one year than that. So I think part of it was personnel that was an issue with that transition in Wisconsin and transitioning to a completely different offense. But he's the guy who came out and ran a super fast 40 at the Wisconsin Pro Day that surprised a lot of people. So I'm not saying he could be that Derrick King backup role that was really missing and really lacking in DC this year, that offensive spark. But I could see him in that kind of role where they have packages for him as a backup in dc. Coach Greg here says fun fact. Kurt Warner, coach Solo in high school. So just checking in here as well here. Anthony S for you? For the defenders. Yeah, I'll just add that I like what they did on the defensive line. Obviously this week they lost their top pass rusher and Malik Fisher who signed with the Houston Texans. So Brady McGregor out of Michigan and then Leonard Taylor out of Miami. Taylor is 305 pounds. Big dude can really have a great ability of stopping the run in the middle. So I like what DC did there. And then McGregor is quick on the outside of Michigan, on the edge. Again, this is Michigan's defense was super talented last year on their run to the national title. So maybe didn't get as many looks as if he would like, but I think he's a guy that can maybe step in and develop and be a nice replacement for Fisher. So I like what DC did on the defensive line and defense in general. I thought they drafted really well And we talked about that. The signing ins that Greg had mentioned earlier on, only 14 here are coming. And that was the one this week, Greg. Is it just, we've been doing these spring leaks now for four years. There's just not enough spots. And then Mike talks about that a lot. Mike Mitchell kind of in our group chat. Thoughts on that? Just in terms of just to take a break here for two seconds, just about the signings coming from the UFL. I think really more so than anything else, it's the time of year, right? If you look at the transactions in the NFL, there really haven't been any for the last month because they're off, they're arresting before training camp, there's no OTAs, there's no practices going on or anything like that. So GMs are taking a break, coaches are taking a break before the season begins, so I would really expect that number to go up here as we get into training camp, but that's part of the argument against playing the time of year that the UFL did in kicking off the time of year it did is because you may get a couple signings at the very end of the year where teams are completing OTAs and things like that, but there's going to be a long gap where there's just no transactions in the league period because this is break time, the dead zone before training camp begins. So I think that's more of the case than any kind of spring league fatigue in terms of the NFL trying to sign these players. Evan, any thoughts on that or else we can transition to the ref next? Where do you want to go? Yeah, I mean I think that's accurate what Greg said. The timeline might be something to consider next year depending on how many signings we're going to have to wait a couple months. We're playing the waiting game now to see how many guys are going to sign during the NFL cycle, which really goes all the way through I guess December, January the regular season. So it's just a wait and see. But no, I agree with Greg Evan standouts here from the roughnecks as we continue on. Yeah, I had two roughnecks players and I already pointed out that their draft was interesting because eight of their 10 guys were not under contract by NFL teams. So I'm going to focus on two of those guys. Of the eight, the first guy is Trey Fluen, I think that's how you pronounce his name Safety for Middle Tennessee. He transferred up from FCS, Houston Christian, he's also from the Houston area, so I thought that kind of added a nice tie into the pick. But anyways, his production was down a bit in 2023 compared to 2022. He had over a hundred tackles in 2022 from the safety spot, which I thought was impressive. Five combined interceptions and 16 combined passes defended over the previous two seasons. The biggest thing with him is the tours ACL towards the end of the season in November, I think it was against Florida International and I know that's what hindered his NFL interest. I'm sure he would've been in an NFL mini camp had he not suffered an injury, but that could work to the roughneck advantage. You got a very talented player who was going to be in the NFL but because of the injury and the rehab process was not able to attend such events like mini camps, training camps, whatever, and therefore he wasn't going to be signed. So I liked that. And then the second guy, Malik Dunlap, the DB from Texas Tech later round pick I think at round nine. This is to me more of like a diamond in the rough pick. Again, another selection that people aren't going to talk about as much. He recorded 23 combined passes defended between 2022 and 2023 seasons super great size 6 3 2 20. So pretty intimidating from a frame perspective. And then this is kind of just a tie in, but he played in the same secondary as a guy Dre Taylor Demerson who was drafted by the Arizona Cardinals in the fourth round and that was a guy who initially stood out to me as another underrated DB during this process. So the fact that you're getting one of his teammates who played at the same school, played at the same system, that could work for their benefit as well. I thought he was an interesting player. Let's go to Anthony and I should have mentioned off the top, I didn't want to cut off Evan, obviously the roughnecks a new GM here. Will Lewis coming in here, curious Anthony's thoughts on that, how it would relate to their draft and then stand out players and I'm going to go get some water so I'm going to mute myself, but Anthony, thoughts on that and then thoughts on the draft itself and I'll be right back. Yeah, I think the roughnecks needed to make a change on the front office and honestly they probably need to make a change at head coach too. I know we've talked about this multiple times that CJ Johnson just didn't get the job done this year, so I'd be interested to see if they still make a coaching change, but this is a third different GM in the last three years for the Houston roughnecks, so there's probably more moves that are going to be made. Even if CJ Johnson ends up coming back, they're going to have to do some work on that coaching staff because they just didn't get the job done. Do you look at the office coordinator Eric Price and do you make a change there? Did price do what he needed to do to get that offense rolling? I don't know. I think this was an offense that really struggled. I think the quarterback position, I'm really surprised that the roughnecks didn't go after a quarterback in this draft. I would've liked to have seen them get somebody that they could develop. I think they have a good group of quarterbacks right now, but none of them really stood out as a guys that can be stars in this league. I think no one, Henderson had some nice moments. Reed in a veteran quarterback, Jared Guano maybe could develop. I think they were hoping that he would be that prototypical quarterback that could be the guy, but he couldn't stay healthy, so there's a lot of instability, the quarterback position, so I wish they would've done something there. I would say the one player that stood out to me was Malcolm Epps with Pittsburgh. This is a guy that he's bounced around a little bit in college. He was actually a wide receiver at one point, but I like the upside ability that he has 6 6 244 pounds. He's a tall guy, athletic, I think he can make some plays on this offense. Tight end position was a pun not attended, but a little rough for the roughnecks. I know they had some injury issues there, so it looks like they made a couple moves at the tight end position to add some depth. So I really like Malcolm and I think he's somebody that can, again, he played wide receiver at Texas, so he's an athletic guy and I think he could really make a difference if he can just maybe just develop a little more in his blocking. I think he could move up in this rednecks depth chart and maybe be a starting tight end and could be a top pass catcher. Somebody like a Sal Canella. Same question to Greg, just thoughts on the roughnecks draft. Definitely different than all the other teams and they took two players, the only two players in the draft who did not participate in rookie mini camp either as a tryout player or an undrafted free agent in the NFL. Evan talked about Trey Flu wellen out of middle Tennessee state. He's got an excuse to his ACL in November, but the other one was Xavier Benson out of Oklahoma State started 27 games the last two seasons, fifth leading Tackler on the team this past year. So it's not like they're taking a guy who wasn't an invited to rookie mini camp because he was a backup and hardly saw the field. I mean Benson's going to be an intriguing guy to look out for and could be a guy who ends up in the UFL if he doesn't even have any interest in the NFL coming out in May. The other guy I want to spotlight is George Aquarius Spivey their last pick in the draft. Kind of funny that Houston would take two tight ends. Anthony talked about Malcolm Epps but they didn't feature the tight end, at least in the passing game very often. So interesting that they take two tight ends here. Spivey actually had to sit out in 2023. He started at Mississippi State, transferred to TCU, tried to transfer back to Mississippi State in 2023, but just before the season open opener, he was told by the NCAA that he was ineligible for the season so he ended up working out at Mississippi State's Pro Day, ran a 4 6 2 40 and has actually tried out for three NFL teams this spring. He was in two rookie mini camps and also tried out at one of the veteran mini camps. So there's some NFL interest even though he is I believe unsigned right now, but he's got an interesting background of the guys that they drafted. God bless Greg for the pronunciation guide here going into this, I saw some of these and I mean the worst is when we do it live it's like what's going on here? So good for that all. I'll Never forget it. I'll never forget you furrowing your brow over Diego FAU when he in the XFL 2022 draft and tried to hop in and save you on that one and I think he's with the CFL now, right? Evan would know that. I think he moved up north here. Let's go Evan Showboats here. We'll go round. I think this is a good pace here. We'll get through the teams here and then we can do final thoughts. But Evan, we talked Jason Bean and all of that, but any other thoughts on the Showboats draft? Yeah, this is fun. The Showboats might've had my favorite pick in the entire draft and this guy Jalen Coker from Holy Cross, great combination of size and production. They have 'em listed at 6 3 213 pounds, had 59 catches for 1040 yards and 15 tds. So to crunch the numbers there, he was averaging about 17.6 yards per catch and had a score every 3.9 catches. So if you round up that's a touchdown every four catches or every four times he's touching the ball, which is ridiculous. I don't care what level that's at. Holy Cross is an FCS program. Those numbers are just incredible. He's currently signed with the Carolina Panthers. He's a guy that I would like to see in the NFL maybe break through and get an opportunity. He's got an uphill battle but obviously Carolina is one of the teams. They were at the bottom of the NFL last year, so he might have some benefit of the doubt, but that was probably my favorite pick of the draft. The other guy that I'll talk about, and this is a guy that I've had some history with too, just from the scouting perspective, Macallan Castles, the tight end out of Tennessee. He was one of the best tight ends at the FCS level at uc Davis and then moved into SEC competition last year for his final year. Incredibly versatile player. He was blocking more last year, but he doesn't have a problem catching. Caught five touchdowns on just 22 receptions in 2023 and then he landed with the Philadelphia Eagles Anthony's team as an undrafted free agent this year. So I don't know, that's a guy that I could see sticking around on an NFL practice squad too, but boy if he comes, if both those guys, Jalen Koch and McAllen Castles, if they come to the UFL, that'd be pretty good for Memphis. We might talk about them. You throw Jason Bean in there, they might have the best draft class. I don't know Anthony we've seen here and Chris Steven has a comment and we're talking offensive line and all that stuff, lack thereof. Thoughts on you would've thought maybe they go a little bit more of that, but thoughts on the Showboats drafter? I actually like the Jason Bean draft pick and look. They've been dealing with Case Cookes last year and he's probably the most statue of Liberty quarterback in this league. He is the terrible choice for this offensive line and yeah, I mean I wish they would've drafted offensive linemen, but Jason Bean can actually move around in the pocket and that's somebody Memphis needed. Troy Williams was able to do a little bit more, but Troy Williams, not really. He shouldn't be a starting quarterback. I hate to say it. Bean could develop and be a starting quarterback, so that would be a lot of fun if he ends up getting into the UFL, I think he would have a real shot at starting for Memphis. I would say a couple of standouts. Blake Watson was really good at Memphis. He had a good career at Old Dominion and then had a nice run with Memphis last year. He's ran for a thousand yards a couple of times in the last three years. He's a versatile back, be able to catch out of the back field, so I think he would be a good compliment to Victor who is more of a power back and obviously Watson's a hometown guy too, haven't gone to school there, so that was a really smart pick on their part and then I got to give a shout out to the Ivy League pick there with Mason Tipton. He's the third all time leading receiver at Yale. He was a first team all Ivy League last year. Led the league in touchdowns with 10. I think he's a really solid receiver and somebody that I can see. I don't know if he would be on the outside. He may be more of a slot receiver, but I think he's somebody that can be sneaky and maybe help out with that Memphis offense. Chris here has a question, Christopher. I thought Blake Watson was going to be the first overall pick. Thoughts on that? I mean picking, I know we talked to Jason Bean and all that. I guess we'll go back to Anthony on that. Just that they would go with the quarterback now they're running back. I don't know, just in terms of getting players into the league, are you surprised they were quarterback number one? Oh, sorry. Yeah, I guess I was a little bit surprised. I mean we've all talked about it. I think there's other position needs that they had and biggest one being on the offensive line, but I mean it's a sexy pick. I mean it's one that's going to get people talking, so I don't blame them for going after another quarterback. Like I said, case Cookes is not a mobile quarterback. It's getting to the point now where I like Case Cookes. I think he has good traits. I just don't know if he's really fit for spring football anymore. He just said, Hey, he's been really on and off the last couple years and I just don't know if I really see that kind of impact in him and that Memphis offense, they moved the ball a little better with Troy Williams at quarterback than they did with Case Cookes. So maybe it makes sense to have Jason Bean as the draft pick and if he ends up heading over to the UFL, I do think he could legitimately start for this team and I think he would add a spark to the offense. Greg, any thoughts on that or else we'll move over to Michigan? Any other thoughts on have we done the round on Memphis? Not me yet. Sorry, I trans keep track here. Yeah, no it's okay. I know it's not easy. Just they had a lot of holes. They addressed almost every level of their offense and defense with at least one pick. Again, offensive line is something that I wish they would've concentrated a little more on, but then again you wonder is that a position they're going to look to fill with veterans instead of rookies? That might be the better play for a team like Memphis. I think the one thing they did is they got more dynamic on offense, which is something they needed. Jason Bean is an athletic quarterback. Blake Watson runs a four four flat 40. You've got Mason Tipton who runs a 4 3 4 40 Macallan Castles is a threat at tight end. So they added a lot of speed on offense and I think that was key for them. And yeah, other than that Andrew Ra, I like it center, but I thought they could have used a little more offensive line even if they're waiting to sign veterans to start, I think they even needed depth across the offensive line. They could have even considered drafting some high level rookies to play as backups as well. And not that we want to, we've had this conversation, but yeah, can't you sign some of these players way? I'm just always confused of doing this draft when it's kind of in the USFL and we kind of have the difference of all that. Evan, do you want to talk, I guess any thoughts on that move to Panthers but just Yeah, I mean can you sign, I just never understand the place of this as opposed besides getting pub publicity, but then we don't really publicize it so we're doing this. I don't know. Any other thoughts on that? Why you wouldn't just sign these guys and then I guess we can move on to the Panthers. I mean you're taking a gamble. I mean of course I would prefer a draft where everybody was just eligible for this draft and not signed in a league like the NFL or the CFL. You just have street free agents. Again, I like how the roughnecks prioritized that and they only took two chances on guys that were in the NFL and the rest of their guys will be available to sign right now. I think that's a great approach. Not saying that's going to happen, but we'll transition into Michigan here. I've only got one Michigan player to talk about, so it'll be quick. That's their quarterback. Rocky Lombardi, this is an interesting one, former Michigan State player. So there's that tie in. He saw his most playing time at Michigan State during their covid season in 2020 and then he transferred to northern Illinois, played three seasons there 2021 through 2023. His best year there was probably his first year in 2021. I think he had 24 total touchdowns, 15 passing, nine rushing. This is a guy I've actually seen throw in person before as well, not at an NIU game, but when he was training down in Florida with a couple of NFL or other NFL quarterbacks including Michael Pratt from Tulane who was drafted by the Green Bay Packers, saw them throw down in Florida when I was there for a camp. So I've seen him in person, it doesn't tremendously overwhelm me. Again, guy was taken in the fifth round, so you're probably looking at him if he does come. Of course he's with the beals right now. If he does come in he'd probably be a backup option. But Michigan, they played a lot of different quarterbacks this year so I think it doesn't hurt too much for them to continue looking at depth and looking at options. Evan and all you guys, because I bring on everyone here. I don't know anything, I'm just a facilitator of all this, but let it not be lost here. And Evan like, well I think first year through 24, it is always incredible to me the wealth of knowledge everybody has at this. I'm like, God forbid if anyone from the league, and I know we've got people moving on and everything else, but this was us on a Zoom call and for, you know what I mean? The work that went into this to get and the knowledge that everyone has. Imagine if you had a stack of these players on the list and everything else. Be able to dive into all this stuff. I just think to be able to elevate the coverage of this I just think would be incredible. I think we do a great job with just us on webcams and sitting outside or sitting in Evans home, whatever thing else. But Anthony, thoughts on the Panthers here? Anything from you? Yeah, I like their first choice. Julian Pearl from Illinois. I think last time Michigan drafted a tackle as their first pick with Jared Hors. I think it worked out really well for them. He ended up being their starting left tackle and I praise him. I think he's one of the most underrated offense alignment in this league. I don't think a lot of people talk about it much, but when he was on the field for the Panthers when he wasn't dealing with injuries, I mean that dude was bullying people. So can Julian come in and if he does come in and end up playing for Michigan, can he come in and maybe be the right tackle? He's a guy that played left and right tackle at Illinois and I think two times he was on the all big 10, honorable mentioned team. He's a really good pass blocker. I think he can come in and be a bully on that offensive line for Michigan with horse. So Michigan was a really good running team. Obviously they ran through 5 million quarterbacks but it didn't matter to them. They were always winning games and I think a big part of that was because of the consistency of the running game. So offensive line was very apparent to be important to Michigan. I think they ended up signing three guys, so that's imperative to them to make sure they have a strong depth that the offensive line position, which I think was really a strong suit for this team. Team. I know Chris is going crazy in the chat and I know Evan already talked about it, but Rocky Lombardi, I mean really a plus football name here. I think in terms of anyone else here, a lot of these phenomenal names today. Greg, thoughts on the Panthers? One of the things that I wrote about in my buy the numbers column out today on ufl board.com was something that I know Reed you have talked about, Mike Mitchell's talked about it either on the mark cast or on social media, but it's the idea that with the UFL and so many of these markets struggling to attract fans, why not do a draft in which you can claim local players? Right, Colleagues, and we've had to jump in. We've had a lot of even comments on here. I haven't read talking about that, wishing that they would do that. So yes, you're absolutely correct. Michigan kind of did that themselves here A little bit. Yeah, they Took JD Ddu play out of Michigan State. They took Brian Dooley out of Eastern Michigan. As Evan mentioned, Rocky Lombardi, former Michigan state player, even Isaac ku, the defensive end is in Undirected free agent of the Lions, so he's a local guy right now. Anyway, so in terms of territorial selections, the UFL didn't do that here, but really the teams kind of, we talked about Blake Watson from Memphis being drafted by the Showboats and McClellan Castles out of Tennessee being drafted by the Showboats. Now again, these players may never end up suiting up for these teams that are drafting them, but if you can get a story in the local newspaper about, Hey, the showboats drafted this hometown guy, it can't hurt. I think it's a no-brainer and I mean it's something that doesn't cost a penny at all and you just do it that way. I agree with you, Greg, when we're trying to get these media people, if I'm in Michigan, if I'm in Birmingham, if I'm in whatever, I'm trying to figure out what the heck do I talk about mean and yeah, obviously you should dive deeper and do these other player interest stories, but it's a no-brainer in terms of something that's just easy fruit to pick from that of this is a story that we can run and talk about. Greg, anything else from that we can transition on to who we got the bras next? Anything else? No, I'll jump in with the bras here. So again, they're a team that didn't draft a quarterback despite having some issues quarterback at this point that revealed themselves in the championship game. Again, could be a situation where they decide to wait out a veteran or something like that, add them in a future draft, add them in free agency. Maybe they end up being happy with what they have. Maybe they run with Quentin Dormy as a starter next year if they decide against Chase Garber. So a strong defense got stronger, their first two picks are along the defensive line. Gabe Hall, Gabriel Murphy, whose brother Grayson also played for UCLA. Again offensive line, sincere Haynesworth Center. They've got Alex Mollett at center, one of the best centers in the league. So interesting that they take a center. So it didn't feel so much to me like they were trying to fill holes necessarily on the team other than trying to get perhaps the best talent they could out there that fit their system. I mean more so than any other team perhaps is they have a particular fit that they look for, especially with offensive skill position players to fit into that a J Smith run and shoot based offense. So that's what you're going to look at for those skill position players on offense. Evan, thoughts for you on this and obviously covering the roughnecks back for prior and then now the Brahmas and we've had all this Wade Phillips and everything and AJ Smith and everything else. Curious, I don't even know how they approached this in terms of, I mean I guess Wade's sticking around, right? We've had all these conversations about AJ Smith in the off season, but curious your thoughts on this just because I feel like the team obviously super well. Yeah, well here's a good story about one of their draft picks. One of the guys I was going to talk about anyways, sincere Haynesworth, the offensive center from Tulane, mark Lilybridge who was the GM of the San Antonio bras. His son Hudson Lilybridge was an offensive lineman at Tulane. I watched him play and Sincere Haynesworth was one of his teammates. So I have a feeling that that's why Sincere Haynesworth was the selection here, even though they already have Alex Millett and Sincere Haynesworth is currently signed with the New Orleans Saints in the NFL. He stayed local. Hudson has since transferred over to Missouri State, which is in the FCS. But I thought that was a cool story because I got up close and personal with Sincere Haynesworth when I was doing some scouting stuff at Tulane, same game where I saw John Reese Plumley in the a c championship and a bunch of other guys that have gone on to the NFL. The other guy I want to talk about with the bras is Joshua Fus, the wide receiver from UTSA. So they're bringing in somebody who played, I guess in the Alamo Dome at UTSA, that's their facility from my understanding. He's put up great numbers. The past three college seasons, going back to 2021, improved every year at UTSA during his time there. He was there for five seasons, had I think 1,150 yards receiving last year. That was something like 15th best in the nation if I'm not mistaken at the FBS level. So he'll be kind of like a local fan favorite obviously if he plays in the UFL currently signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Again, a lot of NFL guys here, but he's a guy who again, just really liked the progress that he's made. UTSA isn't the biggest school, but again, if he comes into this league, he'd be a great fit and I think he'd be a great fit, not just for again the culture but the offense that they run. We talked a lot about scheme and what they run. I look at Lara Griffin from Mississippi State prior to this season. Mike Leach rest in peace was the head coach at Mississippi State and AJ Smith has gone on record talking about running the Mike Leach offense, which is a combination of air raid and run shoot concepts with the bras. So that's something to keep in mind as well. Anthony, we hop, do you hear on this? Yeah, obviously defense was the focus for San Antonio. Seven out of the 10 picks were on the defensive side, so I'm sure that ass kicking they took from Birmingham really far. Yeah. Can we get offense? We need offense. Yeah, but the defense wasn't able to stop the run and stuff like that. So yeah, I can see that. And wait, Phillips is a defensive mind coach and I know he wasn't the one making the picks, but it was very clear they wanted to focus on defense. Gabriel Murphy's, the guy that really stands out to me. That dude was a stud at UCLA. I mean he was another guy that Versatile can play outside. Linebacker can play on the defense end. I think he had eight sacks last year for the Bruin, so he's a guy that I think he fits Wade Phillips defense really well and I think he's a guy that can come in and be an impactful player. I don't know if he'll be a starter because that front seven is really good for San Antonio, but I think he can come in and be a guy that can step in and help out. So I like that pick with Murphy. Yeah, it's funny and I know they're known for defense, all that. It's like the Mariner, we just had the baseball drafts and I think whatever they draft 30 players, I think 27 to 30 were pitching for the Mariners. I understand we have good pitching, but if we get, and I understand this different circumstance here with all this stuff, it sure would be nice. Okay, Kaka, battle Hawks. Who wants to start here? I guess we'll go back, Greg. Thoughts on the battle hawks here? We talked about Houston selecting mostly players who are not under contract to the NFL right now. St. Louis picked the second most. They picked five players who are not under contract to NFL teams right now and could conceivably sign with the UFL tomorrow if the UFL has contracts ready, which we don't know about, but that's a whole other situation. But Bradley Ashmore out of Vanderbilt is a guy I watched this year. I thought he was really impressive to me and could come in a backup role at least and develop for a year in St. Louis. And again, starter ceiling, that's kind of what you look at for these guys in the rookie draft. They may not come in and start right away, but what's their ceiling? And I think some of these guys do have that ceiling to them, whether they ever get there or not, who knows, but they have that ability. Cody Schrader, another local guy out of Missouri running back is very talented. St Louis has some good running backs right now. They've got Mateo Durant who is hurt early, would expect him back healthy this year. Jacob Sailors is now in the NFL with the New York Giants, so perhaps they're looking at needing to replace his production or at least a backup spot to Durant and Wayne Galman this year. So Schrader could certainly do that and more. And then Sivan Cordero talked about at the top of the show how I had to take a quarterback in my mock draft. They take a quarterback first round. I think that's going to surprise a lot of people. Doesn't really surprise me with AJ McCarran and the decision he's on year to year, right? I mean he could hang them up just as easily as he could come back in 2025. So you're going to start needing to develop young quarterbacks behind him. Manny Wilkins is not going to be the answer. Brandon Silver's, sorry, Reed is not going to be the answer at quarterback to replace McCarran. So you got to start compiling some bodies there, whether they're rookies like Cordero or players that you bring in that are a little more veteran, but that's a position that's kind of a sneaky need for them here in this draft. Evan thoughts? Yeah, I've got three guys. I'll talk about Cody Schrader too. The running back from Missouri. I mean we talked about kind of fan favorite with Josh Fuss and UTSA in that connection. I think Cody Schrader, if he comes to this league, will be the ultimate fan favorite, just knowing how big and deep the St. Louis fan base is. Great story played at D two Truman State, which is another school in Missouri, so he stayed local his entire football career, but wasn't always that the big school Mizzou, but when he did get up there to the power five level in the SEC, he did some great things. They were talking about him a ton last year. Again, his journey's been really well documented. He's currently under contract with the San Francisco 49 ERs, so we'll see what happens to him. That's a guy, I don't know if he's going to come or not, but kind of hoping that he does. Again, it would just add a great, we talk about storylines in this league. That would be a fantastic one. Jelani Baker, the wide receiver from Limestone. I know Cody Schrader, I talked about him playing D two. This was technically the only division two player selected in the draft. Just the definition at that level at least of being a number one option. 75 catches 1089 yards, 14 touchdowns last year. Again made about a 500 yard jump from the season before. I think he could come to this league just because, well, maybe not just because again, he was a highly productive receiver. He's got the ideal size you'd want just under 200 pounds, I think 6 1 6 2. But he did well in kick returns last year and I know again, it's at the division two level, so maybe we take that with a grain of salt. But you could see this guy getting worked in on special teams, just kind of like a guy Jawan Mongo who was a D three guy who had to play in Mexico before he came to the UFL this season with Arlington. Worked his way up. Again, you look for those things, right? So there's Jelani Baker, he was signed by the Baltimore Ravens as A-U-D-F-A, don't know if he's still with them or not, but I know he did have an NFL contract. And then the last guy I'll talk about is another receiver that they took. Jayden Jankey, I think is how you pronounce his last name. Janky, Janke janky, something like that. Anyway, again, another South Dakota state guy I talked about Garrett Greenfield, I think Isaiah Alberg was the other one. And then Jaden here, he was slightly more productive in 2023 than his twin brother Jackson. Again, that's another well-documented story. If you watch FCS football, he has a twin brother that plays on the same team. They play the same position. They were both undrafted in the NFL and both signed with the Houston Texans. So they've stuck together. Would be interesting to see maybe if Jayden comes to the UFL with St. Louis, maybe they bring his brother with him. And I know that's not, he wasn't drafted obviously, but again just down the line if he chooses to do so, he was again, slightly more productive than him last year. Fell just short of a thousand yard season, but had double digit touchdowns for the first time in his career at South Dakota State, which he was there for five years I think. And then, like I said, signed by the Houston, Texas as UDFA. So again, all St. Louis just had a lot of cool story type of guys and I always liked that. I think that's a good way to round things out because this is the last team that we're talking about. But again, like Greg was saying, five guys that aren't under contract with the NFL. So in terms of players potentially suiting up in 2025, St. Louis might have a higher chance or a higher success rate, I should say with this draft compared to other teams because of that. Final thoughts here on this team, Anthony? And then we'll do a final go home question then we'll get out of here. I appreciate everyone's time. Yeah, so Cordero, I think of the tape that I've watched from quarterbacks that were drafted today, looking at 'em, Cordero's was the most fun to watch and he's somebody that I think he's the quarterback that I think St. Louis was hoping Manny Wilkins would've been because I think after watching Manny start this year, I think there are legitimate concerns about that backup quarterback position. So I thought it was a really smart move to get cord. He is the all time lady passer in the mountain west, but the one really good thing about Cordero is the last couple of years he's improved his efficiency and protecting the football. His turnovers cut down, he was making better decisions and I think that's a really big deal when it comes down to the battle hawks because that's a really big thing with AJ McCarran is that he protects the ball well, but Wilkins turned the ball over a few times, so they need a quarterback in there who is mobile. I mean Cordero is super fast when he is in the open fields, he's a lot like ply. So I think he's a guy that can come in and I think if Agent McCarran doesn't come back, I think Cordero can compete for the starting job. And then Cody Schrader obviously is a big name here. He was a dope walker finalist last year. Dude is quick. I mean he can do a lot of things in the offense and I think he could be somebody that maybe they were hoping Max Bo, he would be. I think there's a little versatility to him and Schroeder, it's kind of similar to the Memphis Showboats pick with Blake Watson and getting a guy that is local that can get a local name there. And Schroeder is a massive name with the Missouri Tigers, so he's a guy that I think can definitely start and be a really good replacement for Jacob. Well this is good. Eight teams here moving through. I think we did pretty good brisk pace. I appreciate it. Deep dive on all those. Let's go around before we get out Greg, I know this, we've talked about the top and different circumstances for this, but who do you feel highest on in terms of what they did today of these eight teams in terms of this was a smart way to approach the draft before we get out of here? We'll go around. Well, I mean really Houston and St. Louis are the only ones that approach the draft differently than anybody else. So we won't know the results of that approach until January, February when training camp opens and we can count how many players from this draft are in each team's camp. But I think this is the first time the UFL is holding a draft of this nature where undrafted free agents under contract to the NFL are available to be drafted. So I think everybody's kind of flying blind a little bit here and kind of feeling around in the dark and really not sure how to approach this. I think next year when we can actually look at this list and say, gee, zero players from this team are in the UFL, I think you may see GMs then next year sort of adjust their game plan off of that. But I think at this point, taking best players available, doing that sort of thing, I can't really fault them for doing that. Just taking flyers on these guys is really what they're doing and unfortunately they're kind of hoping the guys that they drafted are not good enough for the NFL, which is kind of a weird thing to hope if you're a general manager taking these players, but you really do want them. I do wonder what kind of communication, if any there were with GMs and agents, I know you asked Evan earlier, how would you approach this draft from a personnel standpoint? If I'm a GM and I know that there's a lot on the plate of these UFL GMs, they're responsible for sifting through all 12,000 of these players basically on their own unless they get help from their coaching staffs, which they're probably not going to get because they're no longer under contract. But I'd be reaching out to agents of these players that I have on my draft board and I'd be saying, Hey, you're Blake Watson's agent, is there any chance that this guy could consider the UFL if the NFL doesn't work out? And if they say flat, no, he's off my draft board, I'm not going to bother drafting him. If his agent is telling me, look, I've talked to him, we're not interested in that option. So I'd be reaching out to agents and saying, Hey, if I draft your guy, is there any possibility that he might come and play in the UFL? Because otherwise you're really throwing darts here in a lot of ways you're taking guys who may be scheme fits, but you don't really have any idea if they're even interested in the UFL and that's a very difficult proposition to be tasked with for these GMs. Well, and I think that's a perfect segue to talk to Evan because, and I know that you and Sam and we talk a lot in our group chat about the arena and the IFL and how do you get these players and it's the same thing here. We got the NFL, okay, you go to the UL, you're doing that same kind of convincing role, whatever. So I guess segue off of Greg's comments, but then kind of just what I initially brought up, but I'm curious your thoughts on that too. I think it's interesting. Yeah, well Greg's spot on. I mean my number one thing when you're initially contacting a player or you're interested, you got to gauge the level of interest like, Hey, would you actually come and play in our league and be interested in signing a contract? Because there's a good number of guys, especially guys that have touched the NFL, that are still clinging onto that hope of making a roster or getting a camp invite or whatever. They're not going to do it. They're like, well, I don't want to do this. My focus is on the NFL. Or again, we're talking about here maybe UFL. I've heard some things about that. I always say player education is important. Having guys understand what options there are out there, how much money you make, schedules, things like that. There's a lot that goes into it. But yeah, I mean like Greg said, it's a lot easier to kind of trim down this giant pool of thousands of players if you just find the guys you're really interested in and then get in contact with them or their agent and be like, Hey, would you actually consider doing this? And if half of them say no, well then you've chopped that in half so you can be way more condensed and more precise I guess in your process. But to answer your original question, Reed, I mean in terms of who I thought had the best or most productive draft for me it's between Memphis and dc Again, DC just because I love Von Hutchins approach, what he does, I know he has a lot of connections, he's very vocal and open and honest about what they're doing from a personnel standpoint, which I appreciate. And then Memphis just had a lot of flashy guys. Again, not saying that those guys are going to come play, it's not a guarantee, but you like the upside there. And then I look at the roughnecks and the battle hawks like Greg and the rest of us have already talked about taking guys that aren't under contract with the NFL, which means that they have a higher chance of coming into the league. But again, maybe that doesn't work out and maybe the guys that Houston brings in just aren't talented enough to make the cut because they were overlooked in the NFL and usually that's for a reason. A lot of times NFL personnel people, they don't get things wrong. The scouts, the GMs, I mean you hear about some of the more highly publicized stuff like a Johnny Manzel situation or something, but with a lot of the smaller, more intricate things when it comes to scouting, they don't miss on a lot of players. The guys that should be in the NFL are in the NFL and they're there for good reasons. So I'll leave it at that. Anthony, take us home here. Yeah, it is like Greg said, it's kind of like inviting, Hey, if your date to the dance doesn't work out, then I'm standing by here. It really feels like that a little bit here. Anthony, final thoughts on what team you liked the approach to today? Yeah, so I like what Memphis and St. Louis did offensively. I thought they had the strongest drafts on the offensive side, really like what San Antonio did On the defensive side of things, I would say if they can make any changes to this college rookie draft, they should separate into two. They should do one in the summer where whoever is available, actually available and not under contract with the NFL, have them be available for it and then do a second one when cuts are made and stuff like that. I know that's typically what they did with the veterans, but maybe you do one with just rookies that were cut by teams by NFL teams or are still available and you can put them in a pool and then do, if you need to do a third one, do a third one. I mean these spring leagues typically love doing three to five drafts in the off season because one, it is a publicity, which I know you don't think it is, but I think it's kind of publicity. I can Be, I think it can be. I mean you did a whole show off of it, so I mean it's counting for something, but I think it's good to have any way that the league can generate some kind of news I think is always good. So I think the more drafts the better. I mean throw in as many as you want because I do think you're opening up opportunities for players to get a chance to be signed and these are leagues that can use as many players as possible to fill up rosters before going into training camps. So try to get as much talent as you can. I agree. I think, and like Greg said, presumably more drafts to come here, Ryan, and we have the showcases, we're not doing the combine this year. Riot, we're doing the showcases presumably that and then we'll have another draft early fall and then maybe one after kind of the end of the NFL season going into training camp. It's just hard because I get, like Anthony said, doing the publicity, we want to do this, we want it to be a thing, but most of the stories that come out today are players that were like, well, I didn't even know I was in this or what's going on. And so I think there's ways to do this. I've given the work that I feel that this does at this point. I could bring on 87 people to talk about football stuff and I think there's a ceiling to kind of the interest for this. I think we did a phenomenal job today. I appreciate all three people coming on. I know Pat wanted to hop on as well. I know Pat's busy with work stuff and then Andy Murray, the professor wanting to hop on as well, just circumstances and stuff. So I appreciate everyone coming on, like I said, like and subscribe if you're finding this now, I don't know if we are, we're still working through all this. I would like to get more of a picture of what we want this UFL off season to look like. I know that Jeff and Anthony had his article out, Jeff, the VP of comms stepping down mutually party ways with the league. I've had my own issues with the league and maybe we leave that be discussion for another point, but I haven't been super motivated to kind of figure out, okay, what is the plan here? Are we having more drafts? We had Russ, Julia on last season kind of talking about, I thought that was a fruitful conversation, but we're all here where we are now. So and subscribe. I talked on the Monday show, hussy and I are taking the two week break. I got vacations here. We're going to the lake, we're going to Boston. We'll be back If there's any breaking news, I'm sure I'll have my laptop. Greg, anything you want to plug UFL board, we'll do that real quick and we'll get out. I know it's late for everyone. Yeah, a lot of content coming to UFL board, I had my by the numbers, looking at kind of a macro look at the draft today. I'll have more micro looks at each team comments on each player over the next few days. Those will be split up by USFL conference XFL conference, take a look at, analyze what each team did and then next week I've been compiling throughout the last week or so players who've participated in the UFL showcases in St. Louis and DC last weekend. So I'm going to have a couple pieces out that profile, do short little bios on the players that I was able to find scouring social media to find out who attended these since the league is not releasing those names and it's probably going to be the most comprehensive list that's going to be out there of players who attended the UFL showcases. So be on the lookout for that next week. I mean just for crying out loud, I understand Greg last year when it's like we don't want to release the names, we got to deal with the USFL and all that stuff. Put the names out there, right? If you're the UFL at this point, put the names out there. What are we hiding Evan? Are you guys winning an IFL championship? What do we got here before we get out of here? I sure hope so, man. Just clinched playoffs and we got our last regular season game this weekend, so always looking around. I do plan to go to the UFL showcases in Orlando hopefully. And San Diego, which are I think September and October. That's in my schedule. I'm working it in, so always looking around. Always happy to talk football, always happy to talk players. That's obviously my thing, my bread and butter. So yeah, had a good time and like you said, hopefully we come out as champions. Everyone's here. Happy. Happy words Anthony. Hardest working man. And for the all football news stuff right now, what do you got coming out and then we'll get out of here. Yeah, so obviously CFL season is hot and heavy, so that's kind of where our big focus is at. Thank god this draft happened. So now I can do some UFL breakdown. So I know Mike just finished up his DC Defenders one, so hopefully they'll come out probably tomorrow and then I'll do the breakdown on the rest of the teams. And then yeah, just going to be a lot of CFL content. It's going to be busy this weekend with two games on I guess Friday. There's no games tomorrow, so it's just going to be two games on Friday, one on Saturday and Sunday. So a lot of preview games And then tomorrow probably do some, I want to do a breakdown of what's going on in Edmonton and all that jazz with the quarterback position and stuff. So be on the lookout for that. Yeah, I saw Rash Madani out a friended me of the show and he is like, there's no sports right now. What's the CFL doing? I'm like UFL college draft, bro. Wake up, we're going. Yeah, if you're, God forbid if you're, we got a lot of people still on this hour and three, five minutes in if you're like into this CFL season's been great and I know and your mileage may vary, but it's been a phenomenal CFL season BC number one in the west. We're going to be hosting the Great Cup. Should be excited. Appreciate everyone, Evan, Greg, Anthony, thank you guys all so much. I'm going to go get some dinner here. Well, I'm going to shower after working there. We'll go get some dinner. I appreciate everyone, enjoy the new outro graphics. So we'll see you guys next time.

CFL Week 6 Results + Reactions! Winners and Losers From CFL 2024 Week 6!!

There we go. Hey, maybe we're live now. No countdown. See here. Sorry about that. Sorry for the delay. Let me check Twitter. Hopefully I sound okay. We lost the intro. We lost everything today. Yeah, it looks like we're getting to Jason. I even took the time to redo our intro graphics for today, so certainly upset about that. Let's play that at least so you can see the hard work I did and then we'll get into the show here. I'm checking to her. Sorry everybody. Sorry that was never had that happen. Now Jason knows that I log in about eight seconds before it's time to go live. So far of it's on me if it's not working, but normally we go ahead, but Jason, check this out. Got new intro graphics here as everyone logs in, so there we go. Got the new logo. Everything on here. We'll see. I don't know if it's on Twitter. It looks like maybe we're on Twitter here. We have a lot of that. Jason, how are you doing? I know you said you felt sick today. Not a great start to the live stream. How are you doing now? Clean up stuff on the backend and we'll get into all this. I'm doing pretty good. I think that really enjoying the CFL season so far. It's been good lately, so really no complaints for me. I mean I'm excited for another week of doing this recap show. Yeah, so I think we're good now. I'm deleting because then it tried to put on all these other live streams, so I think we are good now cleaning all that up. So we had the big breaking news here coming into today. I was going to pull that up and I'll pull it up now. Chris Jones pour one out, our commander in chief head, coach gm, everything else. Jason, what did you make of this? Came out, you tweeted, you said what a perfect time for us to go live here, CFL week six recap if I haven't gotten all that today, but here we have the news. Chris Jones has been relieved of duty. Jor Simon's going to be the interim gm, Jarris Jackson going to be the interim head coach. We expected this to happen. I think Andy Murray is probably doing backflips right now somewhere in San Diego. What did you make of this? I mean, five weeks in, I think time is time, right? Yeah, absolutely. And you could have argued the time would've been maybe even last year given how the disastrous results have been for the Elks previous couple seasons. So I mean just the way that they've started this season, I think that every game has been close and I think that when you lose tight games, I think it's more of a reflection on coaching than it is anything. And I think at the end of the day, the Elks just made too many crucial mistakes in winnable situations to start this year. And that's ultimately why Chris Jones ends up being fired today. And I mean the previous couple years you could have argued that they didn't have the talent necessary to win CFL games, at least be competitive with most teams in the league. But this year it's quite clear that is different. It's quite clear this team is improved from the last couple of years, at least looking at them from a week to week perspective. But at the end of the day, Chris Jones just did not get enough wins in his three years with Edmonton. I believe at eight wins in three seasons or two and a half seasons I should say at the helm of the Elks. And obviously we kind of got into all this with the salary cap issues and we're going to have Chris Jones to both of 'em. I saw Farhan tweet out that the expected would be, the expectation would be for that to be split here moving forward. I think that that was part of it, right, was probably a lot of stress and many hats being worn by Chris Jones on that. How much do you attribute that to versus playing forward other things? I mean was it just Chris Jones had too many things going on? What do you attribute their lack of success or his lack of success? Well, I think sometimes the game just kind of passes you by, and I'm not saying that Chris Jones is an old coach, but 10 years ago he had a lot of success as a head coach in this league. But ultimately I think at the end of the day, they just didn't put together enough good enough game plans at the end of the day to be able to string together enough victories because like I said, they look like a much improved team this year. They're moving the ball much better on offense, but I think the defensive side of the ball, which is Chris Jones specialty, it never really came together over the last few years here in Edmonton and that's a huge reason why he finds himself without a job today. Obviously the breaking news here, coming in on all this now of course is my neighbors decided to Mother-in-Law and Edge everything right now. Do you expect McLeod we move forward with that? Right? Obviously this is early to tell for that, but there's still so much money tied into that. I know that John Hodge and that we were doing the free trade for, I like to take credit, I think I had the timestamp I think October of last year. I think we started that hashtag, but do you think that this changes anything in the immediate or is this more, I don't know what you can do here where you saw McLeod and kind of the offensive line and everything else they have. Do you see any immediate change coming from this? I think in the next couple of weeks, no. I think that McLeod is probably going to remain the starter there in Edmonton, but if they could continue to see this losing trend, if they go to oh and seven, I think they have nothing left to lose at that point. Throw trade forward in there and you're looking at it pretty much another lost season there in Edmonton. But no, I think McLeod, he's been kind of a mixed bag so far this year, but in general I felt like he's played well enough in most cases for them to have to win. But at the end of the day, I don't think, like I said, they're not making the key plays necessarily late in games. I mean I will get to the game itself from last night, but this was probably the worst of all the Edmonton losses over the last couple of years just from the mistakes that they made and the way that they battled back in the game. But then they just blew it at the last second again, just with stupid self-inflicting errors. So yeah, I don't expect any change in the short term for the Elks, but that question of Trey Ford, when is he going to see the field is definitely getting louder each week. Well, and that's the thing, and it was funny you were messaging me. We were out yesterday, I had a wedding on Saturday and so watching, I wasn't watching the game live, I caught up on everything today, but was it watching the game live? And I was like, man, I saw what was the Edmonton, what was the right am I turned around here? Yeah, Edmonton losing to Ottawa like the walkout field goal kick and all that and I didn't realize how close it was and how they had battled back and then kind of seeing that and we had the pound out bounds and then they got the feel all that stuff. I saw a lot of, what I did see a lot of last night was a lot of this narrative around them falling apart. Again, I agree with you, losers lose losers find a way to lose. And so they're involved in this and you're always going to find a way to beat yourself. But I also see this, well McLeod, he is demonstrably better than what Trey four would be or that, and to me it's never an apples to apples of like, well if Trey four is he going to beat out McLeod in a quarterback battle, but it's what have we invested in the McLeod? What have we have invested into the money of that? If you had taken that time and energy, money, invest in the better offensive line in better defensive, whatever you think the holes that Edmonton has, that to me is the thing where I would like to see is it's not Trey versus McLeod, it's what is Trey on his penny salary and not spending half a million dollars on that? I don't know because that's 400 whatever thousand that you would be able to spend on the rest of that team. Do you agree with that? Are we kind of on the same page there? Yeah, it certainly could have helped them, especially on defense. I think that they lost a couple of really big time players this off season AC Leonard and Jason Rena who they traded to Toronto. So I mean they just didn't have enough talent on that side of the ball to really give Chris Jones much of a chance in getting this defense coached up. I think a lot of it is his doing, obviously being the general manager, making those personnel decisions. So in a way it was the manager Chris Jones that screwed the head coach. So I think ultimately they just didn't do enough in terms of allocating the proper resources. And yeah, I agree with you that it definitely could have been a better use of resources there in Edmonton to spread that around more and maybe go with Trey Ford or a cheaper option that quarterback this season. But again, you could look back at last year they went more of the cheaper option with Cornelius and tried to surround him with better talent that didn't necessarily work. So I mean I'm leaning on the side of this team being sort of a cursed franchise. I don't like to believe in curses, but I mean at the end of the day there's just so many things that have gone wrong for this team and it's just so tragic watching this team every single week. Yeah, I saw it last night as well, we're back on this, well the name changed and everything. I'm like, oh my god, we're three year. I am so tired of that. It's just been such a long, Chris Jones is the curse of this team or the lack of awareness and trying to figure out, and like you said, trying to make it work with Cornelius paying them too soon, were we worried about the XFL? That was kind of the rumor I had heard. He was worried they were going to go back. I don't know if the XFL back, what was that 2023 was interested in that and then now this trade Ford debacle and the McLeod thing can't, there's always this mentality with these teams like, well, you're just a quarterback away. But not every team is just a quarterback away from being trying to be a great cup contending team. Look at Hamilton here. And so I think we're learning that yes, you can buy a quarterback but you still might need many, many, many other pieces besides that. Yeah, I think this whole team is just a lesson in team building and how not to do it. I feel like even if you look back before Chris Jones, this team was struggling before Chris Jones when they had Jamie Elizondo that one disastrous year, he spent his head coach there. So I mean I really don't know what's the solution for the Elks going forward. They're kind of in no man's land with a 36-year-old quarterback and just kind of a flawless, no, not flawless, a very flawed roster. So I mean I don't know what they do from here. It's going to be an interesting rest of the season. It's clearly not a talentless team, especially in comparison to the last three seasons. I like a lot of their players, especially on the offensive side of the ball and like I said, they've been able to move the ball a lot better, score a lot more points. But I mean I just don't think that they have the it factor needed to win games And I think we'll get into the game here. I think what does it look like even next year here, right? Not like okay you got, because you got to figure out the straightforward thing and McLeod's only going to be around right now is that, I don't know the detail. I don't know if he's under multi-year contract with that. So then this is the lame duck year. You're paying this guy a ton of money the next year you're no better off, the fans are going to be even more upset. It really is kind of a shame there where at least at least and you can obviously the tie cats were on by this week, right? Didn't have a chance to lose again, but at least to me, I feel like the tie cats are trying. I dunno, do you feel that way as the two winless teams right now? At least to me it feels like Hamilton. I don't know, maybe you get something out of the backup moving forward and we finally move on from Bo. How are you feeling long-term trajectory of Edmonton Hamilton right now or you know what I'm saying? Well, with Hamilton it's more of the fact that they have won a great cup in 25 years that's just constantly hanging over that franchise's head. But we have had respectable seasons in recent memory. The last four or five seasons I think we've all been over eight wins. So eight wins are above. So I mean at least they've been a respect in the last handful of years. Edmonton has just been the complete opposite of that. It's just been no hope that they've given their fans over the last few seasons gets quite drastic for perspective. Obviously Edmonton has a lot better of a history in terms of winning great cups, winning one as recently as 2015, but even that seems like a long time ago now. So let's get into the game here. Quick little programming note. I think we're going to be on a sabbatical the next two weeks here hiatus. We are at the lake next week and then I'm going to be in Boston the following week, so I think we'll be back, right? Yeah, the 22nd, 29th. So I think everything considered, we'll be back August 5th. We do have our UFL college draft coming out this Wednesday. We'll be doing the recap stuff for that, the results when that all comes in, just kind of getting back on track now after I remember the rough start today. I really hate that anyway, but ruin our perfect record of a clean episodes here, hussy. But anyway, so probably two week hiatus, we'll be catching up with all that stuff, but I already have weddings next weekend. I'm missing the first few days of vacation, then driving out. I have to tell Dorothy, hey, we're doing the CFL recap, that might be bad. So we will do all that UFL, like I said, draft college draft coming up this week. So let's get into this. Like you said you were texting heartbreaking loss. We see all this come down and Boris and Tim's like Tim Capper is checking in here of course with the Boris Beatie boneheaded kick resulting in his team losing. Is there a history here? Jason? Is this over my head? Well, the last couple of years, Boris Beatty has been remarkably good, but prior to that, I mean he was the kicker in Montreal for a couple of years, I believe even his first year in Toronto, I think he was a little bit shaky. So I mean I always think about him as kind of like a wild golfer. You never know exactly where that ball's going to go. He's going to hit it far, but you just don't know exactly what direction it's going to go. And that kind of Boris Speedy's kind of returned this year in Edmonton and I can't say I'm surprised just because the luck of this franchise and the player that Boris Beatty has been in the past, but I was in favor of that signing. I really thought that that was a really good signing for the Elks. But the results on Sunday were really brutally missed a 31 yard field goal with a chance to tie the game. That was early in the fourth quarter if I recall correctly. And then obviously he had the kick out of bounds that set up the game-winning field goal. So rough night for Boris. Yeah, so all around here Edmonton played well. We saw Drew Brown really, I mean the interception here, but almost 500 yards through the air. We've talked and kind of the dinkin dunk and Drew Brown, he does have a canon on that. Were you more impressed with Ottawa obviously getting the win here or Edmonton on the fall trade? Well, it's hard to be too impressed with either of these teams just given the fact that both of these teams blew double digit leads at different points of this game. So in this game, Edmonton I thought was actually going to run away with it. They were up, I think it was 15 to three at one point in the first half they were driving. Then Jevon Lee Fumbles and Ottawa is able to come back and make it a ball game again and eventually they took the lead and went up by two scores in the second half and then Edmonton came back to tie the game. And then of course that's when Ottawa got the game winning field goal. So I mean, I'm not overly impressed by Ottawa to this point of the season. I do like what I've seen from Drew Brown. We saw this from him last year against Edmonton where he had a couple of huge games as a member of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. So I think that's a really good sign for him going forward. But I think at the end of the day, I just don't think that it was an overly impressive game from that perspective. But there definitely are some really good bright spots such as Khalil Peleton who made a CFL debut, a five foot eight receiver who's an absolute speedster, the type of guy that really just fits the CFL game. So really accept him going forward. So you look at it, they had three guys over a hundred yards. Not too often does that happen in any kind of football. So that's a really good sign for auto, but defense didn't look that great at points during this game. Do we lose Jason? So Want to see how they continue to look going forward. Yeah, we got John here checking in. Good to see you on Twitter, John, make sure you're subscribed over on YouTube here. We talked about, we got Chris Jones to par over that off the top, but we did get thoughts on that and obviously talking the game now. Yeah, it was funny because last week we were talking or I was the Ottawa lack of kind of a wide receiving room here. Obviously them coming to life right here, right? We've seen the researchers to Dominic gr. I will say a couple things. The walk-off win. I watched it many times last night on Twitter, obviously watching the game today, a little reminiscent. The Mariners lost to the Angels three out of four games over the weekend and they're one of the worst teams in the entire baseball, especially the American League. And that when they beat us, they had a walk-off home run on Friday night and it was a little bit of this celebration where we've won our World Series on July 12th or whatever it was. It felt a little bit like Ottawa, like we've won our great cup. Bob Dice was coming off the sidelines like Woo. And it was Lewis worth all that with the walkout field goal. I will say this, Khalil out dead, if there was ever God put this man's on the earth with this name to have Dustin Nielsen call him, right? If there is not Tennis running down the side, I was like, God is good to him. Where the heck has he been all year? He said, this is his first game, Dominic Rimes, we get rid of the Mel cartons, we don't need to find him anymore. But to me to get him involved here, Dominique Rimes, after we've talked about this for weeks, what the heck's going on with him and then this pimple, did he just get elevated up? What's the deal with that? Yeah, so I'm not too sure too much about his background. I know he had a very good college career, I believe as primarily a special teams guy, but I think the reason why he got into the lineup here was due to an injury to Braille and Addison. Braille and Addison, one of my favorite players. I mean this guy was the same jersey I have right now from when he played for the tcat. So obviously replacing him and that's how he got into the lineup. But yeah, super impressed by him and what he was able to do this week for Ottawa. Yeah, I mean he just like, where the heck was this? 480 yards with Chris Jones and all of that. Here we go, John Hopping over there. There we go. That's making the conversions today. That's what you call it, converting sales. That's what we do here on the mark. But no, it really was, and I mean besides the fact that Edmonton finally hear this receiving, I mean really, really impressive. Like you said, three receivers over a hundred yards on this. Yeah, injuries there, right? Ton taking over. But yeah, even Dominic, it's just crazy to me like Dom Rimes here, we've gone through five weeks finally here. Feels like he's woken up getting some play with that Drew Brown here. Are we higher on him now? He struggled the last couple of weeks here. What are you feeling about him overall? I think in general the arrow is pretty much up on him. I think that the accuracy I really like from him. I think he's willing to take enough deep shots down the field, which is really required in the CFL game with the limited amount of plays you have. I think you need to be willing to take risks and he definitely is able to, he's one of those guys that can really judge when to take risks and when not to, because you look at his touchdown interception ratio so far in his CFL career, it's definitely impressive. So I really do Drew Brown and what he's brought to the table so far this season. But again, it's against the elk, so I think that secondary is pretty poor in Edmonton, so we'll have to see how he does against the other teams in the league, most notably against the east because like I've said before on this show, that's usually where the red blocks have struggled the last couple years against Eastern opponents. So At the end of the day I think that's where we're going to look and see if we see that performances continue for Joe Brown, We saw some Crumb sanity in there as well. Getting that, I don't know. I mean to me Ottawa, I mean obviously the standings, I got that here and not, I mean alive here, three and two obviously Ottawa, or excuse me, obviously Toronto getting the win over Montreal. I see Tim is still a little chipper here, maybe not as chipper today with the ette, so we can talk about that. That might be an ascar, the Caleb Evans loss and kind of all that stuff. But I don't know Ottawa three and two, I am as high on Ottawa right now as I've been the last since we've covered this podcast. I mean hyperbole here. No, I think that's completely reasonable to think that because I mean this team has not shown much hope over the last few years, but this year it feels like, I mean you had that little blip last year when they had Dustin Crumb merged onto the scene. You had that mini two game run where you looked really good, but this year I think they've started off very well this week they have Edmonton again, so I think they have another chance to pick up a fourth victory here and that would be huge because I believe this team has not had more than four victories in a season since 2018. So I mean even matching that total in week seven, I think that would be absolutely huge for this franchise. John, we, we'll obviously talk BC Lions here. He says he was president at the Lion SA game, an entertaining match. I was filming the wedding ceremony in about 90 degree with heat on the top of a mountain. I had a wi and got a glass of ice water. I was holding it against the camera to keep it cool. It was so hot. So very different lifestyles that we had on Saturday would much rather been sitting on the couch watch that. But I watched that today. We'll get to that, but very exciting. I'm very high on the line as well with all this question. Do you think this Edmonton, do we get the new coach bump here next week? I mean that always seems to be, we see that even with hockey and everything else, I don't know because they're still kind of a garbage team. Do they get the bounce back win here? Well, I mean I think it's definitely possible with the way that they're playing. Like I said, they're not playing terrible football, they are being very competitive no matter who they're playing. I remember they took the ettes in now, I think it was week two, right down to the wire. So I think they definitely do have the potential to come out and get a victory here because like I said, I think coaching was maybe their biggest issue on this roster. So I think it'ss reasonable to expect them to come out and win, but they got to go on the road to Ottawa. Granted Edmonton being on the road is almost like a better chance of winning than being at home. But I think ultimately I think Edmonton probably should have a good chance of winning that game, but you can't really count on them. Yeah, I was just pulling up the schedule here. So obviously week seven here. Yeah, Edmonton going to Ottawa with a big SaaS. That could be, I mean that's kind of an exciting game. We'll do kind of the recap at the end, but you can tell the pre-production I doing this, what games are next week on here. But yeah, I dunno, just like you said, I saw the results, I'm watching the score, I don't expect it to be and then really a heartbreaker. I do want to talk through any of that before we move on to the next, that the punt out of bounds and giving them the field position and all those freaky rules there, The shock value of it was just insane. How is this keep on happening to this team? How did this team keep on? How do they keep on finding new ways to lose? I think that's the only thing I take from it. It's just mind blowing to me watching this team each week and seeing them find and invent new ways to find a way to lose the game. So I mean, like I said, not playing terrible football, but they're certainly not playing winning football and that's really what matters. All right, let's get on here. This to me, and I thought we were saying off the top when we were getting through all the technical issues at the beginning of the show, this was another really good weekend of football. I think to me this is really a really positive stretch here. I mean really throughout the entire course of the season, I think we talked last week, one of the games had kind of a slow start and they picked up, but here was another one. I thought the Montreal game, I mean all I think there were unique storylines to all these. I thought it was really kind of fun to be able to catch up on all this Today. Lions here taking care of business obviously with Shea Patterson, but big home win for them. Vernon is on the cusp of setting all these different records here. How did you feel? I'm still not totally all in on the Lions, I think some defensive issues with that. I'm curious your thoughts, but obviously here top of the west here, five in one and Sask obviously the mismatch of games and all that stuff, but what did you make in the Lions are really taking care of business here? I thought that, I dunno if it was a statement win because it Shay Patterson, but I mean this felt obviously Saskatchewan here four and oh going into the game. Yeah, for sure. I mean I think with BC they absolutely needed to win this game. This is a game that they really need to be like, yes, we absolutely are the better team. And yes, it's unfortunate that Trevor Harris did not get to play in this game because this could have been a really, really good game if he played. But I think yeah, BC is just showcasing just more of the same. I think for me, I think that really showcasing their strengths as a football team, Vernon Adams is just really on his historic pace as you alluded to. I think on pace for 6,600 passing yards, which would be I believe A CFL record. So I mean just incredible stuff so far this season from the Lions, I mean it's not a flawless team. I think that the running game could be a bit better at times, but that's not really their style and we'll see how that factors in when we get down into November in playoffs. But I think ultimately Vernon Adams is just playing so well right now that you're not really worried too much about other aspects of this team because the defense is still playing. Okay. I think that they haven't fully hit their stride yet, but with the offenses playing like this and Justin McInnis and Vernon Adams are just making it look so easy on a week to week basis. I mean Justin McInnis is on pace to break. Alan Pitts is receiving yards record for a single season. So just incredible stuff. I think that, like I said, it's just more of the same from the Lions from in a good way. I think that they've really showcased a lot of their shrinks as a football team the last couple of weeks. See now Jason, I get a lot of the pessimist and the glass half empty and reed's Mr. Negative and all that. But I do, I view the world. I view the world a little bit more cautiously optimistic. You could say a realist, you could say pessimistic, whatever. Yeah, this stat line, the Justin McKinnis, 14 to 14 for 2 43 is insane, right? I mean really, really insane. And God bless Nick Kowski, the friend of the program and working with Alliance and I see all his tweets and I just think that that would be so much fun to work for. The team would be involved in that and produce the things they do and really just, you talk about, I mean I call it the mark cast bump. Nick Kowalski was on our live stream a couple years ago. Matt Baker was on the stream. Nick Kowalski goes and works for the Lions and we have the Imar doman and everything and he's really, all signs are pointed out by, I take it at least 1% credit for all that stuff. But this stand back or 12 yards for 14 yards. Jason, we've seen this every year we've seen this. Yeah, it's great. July, what was the game? July 13th. Awesome. Not November 3rd or whatever that's going to be like. That is my concern. I mean, yeah, this is great. Beautiful day BC place roof's open, we're throwing the ball over the field, everyone, we don't even need all of our receivers. Do you need to talk me down? Do you co-sign that? Because that to me is the fear. Yeah, it's definitely a concern if they do not get the West Final at BC place. Now if they get the West Final at BC Place, I think they can lean on that passing game as much as they do right now and realistically think they have a chance of winning. But if they have to go on the road to it doesn't look like it's going to be Winnipeg again. But who knows at this point of the season a lot of time left. But if they had to go to Saskatchewan in November, the running game has to play a big role in getting a victory on the road there. So I think ultimately it really depends on how they do the rest of the season. Do they get that number one seat in the west and then ultimately only have to win two home games including the Great Cup to win it. So I think they have a chance if they can do that. But the running game definitely has not impressed me to this point of the season. I was not a huge fan. As I've said before of the Williams stand back edition, I thought they definitely could have went a different route. I thought that the guy Tiwan Mazel was pretty good for them last year. I think they definitely could have just rode with him this year. But yeah, ultimately I don't think that it's made much of an impact in a positive sense with the exception of that game against Hamilton where he was pretty decent last week. Yeah, I hate and I appreciate all that. Yeah, it's like as long as we have that obviously BC anyway, where the only team that plays inside and we have all that and the softness, and I remember last year when they were going to go into the West, was that the West whatever, where they were going into play Winnipeg and then they were practicing inside and all the media was like, isn't that crazy? They're practicing inside. They're like, well no, because we're playing, we're simulating crowd noise, making way more concerned about crowd noise than we are about whatever. And then I think Farhan was trying to do life hits from the field and they kicked it. I mean it was like this whole thing that, all that kind of stuff. I don't like that asterisk. I think it was Jar Goff, he signed his contract with the Lions. They're like Jaroff, whatever he plays when he plays inside, it's X amount better than when he plays and he's playing 14 games inside, whatever the crazy number was because obviously with Detroit and everything I'm like, I hate that that it's not all apples to apples. You have all these discrepancies and obviously Sean White even is the kicking game and was it he eclipsed Palm mcCal last week and now it was kind of extended that streak going. Well that's not the same as Castillo kicking in Winnipeg. I mean there's different, there's all these different, but this is just a recipe for disaster. I hate to be on the negative Nancy right here, but I'm very high on bc but this just scares the crap out of me. Yeah, I mean it's just a fact of football. There's some teams that play indoors, some teams that play their home games outdoors in cold weather. I mean I remember I was a big Peyton Manning fan growing up and he definitely could not go outside in cold weather and win playoff football games. That was kind of his Achilles heel. But when he got the games in Indianapolis and in Denver it was colder. But I mean in general in the colder weather games he didn't do well. But when he did get those indoor and warmer weather environments, he did have some success in the playoffs. So that's the way I look at it with the Lions looked like a drastically different team from last year with the exception of mechanics really taking that giant step and Vernon Adams just playing insane and maybe a couple of pieces missing from that defense. So I mean it's not a drastically different team from last year, so I don't think they're just magically going to be able to, if they have to go on the road in the playoffs and win, I don't think they're going to be able to magically flip the switch and do that. But like I said, I do think this team is on pace to be the number one team in the west. They certainly should be favored at this point. It's very early in the season like I said, but winning this game was a big terms of capturing that first place in the west and I think if they can do that, they have as good of a chance as any team in the CFL right now at winning the Great Cup. And they were talking that they went for the field goal at the end. We want to get all the points we can because whatever the aggregate, if we tie with Aaron Peace, Saskatchewan wins later and it's the time we want to make sure we do. I get all that kind of stuff. I really see them sending all these records and Vernon looks phenomenal and we threw for six, all that kind of stuff. And then whoever, Winnipeg or whatever, and we'll talk at Sask here in the second, kind of just boom boom, just kind of plow through and kind of exert their will that way. With Saskatchewan, one of the, I can't remember who it was, BC couldn't even tackle him. They had four guys hanging off him and they got it down within the five yard line, but I'm like they, they're just kind of a tiny team sometimes. They talked about that with the Cowboys last year and that's why the 49 ERs were able to just run all over them because the guys up front for Dallas were just so much more undersized and just the way that they were playing football really quick, just some breaking news, which is kind of exciting. VM Morley Scott, friend of the show, just talking to Edmonton here, Deeres is MBT is a starting quarterback moving forward will work to get trade forward on the field. So what the heck do you even make of that here just real quick and then we'll talk about Sask. Well I mean I'm kind of shocked that so far this year considering the success that Ford had last year that they didn't have some sort of forum to incorporate him into the offense. Especially with the way, and this is an under talked about storyline so far this year for Edmonton is the struggles of the running game with Kevin Brown. He just has not been the same player so far this year. And I mean getting Trey Ford in there just to run some option stuff I thought could help them really get that ground game going occasionally. So I'm kind of shocked they haven't done this already, but that Jarius Jackson is considering that going forward. We won't do any copyrights track here, but we do have Edmonton president here talking all of this kind of stuff. So very excited, just all this going down. I'm very excited to kind of live through that with the breaking news of it all here on a Monday. We don't always get that sask here. Paterson, no tds and one interception, AJ Alette I felt like had another good game, right? He's kind of coming up, I think it was last week. It kind of feels like we're getting a little bit of life fear going on with that and he had big hurtling and we're doing all that and he's just really exciting to watch when he gets ahead of team going. How did SAS look here? Because like you said, it wasn't really a fair fight with BC because we don't have Trevor Harris and maybe this game goes totally different, but how did you think SAS played here? Probably their toughest matchup this far. I think if you wanted to say, Yeah, I thought they looked okay, definitely not as bad as it could have went, but ultimately they just didn't put together the perfect game plan and I think that was what was going to be required for them to win this week. They needed it to be the perfect game script. I think they needed to win the turnover battle and they needed to play very well on defense, neither of which really happened in this game. And so too much was on Shay Patterson and Agio Ole and that offense to really carry the load and ultimately they just couldn't put enough points on the board. I mean I really like a couple of their players and their performances in this one Ole, as you mentioned, I think really coming on the last couple of weeks. I think that is a huge sign for them going forward, especially when Trevor Harris gets back to have that balance we talked about with bc. I think that is huge for Saskatchewan as well. And I think Sam Amli, I think we will talk about this when we talk about some of the other receivers this week, but this is kind of the year of the Canadian receiver when you look at Justin McCanns obviously on pace to set all these records. But I throw right into that conversation as well with Tyson, Phil Pot, so many great Canadian receivers in the league this year and yeah, Lys quietly had a thousand last year. So I mean this is a guy that is really looking, one of the better draft picks in the CFL in recent memory was a first round pick two years ago now I think in 2022. So really just had the one year of adjustment and then last year he really took off and this year he is doing more of the same. So I've been really impressed with him and what he's been able to do for that Saskatchewan offense, especially considering some of the quarterbacks he's played with the last couple of seasons. Yeah, it's kind of like when you got Tara McCory for the Washington Commanders and he's always on pace, really, really high in a thousand plus yards and you're like the quarterbacks, he's played with him. I mean he's a different quarterback every year, two, sometimes two or three quarterbacks every year with that. I will say, yeah, wait, Tian Canadian talent here is do the rash Madani come in here and take possession of Hussey's body here, Italian and Canadian talent. No, I agree with that. I think it's really exciting and I remember even with all that CBA stuff two seasons ago and Gerald Davis coming on to BM because all the ratio stuff and yeah, support and it's awesome and these guys and I was sitting about that today because obviously the podcast we're taking a little bit of time just off. There's not a lot of UFL stuff we're doing the college draft and kind of everything, but I would show anybody I know any of these four games this weekend, I thought that they were all, sometimes I'm a little Dorothy comes in, Hey, what's going on? I'm like, wow, got to catch up on this. Or maybe we had those Ottawa red black Thursday rain games where there's eight people in the stands and I thought all these games were really exciting, people are really excelling. I think it's GR Lewis said a lot of these guys right now, he said with Phil Pot for the Owlettes, all this other stuff really just kind of stellar work across the board. What did you make? And I saw Jamie Nye getting mad because JC Abbott had a quote from Corey Mays following game, they were happy they lost or whatever it was, and I posted the wink like, oh yeah, we're happy we lost, wanted to face that adversity. But I think there's something for that, right? I mean you don't want to go and obviously this wasn't sustainable and Trevor Harris and you're going to lose games in the CFL, but what did you make of that of, because I think this is good for SaaS. Like okay, we had a great start maybe Overperforming certainly, I mean not maybe we're certainly overperforming, but people thought we were going to be at this point, now we can refocus. What do you make of that? Yeah, I think it's definitely healthy to have that viewpoint. Obviously you never want to lose any game, but just to have that face adversity like you said and lose against some of the better teams in the league especially I think just seeing what they do well and especially I think how this defense was really kind of torched in this game. Obviously you don't want to see that every week, but I think that's a huge experience for even Corey Mace as a head coach because he's more of a defensive guy, obviously was a defensive coordinator with Toronto. So I think getting this look at this BC offense and having his players really face that adversity I think is really key for them as we go forward this season. Because the CF is a league of rematches, I think you play every team twice this year, especially this year time since 2019 where every single team you play twice. So I think it's going to be very crucial going forward for teams to be able to bounce back in these season series. So I think it's healthy for Saskatchewan to have that viewpoint in Corey Mace. I just think it's interesting, there was zero expectations on Saskatchewan at all, right? And then they come out hot and obviously the Harris injury and kind of all that and we'll talk Winnipeg here with that. But yeah, I mean I think Corey had a little bit obviously time coming in to kind of figure this out. It certainly has ingratiated himself enough now. I mean unless they totally fall off the cliff here, I think that they're feeling good. Anything else from this one? Anyone that we talked to? AJ and all of that bc, Justin, anything else from this one? Like I said, I thought this was kind of the highlight of the weekend. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit of defense here since we, as Evan always used to say last year, we don't talk a lot of defense on this show. Roland Milligan just a super impressive guy for the Saskatchewan Rough riders playing that cover linebacker position just always seems to be around the ball and I always love players like that. Just a playmaker back there in the secondary for Saskatchewan. Patrice Renee I think has had a really good season so far for BC being used as a blitzer, another one of those DB kind of hybrid guys and then Sean White, I wanted to mention because, and this kind of goes for kicking around the CFL in general except if you're Boris Beaty this week in general, the kickers have been lights out so far in the CFL with the except first night where Castillo missed those kicks with that chipped ball. So I think the kickers definitely deserve a shout out. Well and yeah, they were really, at least in kind of the highlights I saw today, really giddy about that. All the announcers really kind ting that as well. And it is, I laugh sometimes like oh there special teams in the kick returns and all that kind of stuff. But I mean it's super impressive and I mean Sean White, we talked doing the indoor thing with obviously setting the beating Paul McCallum's record friend of the show and Canadian Hall of Fame member and kind of all that stuff. So certainly exciting to see. Let's get to, this was a shootout and it kind of finally felt like Winnipeg figured out how to score here, right? Calero finally get a couple TDS here, RA 109 yards on the ground really. I mean this was back and forth, a lot of turnovers. What did you make of this one? What stood out? I think Ontario Wilson is the first thing I have to say and I think that is the huge difference for Winnipeg in this matchup because last week I think I said on the show that what's missing is that Zach Claris does not have much trust or didn't appear to have much trust with the newer guys in this receiving corps now that Lawler's injured Sean's out for the season, they needed somebody else to step up into that void and become a guy that gets a high volume of targets. And Ontario Wilson certainly did in this game, made a couple of spectacular catches. I mean obviously the numbers speak for themselves, 13 receptions for 201 yards and a touch. So really excited to see what he does going forward and if he could continue this trend of really, I think he had a pretty good game the week before and then this week he really broke out. So really happy to see that for him. Brady Olive, Oliveira really starting to get going as you were saying, Claris not all the way back yet. The numbers are really good. He did have those couple of interceptions, there were a couple of missed opportunities as well in there. So I don't think the Winnipeg blue bombers are all the way back, I would say, but I think definitely trending in the right direction and at least they're picking up a couple of wins here and staying right in the thick of that playoff race in the west division. As much as I kind of wish that Winnipeg would take another loss here watching the game, and I'm like, yeah, at first I'm like, oh, Calgary, did they really kind of fall apart here? And did they really? Did we overhype them? I thought Calgary played really tough here. I thought Calgary played pretty close and Mayor had him and Zach both interceptions back and forth and there was the blocked to punt ride. There was a whole lot of different kind of things going back and forth really felt in the mix for a while there. It is interesting that you were talking about Zach kind of learning to trust new receivers and we had the injuries at the beginning of the season. You do see that, right? I have to build a new relationship now with some of these guys to put them up and we're seeing that now. I don't know. I was thinking, watching this game, there was the meme, the guy whispering in President Bush's ear and it's, sir, they hit the, it's a nine 11 meme, so it's not always funny, but Julio has kind heated up here for the Mariners finally, and they let Julio get hot like, Hey, we let Winnipeg wake up here. It felt like they're really, like you said, they probably not all the way back, but I mean this looked like a totally different team than they were the first couple of weeks Certainly. And they were the previous week when they got their first win of the season. So I mean they're definitely trending up, I think. I'm trying to think. They have Saskatchewan coming up this week, so that will be a big test for them. I think Saskatche one, so I mean that's going to be a huge game for them. A lot of emotions run high in that one always when those two teams get together. So if they win that game, they're three and four and they're almost getting on the verge of a racing that four starts. So I mean it's the blue bombers are coming back from the dead here, but I think with the veterans that they have, it's not rising at all. I definitely didn't think that this team was going to ever be a team that was in the CFL standings or even next to last in the CFL standings. I think they're at worst going to be that last team that makes the playoffs in the league. So the things are trending up for the blue bombers. I did laugh, I'm forgetting to talk Sask. And then just obviously because talking Winnipeg going in there to play because they had the big, the melon, whatever, the melon smash, the watermelon, the Saskatchewan and all that, and were BC was buying up the watermelons and Carolyn Cody with the lions postage, she's like, oh, all the lemons, all the watermelons are sold out here at Costco. Like whatever. And I go, to be fair, I don't think those inbreds from Saskatchewan can afford the Costco membership. I don't know if that was them there. I think the BC is probably, to me, the BC Lions, that clientele is a little bit more Costco membership than Saskatchewan. But regardless, yeah, a big game here, a big game Winnipeg going in. Yeah, like you said, they win here, they're right back in it. And now you still have Patterson and we talked about this with Sask and the injuries and all that. I don't know if Winnipeg, if they're able to replicate again now and take that final step. It's like in the Mummy, I just rewatched those movies where he has to eat the hearts out the people and then he comes back to halfway through the movie, then he regains all his strength. I feel like that's Winnipeg here. I feel like they're coming back to life here from the dead. It's cool. I hate to see it, but it's exciting. Yeah, great. In season turnarounds in the CFL after teams had slow starts. I mean everybody always alludes to that BC Lion that started oh and five and ended up winning the Gray Cup. But there've been several other teams that I think it was 2017, there was a year they started oh and seven and they almost made the playoffs. So I mean there's definitely a potential in such a small league to have dramatic in-season turnarounds. And we're seeing just that from the Winnipeg Blue bombers, it does appear. How did my boy, our boy Jake Mayer do here, Dietrich Mills obviously, excuse me. Great game. At least getting some yardage there we go. Back and forth with Jake at three 16 here getting moving the ball. How'd you feel he did? Jake Mayer is just a tough guy for me to really break down because I mean wanted for him. I mean, I've seen some good things from him in his CFL career and you saw this in this game. I thought that he made several good throws in this game and led this team back a couple of times where I really thought they were dead. I think Winnipeg had a 10 point lead right before the half. It looked like Winnipeg was about to blow the game open. And then Calgary scores 10 quick points to tie it before the how. I mean, it was a very exciting game. And N Jake Mayer definitely had his hand in it, but he also made a couple of really brutal throws. I think he had a pitch that he threw to Dietrich Nichols in this game. If I recall correctly, Dietrich Nichols also deserving a shout out. He's an excellent defensive back, I would say is the best defensive back Gordon, the CFL over the past three years. But yeah, Jake Mayer, just a mixed bag yet again from him. And like I said, I'll keep going back to this point. I think that it's the upside with him that you just don't, and you see that with other quarterbacks. I think with him you just don't see that athleticism to move off the spot and extend plays and make any kind of crazy throws down the field. I think everything kind of has to be in structure for him to succeed. It kind of has to be schemed up. And again, I'm not really seeing the trust in the coaching staff in Jake Mayer in terms of being able to push the ball down the field on a consistent basis. They really only do it when they have to or when they can really catch rise early in a game. So I think I'm still kind of muddied in terms of what I feel about Jake Mayer going forward or how I feel about Jake Mayer going forward. I think that he's shown enough to continuing the role as the starting quarterback for this team, but in terms of being a guy that's going to be able to push this team forward and win some of these crucial games against some in the west of it. I just don't see it right now. Yeah, it is a weird thing where, and watching Vernon especially so athletic, and I know he's always athletic, but it really seems like now he's really got that balance of being able to make throws connect, scramble when he needs to. And I'm constantly amazed watching him and just Vernon's, I mean, at least in my perception, not a large man on the field and the strength that he's able to kind of throw and deliver when he's running is really impressive to me to watch as someone that could not ever do any of this at all, does not have in ability to do that. And like you said with Jake, where he just lacks that athleticism needed and I don't know, is it more the Beau model that they were trying to do? And Beau isn't necessarily the most athletic guy. Yeah. It just seems that there's that missing and we're still kind of learning the CFL game. Here I am, my American people, whatever. But Vernon to me is that perfect mix of that where it seems like Jake's on the other side. Is that the game this week? I mean I know we've talked to Vernon already, but just so impressed. I'm like how is he able to throw it that far running how he is just really, really impressive stuff. But yeah, when you talk about Jake a total kind of different story there. Am I on the same page, sir? No, for sure. I think I would even compare him to how Zach Claris looked in this game. I mean, Zach Claris has had to this season this year, but some of the throws he made in this game, you could never imagine Jake Mayer making. I think there's been several ways where he ended to play and was able to kind of chuck it down the field falling away, like you were saying with Vernon Adams. And Zach has made those plays fairly consistently over the past four years in Winnipeg. So I mean, I've been incredibly impressed with what he was able to do in this game. And when I look over on the other side of Jake, Mary just doesn't have the qualities. And yes, like I said last week, I think he has the ability to be the sixth best quarterback every single season in the CFL. But what does that get you in a nine team league? And I think that's ultimately where I'm at with him. Yeah, I think we're starting to see the ceiling there. I think he's got a high floor. I don't think Jake is necessarily going to come in and bomb anything, but I do. Yeah, I think that there's anything else with this game. We'll touch you. The last game we'll get out of here. Yeah, I'll give a couple of shout outs. Trey Roberson, he actually had a really good game in this one. Used to get a lot of takeaways, a lot of interceptions back in the day, I think it was 2019, he led the CFL in interceptions. He came back to the CFL two years ago, but hasn't really been a guy that's generated a lot of plays in that regard. Hasn't looked the best the past couple of years, but had a couple of big interceptions, really nice interceptions in this one. So that was good to see. Dietrich Mills had a really nice game for Calgary, a couple of huge runs in this one where it was really a crucial point of the game in terms of keeping the score close and getting Calgary back into it. Castillo, as I said, with the kickers before, he's had an excellent season after that first rough game. So I mean just a bunch of guys that I think deserving of Shutouts And I think Castillo right, his one miss was super far anyway, it was one of those where I wouldn't necessarily count that against his stellar performance. No, not at all. Let's get over. I was kind of surprised with this. So this was Thursday and I can't wait. What the heck was I even doing on Thursday? Had a wedding consult and stuff. So catching up on this game, I'm like, oh man, Montreal loss. Okay, Cody's out hamstring. Is he good? Right? I think is he going to be fine moving forward? And then we kind of had the Caleb Evans show here. Feels a little bit of an asterisk here in terms of the Toronto win. What did you make of this one? It was, I think you could take it a couple different ways. Well I think, I'm not too sure about Cody Fido's conditions. I'm not too sure if they've given us a full update on the extent of it, but it looked like a hamstring injury really was grabbing the back of his leg as he was walking off. So hopefully he's all right because obviously he was playing at an excellent MOP type level before his injury. So yeah, I agree with you that there definitely deserves to be kind of an asterisk with this victory for Toronto, but you can only play who you're playing. So I think at the end of the day, Toronto did a really good job at taking advantage of the opportunity that they were given. Jane and Grant I think was the biggest standout for me in this game for Toronto. I mean he had a return touchdown in the first half and that was right after Montreal had scored a touchdown to make it a significantly closer game and then immediately right back to the end zone for Toronto. So that was an absolute huge play and I think the game was ultimately over right before halftime when he did that. So I think ultimately Caleb Evans didn't do enough to really get this team back into the game in the second half. Toronto's defense played exceptionally well I thought down the stretch and really shutting him down. And I think we did get to see Davis Alexander come in for that last series for Montreal. So we'll have to see if Fdo misses any time. If he factors in going forward, if it's him or Caleb Evans. It is worth noting that Caleb Evans did start a couple games for this team last year and did win both of them. So that's worth noting. So it's going to be interesting to see how Toronto does going forward. They have Hamilton this week, can they continue their dominance over the Tyca? Because Cameron Dukes, he had a decent game. I would say he played a very clean game in this one, but he wasn't really asked to do a whole lot. So if he's asked to do a whole bunch in a game again, he was last week in Saskatchewan, do those turnovers start to pop back up? But ultimately in this game he was very clean. Yeah, whatever happened to that two headed monster with Nick Arbuckle that we were promised last week? See how that word down here? No, but I agree. I mean, shoot, last year, I mean Cody was hurt and we were talking like should Cody play anymore? And then Cody comes back and wins the Great Cup. I mean Caleb is a pretty decent backup here I think to come in where I think he's able to move, use them for more of the running shorty yards. But I think he can throw it and make things when it counts. I don't think the team's going to fall apart that way. Yeah, the Judean grant, he had a, if I don't break the web here, had a kick return last week too, right? For a touchdown and then got one this well this week. Really impressive there. I think he's the standout, like you said, really when you felt like, oh my god, Montreal is getting the momentum here, comes back, shuts it down and gets a return and kind of slammed the door on that. Didn't feel like they had any other opportunities after that. And I mean Jan Grant, I'd go a step further in saying, this guy is one of the best returners I have ever seen in my time watching the CFL. I'm right willing to put 'em right there in the conversation with guys like Brandon Banks, Chris Williams, guys like that, that have was really dynamic returners from the time I've watched the CFL. So I mean he was a guy that was signed late in training camp I believe, or just before training camp. So what a signing again for the Argos. And another signing I wanted to point out is Kadeem Carey, he looks really good, much more similar to his 2022 self than what he showed last year in an injury riddled season with Calgary. So I mean a couple of really great offseason additions for Toronto and kind of buying low on those guys after a lot of their key guys from last season left in free agency. So I think that's huge for Toronto going forward and this is still quite clearly a very talented football team. Last thing here, Tim says Davis Alexander should get the nod over Evans if Cody's out for any period of time, we'll have to see the injury that way. Any thoughts on that before we get out of here? Well I know that Tim and Cliff have been very high on Davis Alexander. I've listened to their podcast the last few years. They've been very high on him and they would know better than me seeing them in practice all the time. So I mean, I would be willing to see 'em. I think that Caleb Evans, he has a solid floor at the CFL level. I think we've seen that. And he has started games dating back to 2021 when he broke into the league with Ottawa. But I'm always willing to see a new guy get a chance that quarterback in the league, and especially a guy that has stuck around and bought his time on the practice roster and worked his way up the depth chart. So I would be pretty happy to see him get an opportunity as well. We'll get out of here now. It should be exciting. What was I going to say? I had something fun. Oh, I was going to, at some point I'm going to get a recording of some air horns on my phone and I'm just going to play it constantly when I talk about the ette so that you feel like you're at the game. I was going to do that. I did get the intro rebuilt. So that is next step and we'll, I'll have that hopefully by the fifth and we come back on because I just want to be able to hold that even if I do other shows, I want to just like, okay, we're at the ette game anyway. So that'll be my goal, Jason, working through working under Dress today stick. Appreciate that. Like and subscribe, give the video a thumbs up. Obviously the CFL stuff, not doing as great as the UFL wish. Have more people like it, subscribe, share it, all that stuff. We'll be back on August 5th, we'll have the UFL college draft this week. Anything else that breaking? We'll talk through that. Jason, anything else before we get out of here? No, I think that just about covers it and let's put this one to bed. Enjoy. I think it's the home run derby tonight, so we'll enjoy that. No mariners of representation, very sparse for the All Stars this year. So we'll see everyone next time. Stay safe.

CFL Week 5 Results + Reactions! Winners and Losers From CFL 2024 Week 5!!

Well that was almost a disaster. Almost played the old intro music, which would've gotten us even in more trouble than the new old stuff. I need to update that here Jason. That'll be my game plan here for the week. Welcome Jason. CFO. Week five. Coming off everything. Busy Weekend, Canadian American Sports. We had the 4th of July, a real real holiday here. I enjoyed them singing the national anthem. I think I saw for the Thursday game I caught up on a lot of the games today. Wins and losses, all that stuff. We'll get to everything. Jason, hot Bedroom, second floor here. I'm outside. Didn't even bother showering before this one. No excuses today. Jason, how are you doing? Doing good, Reid. Thanks for having me as always and excited to talk about the games this week. Yeah, I need to redo the intro here. We have a new logo and then programming note. I don't know if we will have a Friday episode here for the next couple of weeks, just news wise. We'll do the recaps here. I'm enjoying that. I just don't know if they're like, do I track down Rob Vanstone to do 20 minutes on the Riders and it's pretty dead in the UFL, so I don't know. We'll see. We'll work through all that. There's big breaking news, but we have a couple of vacations going up. I got 'em going to the Boston to watch the Mariners here coming up. We're going to at the lake house here, not our lake house but a rented lake house in a couple of weeks, but talking through stuff today, Jason, the Mariners had to lose, so the Toronto Blue Jay is for the BC Lions to soar here. That was my talking point. You were at that game. We'll get through all that. What was your thoughts? Weird weekend here because it's not really a Canadian holiday and you guys had candid the day on my birthday and didn't play a game and then you play on the 4th of July. What did you make here, the four games over the weekend? Well, I mean it was an interesting week definitely. I think in terms of the first couple of games, there was a lot of quarterbacks that we haven't seen a ton of over the last couple of years. Shea Patterson getting his first career CFL start. That was interesting to see Cameron Dukes continuing to get his feet wet as the starter in Toronto and he kind had a little bit of struggles in this game we'll get to and then Friday obviously with Reer versus Drew Brown and then Drew Brown got injured and we got to see Dustin Crumbs. So that was one thing that stood out about the first couple of games of the weekend and then Saturday we had a great game between Calgary and Montreal and let's not talk about the last game of the week. Yeah, Jason, I was in a really good mood here. I was watching the game, it was my wife's birthday, she was taking a run and then we were going to go to dinner, so I was watching the Mariners game and then we were up huge on the blue. Jason, that's really competitive series and everyone loves to come down and we get all the Canadian fans and we didn't go that we were out of town for the fourth, but normally we're here for at least one of the games and you get all the Blue Jay fans coming down to take a number, which is the weirdest thing. I was trying to explain this to my wife. We watch the Mariners at T-Mobile Park every week. So if I'm at the game, I'm not getting into a dueling chanting match against you that's coming into our house for two or three days, you know what I mean? I'm here all the time. You want to get 15,000 people to come down and do it, so you do. It's like heavy blue Jays and we're cheering all that stuff and then the Blue Jays came back and we lost it in extra innings. We should have won it. Luke Raley would've had the, it was rule, the ground rule double we lost, but then oh boy, the BC Lions made up for that against the tie Kats, you sent me that over. It looked little like at least you guys had fun pre-game right before the game started. You had a music act, everything. What was going on there? It seemed like it was the fun sight and sounds. Oh yeah, for sure. So before every game this year the tie cats, they redid the whole end zone there. So they have a new stage and then they reworked where the concessions are. So there's this big area where they're having pre-game band play every home game. So yeah, it's a good atmosphere. It gives another reason for teams for people to come out that are more of the casual fan and I really enjoyed myself for that part of the game yesterday. Yeah, I Am trying to update the bandish here. Let's see if that works. So there we go and then we have Tim checking in here. Go Alice. Go. I will say, and I saw a tweet over the weekend and I do think we haven't touched on this enough this season. I know we've had a lot of the punts and I was on the CFL this week or whatever on the CFL TCAs network. We were talking a lot about the punt rules and all of that. Ettes home games, unwatchable, unwatchable with the sound on. There's too many fans now. It was fine when there was like eight, 10,000 people there and the owls were kind of meddling. Okay, we're rebuilding and we have, okay, we firing people and whatever else and we're bringing in whatever, excuse me, now that there's like 24,000 people there, whatever it is, unbearable. Unbearable. Get it off tv. I need an alternate audio feed because it is totally overwhelming. I was watching the highlights again today, says we cut win cut, good for them. I mean heck of a crowd. I mean I'm seeing stories of Michael Ball talking about this. Regina have a CFL attendance problem. Certainly not Montreal right now. I mean that was a hot, hot game and we'll talk about that, but I mean Ettes look like the hottest team in the world right now. I mean in any football league. Yeah, for sure. I mean one thing about the attendance that I've always hypothesized is that Toronto, BC and Montreal are always seen as the three struggling CFO markets over the last 10 years ever since I started touching the CFL. And my hypothesis is always that when BCA and Montreal have good competitive teams, the fans will come back and I think we've seen that, whereas Toronto, I don't think it really matters. We've seen them with great cops in there, they've had some really good teams and they haven to really got that big attendance boost as a result. So it's really good to see the fans returning in Montreal kind of to the glory days when Calvio was there. Yeah, so no, I mean we make fun and Tim, Tim, we can watch it in French. I mean do they translate the air horn sounds? I mean I think it's probably the same film whether you're it's in American English. I will say though, and just while we're checking in here and Jason messaging me really enjoying doing the recaps this year, I do as well. They're not really performing as great as I would like. So if you see these thumbs up the videos like it do the algorithm stuff that way if you see 'em on Twitter, thumbs up, you see 'em on Facebook. This is like I said, this might be all we do here for the next couple weeks and I really like it as well and especially like I've said before in here, the later Monday where I can really recap and kind of deep dive, Mondays is coming here with a lot of stuff because sometimes even when Pat and I were doing the US FL like Monday recaps, I'm like okay, it's like seven in the morning, it's eight in the morning Pacific. Okay, what's going on? But I do feel like I come in here, shots ready to go here, so I appreciate that. But no, Tim and everyone checking in, Chris and everyone else but thumbs up the videos like all that stuff, but I appreciate that. Join the channel 99 cents a month doesn't cost you anything. I appreciate that BC here on top of the world safe Saskatchewan had what they got to buy here so far, so 4.0 we'll talk Saskatchewan here, we'll get to the BC game first, but Saskatchewan in the west, a wild scene here for the last couple seasons at least for this podcast covering the CFL. Yeah, I mean it's been really interesting to see, especially now that Trevor Harris isn't out there, how they would adjust and I think the defense really stepped up for them this week, so if that trend continues and they can sneak a couple more wins in here before Trevor Harris gets back, I think and we're not completely sure when that's going to be. I think that's going to be huge for this team. I still like BC to finish first in the west going forward, even though they are behind the standings right now, but I think Saskatchewan's very well positioned Well and that was the thing, I mean this week I'm trying to get pull up the schedule so I can look forward to next week. It felt almost like a mulligan, right? Okay, Harris is out, what's she Paterson? Let's see how Shay's doing here. And we joked and I was on the CFL this week and everything else about wow, he was in the USFL and kind of his duty and then coming up here, he really didn't even have to do that much. I mean it really felt like the defense and I don't want to get too deep dive into that right now. We didn't feel like he had a phenomenal game here. It felt like the Saskatchewan, the defense really kind of took care of business. Well I think the key thing is that he didn't make mistakes. Unlike Toronto's quarterback Cameron Dukes who kind of unraveled down the stretch with all those interceptions. So I think Patterson, he was shaky to start this game. I thought that. I was like, oh no, this game's going to go by the wayside pretty quickly for Saskatchewan. But he settled in and ultimately didn't make those key mistakes. Yeah, no, I think Cameron Dukes was like, well people want me to be Chad Kelly, I need to fill in for Chad Kelly and I need to throw a bunch of interceptions. That seemed to be the game plan. Cameron Dukes was coming in doing all that. Yeah, just looking ahead here next week. Big game here. Riders at, and I know the bc, I think Matt Baker was tweeting out, they're opening the upper deck and the watermelon and bowl and all of that stuff. I mean that should be rocking next week. I can't imagine. Especially Saturday four o'clock here and we don't have the Thursday seven o'clock game or whatever in Vancouver. That's got to be, I would have to imagine the game of the week, right? Well Toronto Ette, I don't know. This week looks pretty good. What's your game of the week? Just early thoughts here. I would go with Calgary and Winnipeg just because I think it's one of those games that can really pivot the standings because Winnipeg wins that game all of a sudden. They're third in the west and they're right back on track to kind of be in a playoff team this year. But if Calgary wins, they can bounce back from their poor second half showing against Montreal. I think that would be huge for them going forward and really kind of burying Winnipeg in the standings. Yeah, I was going to say I forgot to, yeah. Hey, congratulations Winnipeg, you won a game. That's great. That's great. Better than Hamilton. Yeah, Jody checking in here. Jody's a member. We always read your comments if you remember a BT look, dominant Sask looked average trying looked like garbage. Yeah, lots to talk through here. Let's get to, we'll go in a reverse chronological order here. Like I said, Jason was, we were watching the Blue Jays and then we go out to this game, I saw, what was it, Nick Kowalski tweeting that Vernon Adams, if he continues playing at this clip as like 6,700 yards and all these crazy accolades, I mean Vernon's having a heck of a season. We had sand back, kind of had his coming out party here. Bo didn't look terrible, right? I mean it's just the defense here. I mean Bo throws from was 400 yards. You got to figure that's a win. You were there in person. What did you make of this Make this? Well, I do think the stat line for Beau is a little misleading because a lot of those yards came late in the game, but I can't really blame him for this loss because this game was over by the end of the first quarter really. I think Calgary, or sorry, BC had almost 30 points a few minutes into the second quarter and at that point the game was pretty much over. I think this was one of the worst performances I've seen from a defensive secondary in the CFL in quite some time. I mean all credit to BC's receivers, but they were getting wide open for some of these touchdowns and which is very disheartening to see as a Ty Cat fan because we've seen this movie before with Mark Washington's defense. I've listened to other Ty Kats podcasts, they've said the same thing for the last couple of years. The play calling has just been two conservatives on the defensive back side of things. I think they play too much off coverage and then I think at the end of the day they haven't been able to get that secondary, whether it's the pieces or just the scheme. I think it's been a big problem for the tie cats of the last couple years and it's really coming to a head this year and I think it's going to cost 'em the season I think Oh and five, yeah, we'll talk about the oh and five BC Lions that went on to win the gray Cup all you want. But I think ultimately I'm almost ready to stick a for in this team. Yeah, like I said, I was watching the game and then we were going, Dorothy, we went out for dinner last night, so I caught up on a lot of this today, but I'm getting the messages in our group chat like Andy Murray's basically like Vernon and Justin McKenna are just playing catch out there. This isn't even really a competitive and yeah, like he said, a lot of why I like seeing Stanback kind get involved early. We've talked about that kind of his slow star, I don't know, 14 for 82. Are we seeing maybe more of him catching the ball running in for that touchdown? You saw that with James Butler as well, kind of figuring out different ways to use them. I don't know, is stand back doing enough here now? I know we were down on the side, him coming to bc, are they utilizing him better now? Well I think the thing with him is I think that later in the year is going to be more of the true test when they get more into those cold weather games and having to rely more on the running game. I think this team is really designed to be such a lethal team early in the season with their passing attack and that we really saw that early in this game. And I think with stand back, that one play, that touchdown that he got that was one of the most wide open I've ever seen. A running back going, just running a fly pattern down the sideline. It was quite ridiculous on the part of the tie cats defense but stand back. Yeah, I think this was the best game we've seen from him so far with BC he is getting a little bit better each week more accustomed to that offense. So I think you're going to see some good signs there, but I'm not really all in on him just yet as being really the big difference maker that a lot of people thought he would be when he came to bc. I would agree with that I think and I was at that, what was it, the Winnipeg bc, the one before the big playoff whatever or whatever to figure out who was going to have first place in the division last year. Yeah, BC and BC place and Vernon's sitting there and we got all the weapons running out there and kind of digging to diving and then we go to the IG field and the semifinals or whatever and RAs running through and the BC defenders are just hanging on him trying to six people just trying to get him to stop. And I thought that that really encapsulated kind of the difference of the football and I think that's a key, you point that it is one thing to put 44 points on the tie Kats here in July. Yeah, it's another thing to kind of do the same thing in Winnipeg in November. I think that that's an interesting point. We will have to see. I mean early on this is great, but I mean I'm glad BC took care of business against Hamilton. I mean to me that's expected, right? Shouldn't be the expectation. Not the exception to be able to come in and do that. Does BC do more for this win or are you as high on them as you were before? I think it just really showcases their ceiling. I think when they're playing at their best is the highest ceiling and with all due respect to Montreal, the highest ceiling offense in the CFL, I think Montreal's defense is certainly better than BC's, but I think in terms of the offensive firepower that they can throw at you, I think BC is definitely the best team in the CFL and we really saw that in this game, McKenna and Hollins, what a duo we're starting to see early in this season with those guys. Those guys are going to have crazy numbers by season's end and like I said in this game was a great game for them to rack up the yards against that tight cats defense And Keon Hatcher, right? I mean still waiting for him to come. I mean this isn't even kind of the full suite, the talent that BC is going to have. Yeah, Most certainly. And I think, Oh, go for it. I don't have anything. Yeah, I thought that, sorry. Yeah, no I think that hat are getting back and I think that is going to be sooner than we thought because I think they did say that TJ Lee and him are practicing already, so that is a really good sign for bc. You talked about here, so misleading stat line here, Bo with the three tds here, Butler not doing the ton right? Obviously he had the one receiving touchdown for that. Oh and five, like you said, they got to play the rest of the season here. What do you do if you're Hamilton? I mean I really don't know because unless they make that change at defensive coordinator, I think that is really the obvious move. But I'm not too sure if they're going to do that because I believe Mark Washington and Orlando still the football operations head in Hamilton are very close and he is kind of stood by him for a number of years now. I think he's been the DC since 19, but the defense has got progressively worse I've been saying and I think that would be the obvious move, but I don't think they're going to do it. I think they've already moved around the secondary and mixed and matched the pieces that they're starting back there. So I think ultimately they're running out of options in terms of what they're going to do because I don't think they can really expect much more out of this offense. But the defense has just been so bad so far this year and the special teams, they made the coordinator switch a week ago, so I don't know what else you can do in that regard too. So I'm struggling for answers for this team right now. Yeah, mean they took the big swing here and remember going into last year and we're going to do all this with Beau and mean the injuries and everything last year and then now you have what I guess what you kind of envisioned this to look like and it's just not enough. I was looking at the standings here and obviously Montreal is kind of in the league of its own here and then you have Toronto and Ottawa and I would certainly be higher on Toronto right now than Ottawa and we get your thoughts on that, but I don't know, like you said Hamilton Owen five here, anything can happen, but it seems like they've really dug their hole here on the east side. Yeah, for sure. And I mean if they had won this game, which I kind of had a hope in my head that Hamilton would be able to pull this one out and miraculously win this game because the last couple of years they've won a couple of games against teams that they were total shockers. I mean they beat Winnipeg a couple of years ago when Dane Evans threw those five touchdown passes. They beat BC last year when they went to BC play. So I thought maybe they get one of those games. They have all the motivation in the world being oh one four, but ultimately they just didn't show up to play once again in this game. And like I said, I'm getting quite tired of it and a sad story to pass along, it was in the Hamilton Spectator, there was a guy that was dealing with a lot of chronic illnesses and I'm not just sure what illnesses he was dealing with, but he had multiple surgeries throughout his lifetime and he decided that he was going to medically end his life and basically he was a lifelong Tigercat fan. He said, I'm going to watch this last game on Sunday night and then I'm going to assisted dying on Monday. So just really sad to see that be the guy's last game and I was kind of thinking about that story as the game progressed last night. That's crazy. Wow. I've glad at least honor his life and everything else and being the fan and I do think the CFL does a good job of that and we've had certain tragedies kind of involved in the C Ffo family at least in the time that we've been involved in this. And I think the league and certainly the riders never went involved, always do a good job of talking about some of those fans In terms of the last thing I had on this game and just to veer heavily into my comedic timing here, but the Gray Bull I thought was an insane decision and I don't know whose job that was to do and I love the Made in the Hammer tie Kats, I love all that stuff and that branding that was like their alt jersey they rolled out last year, right? The dark gray and all that. I love that. But you can't have the fog away jersey with bc. We needed to talk through that. That was interesting. Yeah. What an oversight by the CFL. How did they not see? How did nobody step up and say, look, this is going to be a pain in the butt for the broadcast to show two teams wearing essentially just two different shades of gray on the field and literally the BC's the only team in the league that has a gray away uniform, so they could have done this game against any other team, any other home game this season for the Ty Cats, but ultimately they decided to do it against BC and yeah, just a weird form matchup. I would like to see, and I know this isn't necessarily the BC Lions is more of the burnt orange kind of their branding and I have the jersey that the people gave us, but we have the Seahawks have their action green, that's the Thursday night Green, they play around and I love it. You get a lot of people that are like, this is sacrilegious, hey, it's either you're talking about it whether you like it or not. And I wish that they had that just like a bright orange, like a traffic cone orange. You have the blackout, the fog's. Okay, I like that. Oh, it's the fog that's our away color. But then I wish they would have that an alt, just not the burnt orange, just like a traffic hazard light orange I think would be really cool for that. Jason's shaking his head with not a fan of the Action Green. Yeah, well not a huge fan of the action green. I find it just kind of like a blinding kind of shade of a color, but I think I would be on board with a color rush set of jerseys for each CFL team. I think that would be fun and maybe you could feature them on the Thursday nights just like the NFL does. Last thing about this and we'll move on. I was going to say just like you said, you thought that we've seen BC drop games and this is the thing while Winnipeg is injured here and presuming and we will get to Saskatchewan, I do not think Saskatchewan maintains this clip the entire season. Happy to be wrong about that. And if Corey Macs is the greatest first year coach in the history of mankind, that'd be awesome. But you, these are the games you need to win. You need to win these right now, build your league because with Winnipeg and somehow Palpatine's returned or whatever, we need to be able to get this going. So I like that. Taking care of business, I was scared like, okay, we're going to go in here, it's a Sunday game, it's a long weekend and then we're going to lay an eggs. So I'm glad to see anything else on this one. I know it's kind of like PTSD to have you go back over this Hamilton loss. Anything else on this one? Well I think for BC I think the biggest thing is consistency. Just like you said, I think we've seen this team lay an egg times before the last couple of years when they've had a very good team. So I think yeah, consistency is the biggest thing for this team because obviously when you see games like this, their ceiling is just so high. All right, let's get to, and I guess we're going to reverse course here. This one, and you had texted me, this is a wild game. We were coming back from the lake. I caught up on this one today. Al Letz almost blew it, right? Almost whatever came back here against the Jake Mayer, Tommy Stevens kind of experiment, four Calgary, Cody, a couple of interceptions here. He had a couple of big runs. What did you make of this, the comeback and ultimately put the game on ice? Well, my first takeaway with this game is that it was very, very physical from the onset. You just saw so many big hits. There were so many short yardage plays where the offensive linemen move the pile. It was just a really physical game. And Calgary came out in that first half and really matched to Montreal and even exceeded Montreal from the physical aspect of the game. Tommy Stevens, he was a monster in the first half of this game. I mean he had the one shorty yardage play where he ran around the outside to Nathan Rourke and ran for 40 yards. And then there was another one where they faked to go in short yards and he threw a pass and there was also other plays where he just won those matchups, just like I said, moving the pile. I think Calgary did a really good job early on in this game and I think they came out with a pretty good defensive game plan as well, but ultimately they couldn't maintain it in the second half. Montreal's coaching staff had a lot of great second half adjustments. I think offensively they really just got cooking in the second half. FTA was something like 15 of 16 in the second half or something crazy like that. They just had no answer for them and ultimately Montreal was able to really get back in the rhythm and come back and win this game because Calgary's offense really couldn't get anything going in the second half. Jake Mayer, I mean really to support this guy at this point because I think he definitely can be the sixth or seventh best starting quarterback in the CFL on any given year, but what's that really going to do for you? I just don't think he has much upside because he's not willing to push the ball down the field. And it's apparent that Dave Dickinson when he is calling this offense, doesn't really trust him to do that. So I think at the end of the day, a very disheartening performance if you're looking for Jake Mayer to show some promise this year. I mean look, 106 yards is not going to cut it in any level of football, let alone in the CFL when it's more of a passing league. So I think at the end of the day it was a very disappointing performance from him, especially because they built that first half lead and ultimately had a 14 point lead at one point. Yeah, Tim Capper is really just living the best life here. I have five in the outlets have wanted to shake Ricky Ray Ham Post came in Montreal Hospital. Tim just says just drop kind of stuff in there. Tim live the world here. Yeah, I dunno. I agree with you. The Jake thing, it's just season started out I thought we felt good on Calgary. I thought Calgary played hard. Jake was pushing the ball. He wasn't. But yeah, you see this 18 to twenty eight, a hundred six yards. It is insane. I don't know, it's just such an insane difference here. I don't even know what you, Cody, 35 42, 3 74 2 and two Jake's like a third of everything. It's just a really weird kind of dichotomy they have here with Calgary. I just don't know. And we talked about this before on the podcast, we know Ryan coming on with three down and what's the expectations this year? Calgary was the playoff team, but I don't think that's good enough. It doesn't seem to me that just making the playoffs kind of limping in isn't any good here. I mean obviously Calgary is not going to make any changes here, but it's weird because the NFL you get eight or nine teams are fine just kind of being middling with just like, well, Derek Carr is our quarterback and we're going to win five games and we're going to be fine. Because there's just so many teams that are like, I don't know if you can do that in the CFL and go year after year with Jake Mayer here if that's, but I don't know what's the alternative. I mean he's playing well enough. I mean you can't really bench Jake and be like, we're going to bring in someone else. What would you do if you were Calgary? Well, I would certainly still ride it out this year unless he gets to a certain point where you want to see what Matthew Schultz can do. But ultimately I don't think he's an answer either. I think he's proven to just be a guy that you start for a handful of games and that's about it. But yeah, John Hodge put out something that I definitely agree with. He said that Jake Mayer has evidently regressed every start this season. He had a very good game against Hamilton week one and then against BC looked pretty good. The numbers maybe were a little bit deceiving in that game. And then week three he didn't have as good of a game against Winnipeg, they still got the victory, but this week he really cratered down to earth and we'll have to see how he bounces back as they have Winnipeg on the schedule next week. Yeah, I dunno. Like I said, I like Jake, I think he's a good guy. It's one of those you're telling me, do you go to Shilts? We're going to talk Argos here. And they're like, we need to go to Arbuckle. It's like, okay, we know what some of these, yeah, and then we'll get to that. He's like, we know what some of these guys are. You know what I mean? We know what some of these guys are and it's like, I dunno, I'm a commanders fan, we got Daniels now they're bringing the Mariota and that's fine and he'll be a backup and obviously with Oregon and number one pickup, all that stuff, but he comes in, you kind of know what he is at this point and I don't know. Yeah, if you go to Shilts, I am kind of in a loss for words with this Christian's saying you got to start Shilts. But we've seen Shilts, right? I mean I feel like you have a big enough track record than both of these guys at this point. Yeah, for sure. And I think another thing with Shilts is that he is very injury prone. So even if he has some promise that he shows, I think he's only going to last a few games. That's really what he's shown throughout his CFL career. I mean I take it from personal experience seeing him in Hamilton the last couple of years. I mean there was times where I wanted to buy into him as being the full-time starter here in Hamilton, but every time I did so it looked like he was on the injured list. So I think at the end of the day, that's one thing MA has shown in the CFL career is ability to stay healthy and get through the grind of A CFL season. But at the end of the day, I just think the upside is really lacking with them and it's becoming very apparent week after week. Yeah, Jeff here checking in that totally agree about the horns too annoying. You don't need those horns and you have big numbers. Yeah, again, it's outweighing the people that are there in attendance for the millions that are oil chain or high hundreds of thousands of people that are watching online. That to me is, I dunno, I think you have to prioritize that, but we've seen the CFL with that forever and I remember even when they had the covid, what was it coming off of? Covid, we couldn't bring certain things in and you could only bring, I want to bring in the air horn. You can't bring in the air horns. I dunno, I think your money's tied up in TSN if Tim said you moved the mics on the field with everybody. I think you got to prioritize that It's a bigger audience if you got half a million people online or on TV watching versus 20,000 there, I think you got to make that priority. But that's just me. I've said that before, but I think it's pretty crazy. Yeah, I mean they don't annoy me as much, but I can certainly see how it would be annoying for some people. I think I saw something on Twitter X and somebody was saying that they've sat behind the person with the air horn before and they said that it wasn't nearly as annoying in person as it was on the broadcast. So that that's really interesting I thought and yeah, I think the CFL and the TSN can do something about this. Yeah, I liked how we had, like I said, we played the Blue Jays here this weekend and I would say all three games, the officiating was subpar and I mean obviously it seemed to be more towards the Mariners, but it was subpar regardless of whatever, watching the games. The umpires were not great in the tri zone and I like saying that they were on the metric system and that they needed to bring in American umpires to get that back on the imperial system. I thought that was funny. Ettes here, undefeated greatest team in the world here at this point continue to look great obviously I think was on the broadcast, what they say, they've only trailed whatever for five minutes the entire season or whatever, but having to have a comeback is cool and all that. What did you learn, if anything, from the outlets? Well, if anything it just shows that they can come back in these style of games. I mean like you said last year you rarely saw them when they were winning games, coming back from deficits. And I think this is a team that has proven now that they can overcome deficits like that because when you're trailing in a football game, as we all know, it's much harder. It's a different, it's really hard to attack a defense than it is when you have a lead or it's a tight game. So I think at the end of the day it's really impressive what the alouettes have really transformed into the past couple of weeks. They've kind of turned into this juggernaut passing attack. All of a sudden, Cody chardo all the confidence in the world, look at the amount of rushing attempts that this team did. And a lot of that was due to them trailing in the game. But I think when they passed the ball 42 times and they only run the ball what 12 times the entire game. I think that shows you the confidence that Cody Fido has now in year two in this Jason Moss system in Montreal. And I think at the end of the day, so many guys are playing well for this team right now. Walter Fletcher, like I said a couple of weeks ago, looks like an upgrade on William stand back at the running back position. I just like what he can do as a receiver to the backfield. His ability to hit the home run I think is one of the best running backs in the CFL at doing so. Tyson Philpot guy gave a lot of credit to Cliff for that prediction in the preseason and that guy looks like a beast. He's really breaking out this year even beyond the player that he was before. So a lot of credit to that team and what they're able to do and they certainly look like the best CFL team at this point. Yeah, no Phil Pot because what was it? It was Julian Grant's first touchdown, right? They were saying because Phil Pot had had obviously came off the hot start there and even into the opening game. I want to develop a trust scale in terms of what we have with the teams here. What would I trust the CFL team, the mantra Ettes, we could be out of the country, you could stay at my house, watch my kids, watch my pal. I have total trust in the outlets. BC lions are like, okay, maybe you could stay at the house, you could use the microwave, but nothing flammable, right? Nothing with gas. I want to develop this trust. What's the trust scale here, right? Because I mean even when the outlets are down, because like I said, I was getting the score updates, we were getting back, I'm outlets are going to come back and win this game. I mean there's no chance that they lose this game at home to Calgary. I just have complete trust in them right now. Really just impressive to see. I mean we've, he praises on all of this before. By that I'll have to figure out who's my least trusted team here. Maybe by the end of the show we'll figure that out. I don't know, it's Hamilton. I mean Hamilton might, I dunno, would Hamilton burn the house down? Jason might say that. I might. No, don't leave there. Don't burn your house down. But yeah, Tim's second year. Cody checked last 12 or 12 and 10 to 10. I mean Cody's on top of the world. I've said this, I've said, Cody winning the great cup, life changing, legacy changing. You're in the history books, you bet on yourself. It proved right. Sports is half talent and then half of it is mentality and knowing you can do it. I mean we saw the Mariners not to bring it up again, but we know they have the capabilities to hit the ball with people on base. We had bases loaded the last three innings we lose to the blue Jays five to four. I don't think that's a talent issue. I think that's the mentality of we can't hit the ball right now issue. And so yeah, I think Cody is on a different level. Anything else? Highlights for the outlets or low lights for the Stampedes? I don't know. I mean whether two and two here, right? They have the, they're in the west. How are you feeling? I think calories all right. Yeah, I mean you can look at it. Glass half empty, glass half full kind of thing. I think they've looked generally pretty good the first four games, but ultimately they didn't win those key games against BC and Montreal this week against the two best teams that they played. And I thought, like I said, they played those teams pretty well and competitively. But I think, like I said, the upside of this team and just you don't trust this team to close out games. The last couple of years I really, confidence has really waned in them compared to what it was a handful of years ago. This team was the organization, like you said, in terms of the trust meter, they would be at the a hundred percent trust them, they're going to come back and win any every game. And I think at the end of the day, I don't really trust Calgary at this point to be anything more than that average playoff team that probably gets knocked out in that west semifinals. So I think at the end of the day, that's kind of where I expect this team seasons to go, Alright, let's go in here. So Winnipeg, oh my God, we finally got a win here. The people don't have to throw trash on the field, run out of the field, kind of all this stuff. Injuries, right? Drew Brown wasn't great. We got some sanity. I mean Ottawa really didn't do much of anything. Just ran the ball everywhere, right? Kind doing it. That Wayer interesting player, right? I think it's the easiest job to be the backup quarterback and waiting and you came in, but hey, I mean Reer got the victory here. I saw at least the highlights I was seeing we're tucking running, we're tucking running. And that's what we kind saw when he was a pre-season with the Jets and things. And I think he's good for that, but I think it's a lot of, not panic, but just like, okay, I'm running the ball here. And that's the difference between someone like Chris and maybe Zach or Zach's playing. He's viewing the field a little bit more, be able to throw it that way. What did you make of STR coming in here, getting the win? Well, I mean this game was one of the first games this season where I was watching the first half and I was like, man, this is an ugly football game. I thought this was a tough watch the first half, but ultimately it did get better as the game went on. And I think with Winnipeg what they discovered, because they had some struggles offensively in the first half. In the second half they really leaned into that athleticism St. Struggler and they said, screw this traditional kind of passing attack. We're going to go and take advantage of Stre row's legs and really feed the ball to Brady Vera and really get him going. And both of those guys really had excellent games down the stretch of this game. And ultimately I think Claris apparently is only going to miss the one week. I think I saw Darren Balming say. So I think at the end of the day, they didn't win this game and that's really what matters. And then for Ottawa, I think that this is a very big missed opportunity for them because I really wanted them to show me something in this game. I really thought that this is a chance for them to make a statement and say this team is different than the past couple of years and going on the road and sweeping Winnipeg this season, but ultimately with Winnipeg looking shaky early on in this game, Ottawa didn't do anything to take advantage and it was very disheartening even when Drew Brown was in the game. We'll get to that, but I think at the end of the day, very disappointing to see from the red blocks in this game. So they're the weakest receiving group of any of the teams in the CFLI would not say. I think when you look at them on paper, this team is pretty good. They have some, they're one to four receivers I think have all produced well in the CFL in their careers. But yeah, I think Dominic Rimes has been a disappointment so far in his return to Ottawa, which is kind of baffling to me given the seasons he's had the last couple of years in bc. Justin Hardy's looked pretty good. I thought he's kind of been their go-to guy early on this season. But yeah, I wouldn't say they're the worst in terms of when you look at their best receivers, just one to four in the league, but I would actually even say Winnipeg with all their injuries is arguably the worst right now. But I think at the end of the day they're just not getting enough production. They're not generating enough big plays. They running games, doing very well. This season I call Armstead was a really nice find for them in the running game, but I think at the end of the day, unless they get that passing game going, it's very hard to win games consistently in the CFL. But like I said, it's still early in the season and I think we have seen enough good things from Drew Brown, assuming he's healthy going forward to continue seeing this experiment play out. Yeah, I dunno, I don't know if Lan or whatever is the guy, I dunno just to me when I watch, and to me Ottawa is still just the most confusing franchise of, I just don't really know what their identity is and we want to, okay, at least now, okay, the riders, we play good defense. As long as you have a quarterback that doesn't throw the game away, we can kind of be in there and maintain all that. And obviously Winnipeg, we saw Willie Jefferson kind of finally wake up this week and realize he's a football player and be involved in that kind of stuff. But just, I don't know, to me Ottawa, there's just not enough there where you have, we saw the Cornelius experiment, okay, we're going to have a subpar quarterback but surround him with a bunch of good receivers To me, I don't know, to me, excuse me, brown, we're still trying to kind of figure what he is. We don't have a number one receiver just in my opinion. Obviously you can disagree with that, but I dunno, to me this is really kind of the meddling team and I thought we thought they were going to be different this year coming in and certainly not. And obviously the injuries did Cru Insanity didn't run wild. Did he do anything to earn anything at this point or was it just break glass your injury? We got to play him. Yeah, I mean he didn't really overly impress, in my opinion, the first play he came in, I believe it was one of those, a complete lateral throw, swing pass off to the left and it was ruled a fumble and that ultimately took points off the board for Ottawa when they were in field goal range late in the second quarter. So that was a bad start. And then he had a strip sack from Willie Jefferson who looks a lot better the last couple of weeks after a slow start to the season for Winnipeg. But yeah, I think Crumb still looks more like an athlete than a passer. That's how I would describe it. I think he's a guy that you still see that potential for those big runs down the field. But I think at the end of the day you have to be teams from the pocket and make plays with your arm in order to win games in this league. And I don't know if he's a guy you can really trust, but it's really hard to tell when you're thrown into a game mid game like this. I would have to see him start a couple more games like the goal games that is to get a better read on where he is in year two. But I think at the end of the day, yeah, they're better off rolling back with Joe Brown. I don't think there's really any quarterback controversy at this point. No, and I agree with that. Where rum was kind, he came in, it was crazy, and then the next week it's like, oh my God. He's like, he running through everybody and then the next week then they kind of figured it out and they're like, okay, we're shutting this down. I think that's the same thing with St. Traveler. I don't think this is a sustainable over the course of the season. I mean he can come in and give some challenges and he can throw the ball, right? I mean he's going to make some passes, but obviously not anything out of the park, but he's kind of the same to me, that's a run first. Then if I really need to, I'll kind of survey the field and figure that out. I mean this gift for Winnipeg really, really would've kind been a disaster start of the season here. Had they done enough, you saw Calgary everything. Do you think Winnipeg's on the upswing here once Calleros comes back or is it back kind of the same? It was like he was lighting the world on fire before. Yeah, I do like their chances to make the playoffs, especially with how Calgary's been looking. I think the teams out east, other than Montreal all looked pretty shaky to me right now. I think we didn't really we're going to touch on it when we talked about the Toronto Saskatchewan game, but I think Toronto's starting to look pretty shaky the last couple of weeks and they do not have a very easy schedule coming up. So we'll have to see how that plays out. So I do like Winnipeg's chances to make the playoffs, especially with that game against Calgary next week. I expect them to win because Claris will be back and I think that game's in Winnipeg as well. So I think ultimately they will probably get that win and get back on track, leapfrog Calgary in the standings. And I think of the day if they make the playoffs, because in 2019 they were the third place team in the West and they ultimately went on a big run to win the Great Cup. I think as long as this team makes the playoffs, they're always going to be a threat considering all the veteran pieces that they have. And if they can get healthy down the stretch, that's a good sign for them. But like you said, not firing on all cylinders by any means to this point of the season. Yeah, I mean think honestly, I think this week six, I mean this Ottawa Edmonton game, just to see if Edmonton can get their life together here and can do anything. But I mean the other three of these games, I mean sst, bc, I know you want to see Winnipeg and everything else with that, but I mean this is a good, can Toronto figure this out here going in Montreal hosting again, I thought that was odd that this was, I think they said the first week that Toronto had been on the road and I know they had the bye week and all that, so that was kind of weird. But yeah, I mean this should be exciting. I don't know, Calgary, you had your shot here and Winnipeg was bleeding a little bit. Like you said, if Winnipeg bounces back over and gets the win and leapfrogs them there. Anything else from this one? Anything else from Crumb or Brown Reer? Anything else with Winnipeg? Yeah, I'll give a couple of shout outs to players. Like I said, Brady Olive Oliveira looked much more like his 2023 MOP level self last this week for Winnipeg. I think Willie Jefferson starting to show a lot more signs of being that impact player on the defensive line. They definitely need him. Winnipeg's defense in general is looking a lot better the last couple of weeks. Devonte Deadman kick returner for the Red Blacks really looking like his old self. I mean he's had a lot of injuries the last couple of years, but when he's in there in terms of all time returners that I've seen in the CFL, he's right up there in terms of the ceiling. And then Deandre Lamont, who's a defensive back for Ottawa, I think he's had a couple of really nice games for the Red Black the last couple of weeks. Well we'll see here. They got to figure it out. Let's go last one and then we can talk through anything else here before we get out. I predicted this was going to be a homicide. I predicted the wrong quarterback here where I thought that she Patterson was going to get Sha Patterson was going to get eaten alive. Fine. I mean defense really kind of carried the day on this one. Dukes four interceptions, like I said, the top wanted to do his best. Jack Kelly impression with that and know Mike Mitchell had an article already out today for Sports Illustrated that Didn Whits taught Coach Jim Whitty is talking about, oh, we need to do a two-headed quarterback monster here. We need to play more than Nick Arbuckle. Can we see Brian Scott here at all? Why are we going back to Arbuckle with this? What did you make? I guess first of all of that, Duke's really falling apart. We're seeing Arbuckle there at the end. Thoughts on kind of the Toronto quarterback. Has Duke's had really been on top of the world here for the first few weeks? Well, it's interesting because in the first half I thought Duke's made, and throughout this game I thought he had a handful of excellent plays that he made. But ultimately it was the mistakes late in this game that really cost his team. And I think that's really what it comes down to in football sometimes. I think that Shea Patterson, like I said, did not have a very productive game in this game, but ultimately he didn't make any of those mistakes. Whereas Cameron Dukes, I think three of the last four Bris or something like that in the fourth quarter ended in an interception. And ultimately that's really what did Toronto in. And I think going forward, I think this is a team, and I hate to say it, I hate to even bring 'em up, but this team's going to miss Chad Kelly. It looks like there is quite a step down from Chad Kelly going to Cameron Dukes as we really expected going into the season. I know Dukes has looked very good. He definitely has the makings of a guy that has a future in the CFL. I think he definitely has the mobility and maybe not the biggest arm in the world, but he can throw with timing and rhythm. And I think he has shown some ability, but ultimately he's still very inexperienced and I think we just didn't see any gains like this from Chad Kelly last year other than the East finals. So I think at the end of the day, we'll have to see how he bounces back from this. But ARB buck was not the answer. I do not want to see Nick Arbuckle on the CFL field. I thought I was honestly shocked when they signed him in training camp, but obviously he has familiarity with playing for Brian Dinwitty before, so I guess there's that, but he's just not an exciting option. I'd rather see them go trade for Moli or somebody around the league. So I think at the end of the day, our buckle is just not an exciting option at all. I don't think he provides this team with any more upside than Cameron Dukes already does, and I think at the end of the day it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out with these quarterbacks in Toronto. I mean the thing with Chad Kelly is does he come back, minimum nine game, right? He was kind of in training camp, we had the whole thing and he was on the, we did all the kind of stuff. Did he come back and then it takes three, four weeks to really get up to speed and then we're going into whatever the heck that would be through September. I just don't know what's the learning curve on that to get him back up to speed and having not really played any football since last November. I dunno, I'll be curious for that. For Saskatchewan here, Shea Patterson, right? I was looking at Harris out for at least another five games, right? Is Shay, they're five and oh here. I mean they're playing BC next week. I would be, I dunno. I guess what is your thoughts on that game? Because I don't see Patterson beating BC right with his arm, even though BC's defense is kind of shaky, ast, we've seen that. So I guess what do you see from that one? Because that to me is the two test here to be able to replicate it two weeks in a row. Well, what really comes down to is that defense for Saskatchewan, I think that they played really well in this game and I think especially down the stretch with forcing all those turnovers, I think that was really the key in this game. If they can do the same to Veon Adams, who is really on top of the world right now. I think I'll due respect to Cody Ferdo who's playing incredible football right now, but I would have to say Vernon Adams right now is the best quarterback in the CFL and I think that's really the key defensively. If they can keep the points low force some turnovers against bc, I think that's what will give them the best shot because if this game turns into a shootout, I have no faith in Patterson to be able to keep up with the BC Lions. I think at the end of the day, Saskatchewan has a lot of pieces on that offense that I really like, but they haven't really been able to fully unleash a jette so far this year. He's gotten lots of attempts. I believe he leads the league in Carries or it's around the league leading Carries, but at the end of the day hasn't been able to put up the best efficiency in that regard. And then the receiving core has a lot of talent, but you have to have someone to get him the ball and I think Patterson is, until we see more from him and more consistency and more upside, I have no trust in him to do so. Another shout out, I wanted to give Tamara Alford here for Saskatchewan special teams really coming into play, right? He have the pun return right with him. I'm making that up. And then Corey Mac was dabbing him up on the sidelines, seemed really excited for that. Seeing kind of the players coach without, I mean Cory Maces has a really good thing right now. I mean five and oh Rider. Are you surprised him finding such early success here coming in? Well, I mean it must be noted that Saskatchewan did start pretty well the last couple of years and then fell apart down the stretch. So we'll have to see. But Cory Mac had been really, really impressed early on this season. Like I said, I think there's that belief in that team. I saw them when they came to Hamilton, they were down two scores late in that game and they still believe that they can come back and win. But like I said, I think going forward it's still all about the health of Trevor Harris because Trevor Harris is healthy. I think this is a top three team in the league and they've shown that so far this season. But you have to have that passing game element in this league to be able to keep up with the best teams. And I think, yeah, if they don't have that going forward, I think that is really what's going to doom them. But ultimately, so far so good four and oh and we'll have to see how that plays out in terms of the quarterback situation going forward. Yeah, just surprised that we talked about this with Shane and everything, but having the older quarterback, the older immobile quarterback in injury history and that you'd have Shea passion here, and I know he's been in the league a couple years now, but still pretty green and I just don't know, did you keep Al, I mean to me this is the big glaring thing right now and you got to at least deal with this for another five weeks and then God forbid Harris comes back and then you got to keep them healthy. I don't know. I mean really impressive right now with how Saskatchewan's looking. So obviously the quarterback is the biggest thing in any of this, but just in spite of all that, for them to be playing the way they are just stinks here that they got a backup that we solve so many questions in. Yeah, it's insane how they went into the season with maybe not insane, but it was very interesting that they decided to go in this direction at quarterback cut Mason, fine, don't bring back D La Gala and go with Shea Patterson, who's kind of guy that's bounced around in the CFL, think he was with Montreal, I think he was with BC if I'm recalling correctly, a couple of other teams. So I think it's really surprising to see a guy like that ultimately win the backup job, especially because you've seen him in other leagues and not overly impress you. So I think at the end of the day, like I said, I haven't seen anything from him yet to maybe fully buy in to say, oh, this guy could be a player in this league for a number of years. So I'm really waiting and seeing with him still. So here for the trust factor here, Saskatchewan, their defense, if I'm at home, maybe the defense can kind of hang around, can hang out and be a part of me. They can party like Toronto. I might be here getting ready to change the door codes. I might be ready to keep them out. I got to be, I don't know. Are you less down on Toronto here after this loss or are you just like, we really, but I don't know, it's not even the Chad Kelly, like we're waiting another week or two. This is half the season I guess. What's your welfare check on Toronto right now as we go into week five where they're playing with the Montreal here over the weekend? Well, I definitely think it's gone downhill since the first couple of weeks of the season I believe. Yeah, they started two and oh, now they've lost the last two. Montreal on the horizon on Thursday do not like their chances of going into that environment and winning that game. So I mean they're looking at two and three. They got Hamilton the week after Hamilton has a bye week this week and then finally, but what you call it, yeah, I think Toronto is going to have their hands full the last next couple of weeks and as long as this quarterback situation's kind of shaky right here, I think they have a really great rest of their team. I think I have no doubts in their talent level of this roster, but I think at the end of the day the quarterback position is just so important and if he's going to play like this and if they're going to throw Nick Ruckle in there, do a two quarterback system barely ever works out. So we'll have to see how it shakes out and the next couple of weeks are going to be very, very crucial for them. Yeah, I don't know. I mean I know Mike had, and I read and shared this article and I know that there's, I don't know, I mean D Witty isn't one to panic and I know he's frustrated. I think they called it an, it wasn't like an embarrassing loss, they called it. I tweeted it out, they called it like a frustrating, do I even have it here still demoralizing, demoralizing turn. That's what it was. So I would co-sign that, right? I would, it was a demoralizing loss, but I don't know if you cut bait on, Dukes just looked so good here the first couple of weeks and maybe it is just SaaS coming in there. I don't know, looking forward and then we'll round out here, just a couple of minutes left. Toronto, Montreal here. So I dunno. I see BC defense taking business against Patterson. You think Winnipeg over Calgary and then who you got is Edmonton. Are they finally able to get the win here against Ottawa? That would be scary otherwise. Yeah, I think Edmonton finally does get it done there, but I've been wrong about them before and I think especially them coming off the bi-week, they really have no excuses. They have the desperation. They've looked pretty good in pretty much every game this year. So I would like them and I think they've in general looked better than Ottawa so far this season despite the record. So I think at the end of the day, Edmonton, I would pick to win that game, but don't have much confidence in that. Do you think that, so now, I mean you're pretty on part or on point though. Hamilton's the worst team in the league right now. Yeah, I think you have to say it just because the defense has been so bad this year and it's just shocking to see how bad they really have been. I didn't think the defense for them was going to be any kind of world beating defense going into the year. But to see them play at such a low level and to see the offense shockingly surpris in a good way so far this season and still be oh and five after five weeks. I think it's just really demoralizing at this point. And could be a long season in Steel Town. Yeah, it's like there's a thing for the Mariners a lot where there's the three switches and okay, if you're hitting good offense and one of 'em will turn off, right? It's like, okay, starting Pitching's good, bullpen's good, but then we can't play defense here. It's like offense is good, Bo Levi's healthy defense is terrible now just Hamilton just can't seem to kind of get it all together that way. We'll see, like I said, this should be a good weekend. I had John Lewis friend of the show complaining he lied, he's watching old movies this summer. There's no football to watch. I'm like, you'd rather watch Terminator seven or whatever versus the CFL right now. Let's watch some CFL if you want to do it. I mean they've been good, but I appreciate it. Like I said, like and subscribe. We'll figure out, we'll be back at least to do the recaps at least next week. And then that might be a questionable there. The 22nd and the 29th we got Lake and then we'll figure it out. We'll keep you. We might take a little sabbatical here, but Jason, I appreciate it. Anything else before we get out of here? No, I think it was another great week. Another great recap and let's put this one to bed. Yeah, BC I would've liked a better game against Hamilton. I mean I wanted to win but I didn't want to win. But it didn't make me feel any better about the Mariners loss. So if that makes you feel any better, I was still equally upset that the Mariners lost. Yep. Baseball season full swing. They're in first place right now. I don't really keep up with baseball too much right now, but last time I checked the standings, the Mariners were in first place in the division. Right? Immaculately Somehow Immaculately. Yeah. Somehow Palpatine returns and somehow immaculately. We are still in first. We'll see you guys next time. Take care.

XFL 2020’s Oliver Luck Talks UFL Merger & Spring Football’s Future!

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast Reid here. Well, here we go. Teased all week, big time guest, big time interview. Hope you guys feel like I delivered today, former XFL 2020, commissioner Oliver Luck, as well as many other accolades. Long form deep dive interview today, over 50 plus minutes with the former Spring League commissioner getting his thoughts on the new UFL merger spring football landscape right now, the future of spring football. Everything else. Super insightful interview. Hope you guys enjoy it. Like I said, a long time with Oliver Luck sitting down and spending his Saturday morning for us on the podcast. I hope you guys enjoy. Please like and subscribe. If you're a new viewer on here, I've discovering this video, please subscribe. We're trying to get over 4,000 subscribers ahead of the UFL 2025 kickoff, working on a new giveaway for that. That will be a story for another time we will get into, but if you are a returning viewer on here, maybe someone that doesn't always check out the program, maybe you don't like me, but you want to hear what Oliver Luck has to say, make sure you subscribe. Please give the video a thumbs up, share it if you see it. Doesn't cost you a penny. A lot of work going into this and time getting this tracked down and set up. So I really hope you enjoy, like I said, a lot of work and Oliver is spending his Saturday morning educating us, filling us in on all of his thoughts, us as the listeners, viewers of the program. So really appreciate that. Like I said, like and subscribe, let you get to the interview here. We will see you at the end. Thanks. Well, if you had it on my bingo card that I would be talking to all of luck this week, I would not have believed you, but here we are, former commissioner XFL 2020 and those as many other accolades here, NFL, Europe, everything else. Oliver Luck sir. How are you doing? I'm doing well, thank you. I'm very, very happy to be in your podcast this morning. It's good. I've been teasing a couple appearances. I have this week big time guests. I would say top five we've ever had on here. We've had Randy and Bros of the world and everything else, but this is a big time. I mean that really appreciate that we see, I'm short team, mutual friends setting this up, talking today we're wrapping UFL 2024. I saw you in the news about some of that stuff. I thought this could be good. First off, just we're here Saturday morning, you're drinking coffee, we're talking, how's your world? How's everything going? My world is great. I live in Colorado. My wife and I live in Colorado and I'm fairly busy doing a number of consulting projects, traveling probably more than I really want to, but life's good. Cannot complain at all. Well, good. So we're here, like I said, saw some of the comments that I think our listeners as well as many people, I think if anything, view XFL 2020 and what you guys did there with everybody from top to bottom, everybody involved. It really kind of the pinnacle and we were talking before we recorded save Covid probably would've been really the high point of what people expected from these leagues. Just to start out, what aspect of 2020 were you most proud of here, looking back now four years later almost? Well, I think the thing that was really most important to us as an organization, and we've focused on it a lot, was coming out of the gate strong in the sense of good quality football. We thought that we had an opportunity sort of coasting off of the Super Bowl, as you may remember, unlike the current UFL, we started the week after the Super Bowl and there's still a buzz in the American football community in this country for football because you've gone through a long college, a long NFL season that culminates in the Super Bowl, the most watched television event in the history of the world I suppose, or at least the history of North America. And we thought there was real, real value in gliding off of that in the wake of the Super Bowl kicking off the season. The critical thing in my estimation was we wanted to make sure we had good quality players games coming out of the shoot. I was at the opening game, which I think was in DC if I remember correctly, the DC defenders, and I'll never forget, one of our players that I was really hoping would step up and play well was Cardell Jones, the Ohio State quarterback won the national championship with the Buckeyes and he was at dc Pep Hamilton, whom I know very well was the head coach there, and it was the first quarter there was a play action, slow developing crossing pattern for the DC team. Cardell play action drops back and there was a guy running the sort of diagonal route, 25 yards down the field. That's a tough throw because your receiver's running away from you on a death. And I remember thinking, oh God, I hope Cardell makes this throw because the guy had a couple yards on the defender, said, I hope he makes this throw because this is sort of what every NFL quarterback would make that throw. And he did. It was a beautiful ball caught 28 yard pickup or whatever. But I remember thinking, okay, that's the kind of quality that this league needs coming out of the shoot. And we more or less had that, right? Not every game was perfect the first couple three weeks, but I thought we had really good quarterback play, which to me is absolutely critical for the success of any league. We had good quarterback play, we had good special teams play, people noticed those things, right? Punts, kickoffs, field goals. We had of course the new rules that we had put in with the kickoff and people sort of enjoyed that, but I think I'm most proud of the work that all of our folks did, coaches, Doug Whaley, Sam Schwartzstein, all of our staff that worked on this. Eric Alco putting all of that together and coming out of the shoot with good quality football. Were we the NFL? Of course not, right? We don't have Pat Ma Mahomes playing or Tom Brady or whomever, but I was very proud of that. In another live maybe I'll tell you, we did a, after the season went down and we were podcasting, we needed some content and we ended up getting a cameo from Cardell Jones and we ended up making a promo out of it and got a kick out of basically sending him the request and I think about six minutes later, he was in his car filming it and sending it over. You could tell Cardell didn't have, I mean everything had shut down. Side note before I forget, thoughts on the kickoff here with the UFL, not using the kickoff, the NFL thing, just while we're speaking about the XFL rules. Yeah, I can't speak for the UFLI wasn't involved at all with any of their discussions, so I don't know why they decided not to do it. I thought when we did it, I thought it was brilliant, Sam, much of this was Sam's idea. We started from a pretty basic premise and said to ourselves, let's make the kickoff more interesting because it's basically at the NFL level, at least it's been taken out of the game, right? Every kicker can, you could put 'em back at the 20 yard line and they'd kick it out of the end zone, right? They've become that good and we thought that it was an exciting play. I had visions in my head of Billy White shoes and the old Oilers running kickoffs back. It was just an exciting play, but it had been sort of neutered, if you will, basically taken out of the game. So we decided let's play around with some thoughts about what a new kickoff could look like that would keep the kickoff in the game, but also would respect the running full speed concussion problem. The kickoff was clearly the single most significant play in terms of concussions, so we wanted to be respectful of what the NFL was trying to do, which we fully agree with, which was reduce the number of head impacts or at least the potential for that. So I thought it was great. We had, if I remember correctly, two kickoffs return for a touchdown. They were super exciting plays, there was lots of strategy being discussed, et cetera. We only had five weeks of play, what five times, four games, 20 games we played in total. So who knows how it would've developed further, but as you can imagine, we were all very excited when the NFL voted, the competition committee voted to make that the new kickoff. So that was something that we, I guess can say to ourselves, Hey, we made a little bit of a contribution to the game and it's so interesting because you can play this out looking forward if the NFL uses it, which they will, they're, they've got the best athletes in the world, arguably, that'll quickly filter down as most rule changes do to the collegiate level, to the NCAA level, and that'll quickly filter down to the high school level. So we may see in whatever, five years, 10 years, we may see pretty much everybody using the new kickoff, which I think will be a success for the XFL for what it's worth, but also more importantly, it'll be a really positive safety issue for the players. A hundred percent. And hopefully you would think that the UFL would embrace that, considering that from That. Yeah, it surprised me they didn't do it, but I don't know why. I mean, that's something you'd have to ask Daryl Johnson or whomever the UFL made that decision. Yeah, I did. I did. We were blessed enough to have him on pregame. Yeah. Just out of curiosity, what did he say? They wanted it to look like a more traditional kickoff is what he said because there was some controversy. Where did he say they wanted it to look like real football? They didn't say real football, they meant traditional football, and so I accept that, but I think that looking back, yeah, That's reasonable. We had philosophically at the XFL back in 2019 when we started talking about all these things, we had a lot of discussions and brought a lot of people in, guys like Jason Wright, the commander's team president who of course played in the league, played at Northwestern, got his, we had input from so many different people, but we always said, is this a gimmick? Because if it's a gimmick, if the American public will view this as a gimmick, we don't want it. We want real good old fashioned football, but there are things that you can do that aren't gimmicky. We believed, and it really helped the game improve the game, and the kickoff was, I think one example of that. So to everybody, his own, obviously I wasn't involved with the UFL, but it did surprise me and actually a little bit disappointed me that they didn't use that kickoff knowing as I did, and Sam, for example, and Doug Whaley, who's over at the UFL, they also knew that the NFL was looking at it, right? It wasn't a secret or anything. There are very few secrets in the National Football League, so that kind of surprised me that they wouldn't have taken advantage of that sort of interest from the American public. Having said that, they did well I think with their TV numbers, so kudos to the league. I'm not being critical at all. I was just a little bit surprised they didn't follow up on that. That's okay. No, and that's fine. It's okay. We get in trouble here for being too critical. So have you had any discussions at all with current management about anything? I'm friendly with Doug Whaley and we talk, gosh, every month or so and just catch up on things, et cetera, and he will ask me UFL football related question every now and then, but I've had very little of any interaction with their executives and their folks. I've not searched it out. They haven't from their part, haven't searched it out, so no harm, no foul. That's okay. Would you ever consider a return to spring football if it arose? Oh, I don't know. I've got a bunch of stuff that I'm doing right now that I really enjoy and as I call it, I don't have a W2 job and I like that because I can decide more or less how I want to spend my time, where I want to spend my time, what projects, et cetera, and I'm doing a bunch of things with college athletics. I'm also doing a pretty significant project outside of college sports that really is all about the law. I'm a lawyer by training and that's keeping me busy, and I find it very fascinating, actually, more intellectually stimulating than a Spring league. Not to say that spring leagues aren't fun, they are. I've been through two of them and there is a playbook, if you will, and installing that playbook isn't really as difficult as some people make it out to be. So you said rounding out the season here, good ratings, right Championship, a little 25 0. A little less if you desired there with that, but it was good. We were there in St. Louis. It was fun. Something that you wish that you saw UFL doing now that XFL was doing something that you wish they were taking advantage of? Well, the only sort of issue that I had, I thought the quality of play was good. I didn't, I'll be honest, I didn't watch all that much. I'd watch a half an hour here or 45 minutes there or whatever. I thought one of the things that we did, well already mentioned this was riding in the wake of the NFL season, and I think there's sort of a psyche that the American football public has the viewing public that enjoys football, and there's a lot of people that like football, there's no question about that. A lot of casual observers that can get pulled in as the NFL and college football has proven. I thought it made sense for us for a number of reasons, including television numbers, including sort of the ability for spring players to have a little bit of a break before they took their NFL opportunity. We believed that there was value in starting right after the NFL season was over, not just again, to take advantage of the interest level that was still fairly high, but also to go through the 10 game regular season, the playoff, the two weeks of playoff, and give those players an opportunity to rest a little bit before they jump into NFL an NFL training camp. We believe we needed to make our league in terms of players and coaches quite honestly, but mostly players as accessible and amenable to make that NFL transition because our belief was every single player in the XFL 2020 wanted to make it to the NFL, right? Just like we believe when I was running NFL Europe and of course we were owned and operated by the NFL, but we believe every single player over in Europe, even the homegrown players, right, the Germans, the Dutch, whatever, their goal was to make it to the NFL. So it was important to have a transition that made sense physically and mentally for a player who's just played a 12 game season. Keep in mind you've got guys who've played a college season or an NFL season and then very quickly they turn around and they're in training camp for the XFL. They play that season and then their goal was to get to the NFL and then boom, all of a sudden they only have a week or two off before they have to go to a training camp and they got to absorb a whole new playbook, new terminology, blah, blah, blah. So we thought that starting right after the NFL season had some real benefits. I could go, I remember this distinctly. The Super Bowl prior to the XFL kickoff was down in Miami. I went down to Radio Road, same thing I used to do with the kickoff of the NFL Europe season, went down to Radio Road, but I could say, Hey, a week after the Super Bowl, there's going to be high quality football American professional players, guys. You've heard of guys like Cardell Jones, there's going to be great players that have won national championships at the collegiate level starting next week, and it's going to be on broadcasters like Fox and ESPN and we're going to have Kirk Menefee calling these games and some of the, so just like what you're seeing at the Super Bowl. So we exaggerated a little bit, but there was a time proximity to all of that, and I think that was a smart move by us as evident by the fact that we came out of that first two weeks or so with 2, 3, 4, whatever million, three point something million viewers, that was pretty good. That gave us a good jolt of energy and excitement. Of course, it didn't last very long with Covid, so week five everybody had to shut down, so who knows how it would've played out, but I think that was a good move that the XFL made. Yeah, I was generally in depression following that. It was really weird. I mean I think everyone was really weird time and God forbid all the men and women that got laid off in jobs and all that kind of stuff. It was just a really weird time for that. Just a side note, are you looking now, because obviously XFL with Fox and a B, C and all that, seeing now the merger of everything, are you surprised that that came about that XFL and USFL weren't able to run? I mean we've seen a lot now, obviously in hindsight it makes sense that they all came together, but that maybe there's not enough demand for two competing ones right now. Yeah, it wasn't a surprise, number one. Number two, I think there is a dearth of American men who can play quarterback at the professional level. I mean, I don't want to over blow it or over exaggerate it, but it's a hard position to play. The college game has developed differently than the pro game. I think there's some collegiate elements that have been adopted by the pro game, but it's still a game where you've got to hit that diagonal 25 yard ball with a receiver running away from you, et cetera. That's not an easy throw to make. So I think that there's a level of interest that doesn't support two teams. I think there's a pool of players that isn't quite honestly big enough to support two teams and keep in mind you've got the CFL that has some pretty damn good players in it playing up north, and we often forget about that, but there's some really good talent there and those players really weren't that interested in coming to the XFL, vice versa. We had a little bit of interaction, but that wasn't in any form or fashion, any sort of a league where we had a strong relationship. I know Randy very well. We talked a couple of times, but it was all about getting to the NFL for our players, so it made sense for a merger to take place. I think for a lot of reasons, very much like the a f, if you remember that league deciding, I forget, you'll know the details better than, I forget the details now, but it folded after week Eight, week seven, eight, And that opened up at least a couple of players and some coaches, et cetera. So it probably isn't in the cards for two professional leagues that really have aspirations to be the Spring league. I think it makes sense to combine the resources and that wasn't a surprise, At least to me in terms of selling off franchises. Obviously that's been a long time goal here early, I mean a long time for this USFL now UFL, what would it take in your mind to have someone actually come in to want to buy one of these franchises? Well, I think it obviously takes some money, number one, and the valuations for all pro sports franchises have just skyrocketed. I don't care if it's N-F-L-N-B-A-M-L-B, but even look at the second tier leagues like the NWSL, the new Women's Soccer League, MLSI would categorize as a major league and MLS is doing remarkably well in its valuations. Private equity is coming in, similar leagues are accepting sovereign wealth fund investment, so there's lots of cash out there, which is very positive for the ultimate goal of if that is the ultimate goal of selling these franchises off. I think though it takes a while, quite honestly to stabilize, it's quite building a new apartment complex. Somebody develops an apartment complex before they flip it, they really have to stabilize the rent and get up to whatever, 92% occupancy and have a healthy rent, et cetera. And it probably would take, in my estimation, anywhere between three and five years to stabilize one of these franchises, St. Louis, incredible fan support. We had it right out of the gate. I think the UFL had it this past season. My buddy Anthony Beck, the head coach there, fellow West Virginia Mountaineer, love Anthony, love what his son is doing at Iowa State. He's my guy. But that may be stabilized already. I mean you can count on 40,000 fans coming down to watch the team. It's an NFL style venue. The domes getting old, but it's still a great venue to watch, great atmosphere, incredible. But there are other franchises that will take longer to stabilize. So in my estimation, I've always said, and you've heard me I think say this many times before spring football is, I'm very bullish on it, but it does take someone initially with some deep pockets and some staying power to really build the brand in part because there've been so many stops and starts, starts and stops over the years, and so people are going to be a little bit suspicious before they invest. Now if I think back to the XFL, St. Louis, we knocked it out of the park. Seattle was unbelievable. That sports town is incredible and I remember thinking about what head coach to hire out there, and I'm friends with Jim Zorn and I thought, my gosh, if I can get Jim Zorn, he's a legend in Seattle, particularly when you go back to the eighties and nineties and when I learned Jim was interested in coaching, I thought we're going to hit this out of the park. But Seattle really was a great, DC was a great venue. I mean we sold out Audi Field, the atmosphere was tremendous. It was maybe the youngest of all of our audiences. If you looked around the stadium, it was incredible. It was all 20-year-old gen Zers or whatever. So we had three or four of those franchises that were very strong coming out of the gate. There are some others that needed some time and care and attention. So I think it's going to take at least three to five years in a stabilization and some consistency where you're building off of year one, you're selling more season, all the metrics, right? More season tickets better, better viewership, more content on social media. You can measure all these things now very easily, but I think it'll take three, four, maybe five years to really have enough franchises, five or six out of the eight let's say, that really have stabilized, and then there's probably plenty of money to chase those in terms of selling those to individual operators. It's a lot more work for the league. As commissioner, I had lots of authority to make decisions about football, about business side, et cetera, so it's a little bit different when you have an owner and they want to weigh in, et cetera, but that certainly is the model that the American professional sports landscape has adopted and it's worked pretty damn well. I think for most, if not all, the leagues In terms of XFL 2020. I think part of it was choosing good venues, like you said, St. Louis, DC and I'm a commanders fan and now it's on the upswing with Jane Daniels and Dan Quinn and all that, but at the time it wasn't right. People in DC weren't a part of that, but then like you said, you also had Seattle where I'm at. I thought good marketing. I was just a fan in 2020, right? Living through all of that and seeing that being passionate, so now this new UFL, we're not really seeing similar results right outside of maybe the markets that they inherited from 2020 and now kind of seeing them want to be more seasonal. The head coaches are going to be laid off seasonally until the fall. How do they do what you guys did? But it feels like maybe hamstringing themselves or putting these weird limitations on, well, we can only market four months out of the year. Yeah, I don't know the financial restrictions that the UFL is operating under. I think in a perfect world, even in a frugal spring league context where you're really turning over every penny, you need continuity with your coaches. You need at least a certain number of players that can return to your team, three or four high profile guys, and if you need to pay them a little bit more money to come back to resist the siren call of the National Football League. For some players, AJ McCarran is a good example. He's bounced around the NFL. He's played a little bit in the NFL and done fairly well for a backup, but he's clearly not a starter and you got to build a franchise around a quarterback and he's played well in the UFL, there's no question about that. So can you figure out how to provide a little bit more money for him to say, Hey, we need you for the next two years to be the face of this franchise and you've got to do that across the board. It takes money and that's why it takes deep pockets. So I don't know if you can build a spring league on the cheap, so to say, and I'm not saying that the UFL has gone cheap. I haven't followed it. And again, I don't know the financial restrictions, but there is something about fan avidity. There is something about having players that return that fans recognize and football fans like me, I'm a college football fan as well as an NFL fan. I recognize every quarterback in the league. I know where they went to college and I'd love to see them develop because most of them will go to A NFL training camp or whatever number. Let's say there's 50 players in the UFL that go to an NFL training camp. Guess what? 47 of 'em will be out of a job come week one or maybe on the practice squad and they'll need to continue to play. So it's really being smart in terms of how you sign up players for the longer term that are going to be the face of your franchise, but also you have to have the money to do that. And I don't know the restrictions that Darrell and his team are working under, but that's important and I'm sure they're trying their best to develop some continuity, but that's one of the reasons why I've always said a spring league really does need some deep pockets in years 1, 2, 3, and four before things begin to stabilize because you're not going to make any money year one, nor are you going to make any money year two, nor are you going to make money year three, nor are you going to make money in year four, maybe year five you begin to have a plus minus zero, but it takes a while. It's like any other long-term investment. It's going to take a while before you reach that plus minus zero point In terms of the seasonality of coaches and they're going to be, we're doing showcases, they'll pay 'em seasonally to come in, kind of like appearance fees and all that. But are you concerned with that, with roster building of having the coaches only on staff for four or five months out of the year? I mean, my preference would be not to do that. We had full-time coaches in NFL Europe and we used those guys in the off season. They'd come over to Europe. We'd have all kind of clinics in France and Germany and everywhere else just to keep the brand alive, wanted to be viable in any marketplace. I think the same thing is true of the UFL, but again, it depends on resources. We did a lot of work looking at NFL practice squad rosters and who we thought might have an attraction to come over and play in our league. I mean, there's a lot of bodies going back and forth and building a roster is not easy. It's a challenging task when you don't quite know who you have. And of course it's not just about the quarterback and the star wide out or a great running back. You've got to build, you need eight, nine strong offensive linemen with good experience. You've got a lot of moving parts and you need, I think ultimately at that point, a head coach. And keep in mind, our head coaches were basically our personnel guys along with their assistant coaches. I think we had, if I remember correctly, we had head coaches on full-time. We had both coordinators on full-time. We had some seasonal assistant coaches, but the head coaches and the coordinators, the full-time guys did all the personnel work in the off season. We did a lot of league level personnel work just to get folks into the league, into the pool. But there's a lot of work that happens in the off season, and I think you had asked what I was most proud of and I said the quality of the players of the games coming out of the shoot, that's in large part because we were able to identify the coaches were able to identify players along with league staff. I get those players distributed in a relatively fair fashion. Nobody was going to be dominant, but nobody was a dog, at least based on the first five weeks of play when we had to shut down. So all of that's connected, and again, I'll go back to a pretty simple point. You need money to do that, and if you don't have the money, it's going to be tough to build that continuity in your local marketplaces, particularly given the checkered history of spring football in this country. In terms of coaches being hired here and he's got, I'm kind of trying to sum this down so it's not a half hour question here, but when you led to hiring coaches, how much consideration was there for basically them being able to coach an exciting product but also be able to assemble a team because seen some of these and even in the championship game and there's no whatever against Weighed and AJ and everything else, but it wasn't great quality of place. How important was it to balance getting the right coaches but also someone that can make an entertaining football product? We spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of time on coaches. I had a whiteboard in my office. We probably started with a hundred potential coaching candidates and worked our way down. The first coach that we announced, and we did this purposefully, was Bob Stoops in Dallas. And that was considered a real coup at the time. I've known Bob for years, known his family for years. He's a Youngstown guy. I'm a Cleveland guy. We could have been brothers in a different universe, but when he indicated to me that he was interested and willing to coach in the spring, and do you know the reason for it? It wasn't that he was burnt out coaching. The guy loves football, lives football, but he wanted to take some time for really the first time in his life to watch his son play football at Oklahoma. And his kid was a hell of a player. And I said, Bob, I know exactly what you're saying because I love watching my kid play college football and it's hard to have a, I was an athletic renter at West Virginia at the time. I had my son playing out at Stanford trying to get to my mountaineer games that I needed to go to as well as watch my, that's challenging, but when Bob said, I want to spend some time watching my son play. I want to go to games at Oklahoma and follow them on the road and just be a fan, don't have tailgates and all that, I said, well, this is a perfect opportunity, Bob to keep your toe in the water with the XFL. And he did. And of course he's continued to do that, which is awesome. But that gave us a significant bit of credibility as we were working through all these things. And so we wanted coaches who were offensive minded, pep Hamilton example, offensive coordinator for major college teams, NF Lman, mark ResMan down in Tampa, same thing. So we wanted primarily offensive minded coaches. We wanted guys who were sort of flexible because having run NFL Europe, we knew, I knew the challenges that come up when you go into the first season ever for a league, there's going to be things that don't work out. There's going to be screw ups, there's going to be whatever, logistics. I think we did a pretty good job and I give a lot of credit to our staff, but there are still things that go south, and so we wanted to make sure we had guys who were willing to roll with the punches. Quite honestly, Kevin Gilbride up in New York, he was an offensive guy and had been in situations like this before. So all these folks, not all of 'em, but many of 'em had experience previously with some of the leagues and we wanted folks that bought into the concept and said, listen, we're going to do some things differently like the kickoff, like the headset communication. But I think at the end of the day, I would say it was a pretty good group of head coaches. They were fun to work with when we got together, they were gung-ho about and excited about the kickoff and headset communication, some of the other playing rules. They liked the idea of developing players. They brought great insight into what we were trying to do. And I had previously over at NFL Europe hired all the head coaches over there, guys like Jack McNell or Galen Hall or Al Lugen Bill, all successful, mostly college coaches. And here we had a little bit of a mixed group of both college guys as well as pro guys, which I think was fun too. In many cases, our game resembled the college game a little bit more than it resembled the, because it's easier to get a roster assembled in year one with, for example, quarterbacks who've had success at the college level, but maybe not at the NFL level. There's a big step up. So I think all in all, we had a pretty good group. We wanted legitimate coaches that had been around the block many times and I think if you looked across the league from Jim Zorn down to ResMan, all these other folks, I think we did a fairly solid job. I got three more Musk asks here. I appreciate your time. You've been very nice with everything today, so appreciate that. You're cool with three more Musk. I got stars on these. I got to make sure we get to in terms of, I guess we'll go to this. Speaking of college with the house first NCAA and all that, players making money in college here are coming out. Are you concerned there would be a time where a player's making so much money in college, maybe they wouldn't be incentivized to go to one of these spring leagues or they're going to have to compete against that. Does that make sense? Yeah, it was interesting. We believed at the time, you have to go back to 2018. This is before the NIL universe was put in place. We believe we had an opportunity to poach a handful of players from the college level who weren't NFL draft eligible. And we had a test case, and I should remember his name because he was a West Virginia Mountaineer, but we had a player at WVU, he had been suspended for his third collegiate season because of some academic issue and we reached out to him. He grew up in Pittsburgh, very good, I think all big 12 defenses back and we brought him into the league and that was sort of a test case for us because he was not NFL draft eligible. He didn't really have anywhere else to go. I think we jacked up his salary a little bit. He was drafted by or assigned to, I forget to the St. Louis team and played well, the entire season was a starter. I think it was all whatever XFL after the fifth week. But we thought that was a real opportunity for guys, and this is again, all pre NIL world for guys in college who weren't yet draft eligible for whatever reason, to come into the league and play for a season and make 60 grand, 75 grand, a hundred grand, whatever the number would be. So that completely changed with NIL. It's hard to say how the NIL universe in the collegiate world and now the house settlement and 21.6 million being made available by universities to at least at the Power four level to pay their players. Let's be honest with exactly what it is, and I would argue at the end of the day we'll probably see something like, who knows, 75% of that go to the football players, just like the back pay is 75% geared towards football players. So hard to say how that's going to play out. There's obviously a lot more money in the collegiate game. Really good players might decide to spend another year in college. The preference might be to red shirt freshman year, play three years, then you do a grad transfer thing. I mean, it is hard to say how it plays out. There's still a limited number of spots on an NFL roster that won't change at all. So there's still going to be players that are out of college that don't have any collegiate eligibility left that still need to play. So I think fundamentally the Spring League concept is still valid and it'll still be a pretty good stepping stone into the NFL, but it may be difficult, quite honestly, to get a guy like Cardell Jones to come into the league. It is hard to say that that has to play out, but certainly there's much more money at the collegiate level now with NIL and the house settlement and the way this is all going to play out and that's going to have an effect in some form or fashion on spring football in the type of player that can come in. The other thing that people have to consider, there's a limited lifespan for professional football players. I mean, it takes a toll on your body, certainly positions like running back linebacker where you're just constantly getting physical contact. So you have to sort of play out how many years you really have. How many years can your body hold up, where's the best place to maximize your financial value in this new universe? Collegiate, right? There's value in playing there. There's going to be some value in playing in the XFL or the UFL now for a year or two years or three years. Obviously the NFL is the king of the hill. The salary cap in the NFL is going up dramatically, which is great for the players. So there's going to be some strategy that I think players have to start thinking about and they got to start thinking about that probably year one, two in college and understand where they fit into the overall scheme of things. There's star players, their first, second, third round draft choices, they're great star players, but then there's a whole bunch of rank and file guys and they've got to play this game better than anybody I think now to make sure they're maximizing the value, value of time that their body has to compete in a pretty rough game. It's getting, there's great progress made in safety, but I think the game's rougher than it's ever been. Just the athletes are bigger, faster, stronger. Last two here, anything you've learned from college and navigating that in the recent time, like at SMU that you would carry back into building a spring league now? Anything you've learned in the last few years? Well, my experience, experience outside of the specific football side, I mean over in Europe for 10 years, I spent more time on the business side of building NFL Europe, what was the World League of American football then NFL Europe. I started with the Frankfurt Galaxy and then moved up to the Ryan Fire and then basically spent a lot of time on the business side because that was as important if not more important quite honestly than the football side. I spent most of my time in the XFL on the football side. We had a business group, but I worked with our business team to develop season ticket sales plans and all the marketing and promotion, et cetera. So the one thing I've learned is college football has, it's really remarkable when we think about it, it has a cult-like status among people and it's all irrational. I went to college at West Virginia University. I love the mountaineers. There's no rational reason why I should. I went to school there for four years, big deal. I took some classes. I love the mountaineers, and it's the same way for tens of millions of people across the country. That's a little bit different than the NFL Avidity or the NBA identity. It's professional sports players come and go, yeah, you root for your hometown team and you're passionate. But the passion, the depth of the passion at the collegiate level is different. It's deeper, it's stronger, it's more alive in many cases. And it resembles European soccer passion. It resembles how the European soccer system was developed really beginning in the late 18 hundreds into the early 19 hundreds, and then the post-war explosion in European soccer. So I say this to say both over at NFL Europe, obviously we were in Europe, but even with the XFL, we tried to really sort of develop the fan avidity around these eight teams that we had really as a sort of collegiate type of a thing where there was just a deeper passion. And that takes a while. You can't do that overnight, but we hosted happy hours for brand new fans. We had had coaches there, they'd come, I was there and some of these things they come over and we'd have a happy hour and you just sort of build and build and build. And we didn't have anywhere near enough time to see the results of that because the season was shut down after five weeks. But we were beginning to see DC Seattle were both great examples. We were beginning to see people really saying, Hey, I care about this team as much as I care about the University of Maryland or about the back then the Redskins, now the commanders people were quickly sort of getting, oh, this is fun going to the game as we get the beer snake and there's lots of young people here. I kind of like this. This is a small little 22,000 seat stadium or whatever it was, down an Audi field. This is a blast. And these guys, they're playing pretty hard. They're not making that much money, but I like this. This is fun. It's something to do this. So we were beginning to get that, and that's a lesson that I took from being around college football as a player being over in Europe. Prior to my duty with the NFL, my wife and I lived over there. I was working for a law firm in understanding European soccer and how it's structured and sort of developing that stickiness with your fan base. And I think we had that in our XFL version back in 2020. We had that certainly in St. Louis and Seattle and DC We had that in Houston with, and people love the fact that we sort of RIFed off the old Oilers and that was an old oiler and people missed the old Oilers, all that sort of nostalgia. We didn't have enough time to really develop that at all in New York. It's such a different market. That was challenging. We just started in Tampa a little bit. It was probably not the right Florida City in a sense, or I should say the right stadium. It was NFL Buck Stadium so big, but we were getting there in some of the markets. We were just starting to see that in LA a little bit with that team in Winston Moss, the head coach who was a real character. But that's one of the lessons that I learned when you're building these things, you sort of have to build it somewhat like you'd build or promote a college team because you've got to create that avidity, but you got to supercharge it. You got to really accelerate it. Yeah. You look though at some of the teams that you wanted to say maybe struggled with attendance back in 2020 a little bit better than some of the ones now. So I mean it's all in perspective when you look at that kind stuff. Well, I would say Dallas did okay, Arlington, but Dallas did fine. Houston I thought did fine. St. Louis knocked it out of the park, DC knocked it out of the park. Tampa struggled. LA did okay. New York was a real problem. It's just you've got to spend so much money in that marketplace. And ultimately in retrospect, we maybe should have considered playing over in Harrison, New Jersey at the MLS building there, the Red Bull facility, which is very nice. I'm also a former MLS guy, right? So I think there's some real value in these smaller venues because you get the fan excitement. You're closing a 20,000 seats stadium that's filled up, witness the Audi field for the DC team, a 20,000 seat stadium could be loud and it could be raucous and could be a hell of a lot of fun. Last question from me, and just to curtail off that, talking about balancing, I guess between building locally and then obviously the national TV broadcast we see now, and I would argue, we talk on the podcast, it's almost too much of a TV product. They say, okay, we want fans and we kind of run these giveaways, but we're not really doing the same work that 2020 did. How did you guys balance that between, we want to obviously have the stadiums full, how passionate fan base is, but then obviously the larger audience is always going to be on tv. Yeah, it's a very good question. You got to thread the needle to a certain degree. I believe though that years 1, 2, 3, when there's a team playing and I'm making this up, a team playing in Seattle, if it's good football people tune in and say, oh, that was a hell of a throw, or it was a great catch, or that was a 62 yard field goal or whatever. They don't care where that team is playing. They don't care if it's Seattle, if it's Portland, if it's Cabo, right? They want to see good football on television. So I think the TV viewership really is driven by the quality of the game and recognizable coaches like Bob Stoops or Jim Zorn or whatever. Oh, I remember seeing Jim Zorn play nice coaching his team. I'll watch for a couple series and see if I like it and maybe stick around. And so I think for the vast majority of viewers, the three, three and a half, whatever million people that tuned in week one to the old XFL in 2020, I don't think they cared where the games were actually taking place. They may not have even known. What they did care about was seeing a fan base in that stadium that was loud, that was a bit raucous, and they didn't want to see a whole swath of empty seats. So the local fans were effectively the stage, if you will, and the good quality was important. So you had to focus on getting local fans in there. We wanted 20,000 plus for every game in every market. We exceeded that in some markets, didn't get there in other markets, but that was really just sort of the trappings, if you will, that we wanted people on TV to see. Because if you're a television viewer, at least I believe if you're a television viewer and you see some good football, you also want to know that somebody in that local market and shows up and wears a cap and a T-shirt and is there waving a flag. And we had, I remember in Houston going to a couple of the roughnecks games and whatever at 19,000, 21,000, 23,000, and it looked good. Upper deck may have been sparsely populated, lower deck, pretty much jam packed. And I think that helped the viewership because people said, oh, this matters to people in Houston. And oh gosh, yeah, Texans, they love their football. I guess this must be important. I'll watch, I'll see what Kevin Gilbride does to try to break down the Houston defense, whatever. So they're two different things, but they are related. And it also, we had partners, obviously Fox, ESPN, and they obviously weighed in on where the franchises were. Ultimately it was the league's decision, but you've got to get others on board as well, and you do want some geographical representation. I thought ultimately between Seattle and LA on the west coast, we had our Midwestern St. Louis team. We had two teams in Texas. You can never go wrong with football in Texas. And then we had obviously East Coast, I thought it was pretty good. Different time zones, all those sorts of things that matter. The only one that didn't perform really at all was New York, but that's also I think just a different market in a matter of time and money. Yeah, I mean, I would argue with some of this in Seattle now that, yeah, I'll lament a little bit of the placement of the new UFL and it's a lot of the essential and Eastern, but it's what it's, I'll be honest, I am surprised why they didn't go to Seattle. It's a great football time. I've been to games, I've been to Seahawks games, seen my kid play out there. I've been to plenty of UDub games when my son was at Stanford, the XFL team in Seattle. Sea Dragons, I mean, it's a great football town. It's remarkable. People just love things that are Seattle It. It's as good of a market as anywhere in the world. And I'm dead serious in saying this. Well, even we were just at the Mariner game last night. I mean, it was a sellout Friday night, 45,000 there. I said, man, that's like eight Memphis here in the UFL. Don't tell anyone. But I mean, Seattle shows up. Oliver, I have kept you for so long today. I so appreciate it. Kindness with your time, our listeners, our viewers will so appreciate it and you taking the time today really means a lot. My pleasure. Thanks Reid. Huge special thanks to Oliver. As I said, spending extended time on his Saturday morning to sit down, help fill us in listeners, viewers of the podcast. Huge special thanks to Sam Schwartzstein, friend of the show, getting that all set up. Really appreciate that. That was kind of an off the wall like, Hey Sam, do you still talk with Oliver? What's going on? Oh yeah, here you go. So ended up coming together easier than I thought, but I certainly appreciate that. No less work for Sam putting in, and obviously Oliver are spending 50 plus minutes talking with me for the program. So really appreciate that. Like I said, this coming a few days early, kind of avoid the 4th of July traffic. So I hope you enjoy it. Whether you're out of town, in town, traveling Canada Day this week, my birthday, if you're a Canadian listener, hope you had a great holiday that way, but that way you guys can kind of enjoy this. Hopefully it doesn't get buried in the YouTube algorithm. So that is what we have for today. Like I said, like and subscribe. Get us up over 4,000 subscribers. We'll be back. Might have a hiatus on the recorded on the prerecorded Friday shows. We'll see working on another big interview for next week with the holidays and travel. Might just have the Monday recaps with Hussy for the next week with Jason Hussey over the Monday CFL recaps. But we keep you posted on that like and subscribe, click the bell, turn on notifications, all that stuff. We will see you next time. Truly hope you guys enjoy. I thought this was a really fun episode. Really fun interview. So hope you agree, stay safe. We'll see you next time.

CFL Week 4 Results + Reactions! Winners and Losers From CFL 2024 Week 4!!

Well here we are. Happy Monday. Happy Canada Day. Happy Reid from the Markcast birthday here. Jason, normally I try. I got my shirt here. It's hot out. It's my birthday. It suns out. Guns out today so we are rocking and rolling. How are you doing sir? Doing good man. Happy birthday to you and exciting group of games to talk about. Yeah, it's funny here. I got stuff all over my screen. It's funny. Yeah, I always joke that especially when Paul and I were going through all the CFL versus XFL stuff. Yeah. It's amazing that Canada deemed my birthday so important that they made it the national holiday, so that's great. Jason, you enjoyed the day off. Oh, always nice to get the extra day off and then have a short week the week after. Is it odd that there is no CFL game on Canada Day? You would think that they would make that be kind of like Canadian Thanksgiving, whatever we would have a game. Yeah, absolutely. I mean in years past, I believe as soon as a couple years ago, recently as a couple of years ago, we did see some games on Canada today and so I thought it was weird that we didn't get it this year. I know they're trying to stick to that whole Thursday to Sunday through the summer kind of schedule, but I think it was kind of odd to see it like that and for me, who's on the east coast staying up to watch that Thursday night, 10:00 PM Eastern time start appreciate there wasn't a game today. Yeah, I will say I caught up in, well I think you got a little bit of delay but it seems to be going all right here. Internet. We'll work through it. I was at the Caitlin Clark game here on Saturday was tracking. Yeah, we were at the game. I'm like, oh my god the game's starting now. I mean it was a really late Thursday night there especially even if you're in bc, I mean I saw the sparse crowds coming off the homecoming game there with ice or what was it, 50 cent and all that, but yeah, that's even tough if you're in BC getting down there on a Thursday at seven o'clock for that. Yeah, for sure. I mean when you look at it, I think even, I think obviously it's hard for Thursday night games regardless for attendance I think especially when it's a west coast game because you can't really have it if it's a weekday earlier than the seven o'clock local start, that's the most realistic time for people to be able to get to the game. It was unusual nine to five job, so I think that's difficult. Let's get Jason, you want to reset your internet? Let's get Jason hop off, hop back on. I'll plug we got coming up tomorrow. Maybe we'll just get that real quick. It's fine. I mean we make do with what we have here. I appreciate it. If you've been living under a rock here today over the last week, just to plug tomorrow July 2nd if you're listening to this, we will have our big Oliver Luck interview XFL 2020 Commissioner joining the program, recorded that over the weekend for about 50 plus minutes, the whole episode's, almost an hour talking with Oliver Luck getting his thoughts on spring football on the UFL merger on kind of the future of spring football, current landscape, all of that. Oliver is obviously close with Randy Ambrozy, we talk CFL and all of that as well. So if you are interested in that, a lot of excitement today when I posted Be teasing kind of for a week about that, about a big name guest on there. So Oliver Luck posted today the teaser for tomorrow, but that should be exciting. 7:00 AM Pacific so if you are involved in that, if you're interested in that and subscribe it should be good. But like I said, Oliver luck, a deep dive, long ranging interview and we haven't heard a lot from Oliver since and obviously we everything with Vince McMahon and the lawsuit and kind of all that stuff. So I saw Oliver on the front office sports gave them a quote. I think he was talking with Ben Fisher as well and so it seemed to be a good time to reach out. I was willing to talk about that so we'll see Hussey's internet, all that, but yeah, Oliver Luck tomorrow should be a big time interview. People seem really excited about that. Yeah, I thought that it was like what a great get for your show and I'm excited to listen to it myself even as primarily a CFL fan. Yeah, it should be good. Like I said, even if you're involved in the Canadian side of anything, should be interested for that. Let's get to some of the CFL stuff. Caught up on everything today was not watching the Tie Katz game last night. Not sure if that's better or worse. Caught up on that today. Was that the Mariner game for my birthday? Jason? I really didn't know what happened in that game. I'm going on the Ty Katz radio show tomorrow with Bubba and all of that. I think aj, Jackie Beck's going to be a part of that. They asked me to come on and one of the questions was question which Owen four team and I was kind of prepping this morning and I hadn't watched the games yet and I got, oh my god, is Hamilton going to drop it again? It'd been 2018 or whatever. Talk me through this one, Hamilton Owen four now Ottawa getting another win. This was, I don't know, Ty can seem to get anything going right. Oh gosh, where to start? I mean I think the most shocking thing about how this season has gone so far for the tie cats is that, I mean going into the year I thought that this team was going to be bad. I predicted they're probably be one of the worst teams in the CFL, but I thought it was going to be because that Bowie by Mitchell was cooked and their quarterback play would not be up to the level that you need to win games in the CFL, but it's been kind of completely the opposite. I thought Bo has again had a pretty good game in this one, led a drive to take the lead in the last minute and then the defense blows it yet again. They decide to s sw kick on the drive that led to the game winning field goal for Ottawa. That was an interesting decision and controversial decision because Ottawa was able to get the ball near midfield and still had around 25 seconds left and they just had to make a couple plays to get into a field goal range for Louis Ward and sure enough he cashed it. And by the way, all I want to say three of the four games this week came down to a game winning kick. So some exciting football we're seeing this year in the CFL. But yeah, ultimately from a Hamilton perspective, so disappointing. I don't think that there's much hope for this team, even though Bo is playing well. He's really the big bright spot for this team so far this year, but I think at the end of the day they're not doing enough, especially on the defensive side of the ball. I think this defense is just really struggling. They're not putting much pressure on the quarterback, they're not covering receivers very well. They're making bad mistakes at bad times. They're not being able to hold leads when they've had them the few times they've had them this season. So I think at the end of the day, not much hope for the TCATs going forward, especially with BC in Toronto coming up in the next couple games here. Yeah, we'll look ahead. That's interesting. Yeah, I got to start planning what games are coming up, Kyle here checking in happy birthday the professor checking in, put the knife down Jason. Yeah, because like I said, I hadn't really paid attention and I was just sitting there. I'm like God, because that's the thing like you said and pulling up, I'm pulling up, I got the game here like you said, Beau's not playing terrible. We saw Tim White finally get on the board. He had a slow start really laying out for that. We it's at 50 50 with Ottawa right now. We saw them play decent and we saw them kind of get steamrolled last week by Winnipeg or excuse me by Montreal with all of that stuff and Cody and everything for that, their great cup band raising, how big a deal is this? I wasn't really tracking the 2000 day whatever that Ottawa hasn't. Is that really a trend here we have going on? Well they haven't beat Hamilton in any capacity since the 2018 touchdown passes against. They got Ottawa to the Gray Cup game when they eventually lost to Calgary. They haven't beat Hamilton since and they were able to finally snap that this time. And really when you look at the last couple of seasons, the reason why Hamilton was is because they got three wins against Ottawa each season and Ottawa was just not able to take any games off of them. So I think at the end of the day this is a huge win for Ottawa even though I didn't think they looked all too impressive in this one. They made some good defensive plays when it mattered the most. They had a dropped interception on that last drive for Hamilton that could have sealed the game then and there, but I think at the end of the day they got enough plays, made enough plays to get the win in this one and starting off two in one for a team that's had four wins in most of the last few seasons. I think that's huge for them. Yeah, you got to feel good here. Crazy to see Ottawa here second, second in the east and obviously bi weeks and all that stuff coming into play here at Toronto, two in one as well. We'll talk through that game. But yeah, it certainly by no lack of Beau trying here, I mean two touchdowns, decently clean. We're still asking Beau to throw a lot. Greg Bell running was Butler or her was Butler out on this one? Concussion. Concussion, yeah, so you can't get too many runs going on that. Yeah, it really came down to the end. You were talking about that and talking about the last couple of minutes, one of the questions, so I got to prep, it's like what do they say Jason? No lead is safe in the CFL. It'll all come down to the final theme. But it's exciting. I mean we had a bunch of walk offs, we had overtime game right with Winnipeg and Calgary is exciting season down for Hamilton here. I mean do we blow up and move on? I don't know what you do if you're Hamilton because it's really been the big swing the last couple seasons. Well I mean they were oh and four last year and they were able to make the playoffs, but I mean making the playoffs in the CFL as you've said with Calgary making the playoffs last year, making the playoffs, it's not really a huge goal. It's not a huge bar to reach. So when I was saying I think a couple of weeks ago on the show that a slow start to the season doesn't necessarily eliminate you from the playoff race in the CFL, but it does eliminate you from being a first second seed if you have a slow start. As much as Hamilton's had the last couple of seasons and it's going to be very tough for them. They have a very, very tough schedule coming up. I believe it's BC at home and then Toronto at home and then back to back against Montreal Edmonton's in there somewhere. So it's a tough stretch of ahead. I was looking ahead, I'm like where is this team going to get their first win? I thought it was going to be this week, but unfortunately for me they blew it again. Yeah, excuse me. Like you said, yeah, BC coming in week five then the buy coming in facing Toronto at home, it's tough. Maybe week eight. Week eight there at Edmonton. Just circle it there. That'll be where they get that. But looking here at the stats and like I said, I recapped the game today watching it, it's just so weird to me that it doesn't really seem like Ottawa did anything much at all and still ended up coming down ahead Louis war going four for four with the field goals and all that. I dunno, it just seemed to me that I don't know if it's a defensive struggles with Hamilton or whatnot. It really seem like Ottawa had to do a lot. Yeah, I mean I think a lot of it came down to Ottawa just not making mistakes. They thought that they actually did make some mistakes. Drew Brown is because he threw a couple passes that were almost intercepted, should have been intercepted by Tiger Kat's defensive backs, but ultimately other than that they played a very clean game. They made some plays when they needed to in the second half and put the ball in the end zone when they really needed to with three minutes left to give them the lead. Then Hamilton answered back surprisingly and then Ottawa was able to get that last minute drive to get the field goal and win it. So I mean they didn't have a perfect game like I said, but this team is looking much more competent than they did a year ago and a lot of that has to do with how Drew Brown's looking at quarterback and most important thing, like I said, he's not making the mistakes or at least the mistakes aren't costing them yet. So I think at the end of the day they have some weapons on that offense. It looks like Dominic Rimes could be a player for that offense even though he's been pretty quiet so far this season. I think just having him out there as a deep threat, that's a type of player they haven't had in recent years. Jaylin Acklin being very productive in this one. Justin Hardy being a guy that's been really impressive to start the season looks like kind of their go-to guy in that offense. So I think they have some players for this team and Tommy Condell must say this is he won the battle between the former Tigercat defensive coordinators I should say, of Dominic Condell being the offensive coordinator previously in Hamilton and Mark Washington being the defensive coordinator still in Hamilton going up against each other in this game. You have to say Tommy Condell won that matchup for the most part and I think at the end of the day Ottawa is looking pretty good. So the Drew Brown thing, that was going to be my follow up because obviously last week against Montreal and that's tough, right? Montreal's D and all that brown looking better here. The weird thing. Yeah, this Dominic Grimes, it just feels like he's just, like I said, I kind of forgot that he was even with Ottawa until last week and they were showing the highs. I'm like, oh yeah, that's where he's at. Is that weird to you how underutilized he feels right now with Ottawa? Yeah, it is weird that he hasn't popped off and had that big game yet, but I'm sure it's coming. I think that he is still trying to be reworked into this offense even though he played in Ottawa before, it's a completely different team than it was back in 2019 where he had a thousand yards there. So I think that's kind of the nature of the CFL. You have an extra receiver on the field sometimes a guy gets squeezed out of the offense from week to week, so I think he's been very quiet to start the season, but it's only a matter of time before we start seeing some big games and big plays from Dominic Rimes because I think they do have quite an assembly of veteran receivers in that receiving core. I didn't even mention Braille and Addison who hasn't had some explosive plays this season but has been a pretty featured part of that offense being a guy that they've used in the backfield on a number of occasions as well. So I think they have some talent on that Ottawa offense, like I said, Looking here back at the standings, like we said Ottawa second right now and early and the bi weeks and all this stuff coming into play, but I don't think you could expect more if you're Ottawa at this point. I mean if you're an Ottawa fan, are you feeling decently good about the season? What do you think? Yep, it's early. Definitely things can turn into a tailspin as we've seen in previous years, most notably Saskatchewan the past couple of years. So nothing is guaranteed with a good start to the season, but I think when you looked at their schedule going into the year, they had Winnipeg who nobody would've expected to be oh and four at this point. You probably had that penciled in as a loss, then you had Montreal, which they did lose but they really weren't very competitive in that game, but still you were probably expecting a loss there and then so a two in one start to the season, it's really not the worst thing in the world for Ottawa and we'll have to see how they do in upcoming games against Eastern opponents because against the west last year they were pretty good. I believe they were something like four and four or something like that against the west last year, but they did not win a single game against the east last year, which changed this week with a win against Hamilton. In terms of, and I'll probably steal your homework here tomorrow when I got to do because one of the questions worst Owen, I guess best Owen, four teams. So let's go best and worst O and four team here. Obviously you got Winnipeg and Edmonton here, really weird right now just with the nine teams we got three that don't have anything. I thought Hamilton's looked pretty decent all the way across here. Best and worst, Owen four team, what do you think? I'm going to sound like a homer here, but I'm going to say Hamilton is the best. Oh and 14 and I just think it's because I like what Now. I think when you look at Claris who got knocked up will get up out of the game against, he hasn't looked very good when he's been in there yet to throw a touchdown pass this season. McLeod, he's looked good at times. They definitely moved the ball better than they have in previous years in Edmonton with the past. But I think ultimately the turnovers have really hurt him at inopportune times. So if I'm ranking those quarterbacks and so often in this league it comes down to quarterback play, I'm going to rank Hamilton as the number one out of those oh and four teams. And not to mention I think that Winnipeg's dealing with a lot more injuries right now, Edmonton you really can't trust just given their recent history. At least Hamilton, we've seen them go on some wild runs to end the season. Usually it's been a second half of the season type team. I remember there was one year that they almost made the playoffs after starting oh and seven. So I mean I've seen some wild second half runs from this team in my lifetime, so I'm going to stick with Hamilton as the best. Oh and four team so far. Let's go on here and we can circle back I guess any other thoughts on Ottawa or Hamilton at this point or you want to move on to the next game? No, I just wanted to point out maybe Bob Dice, I think he has looked a lot more competent in that role. I feel like just getting condell in there, I think that was a really good hire for that coaching staff. I think there hasn't been as many noticeable blunders like bad challenges or bad situational decisions from him so far. So that's a good sign for Ottawa because I had a lot of questions marks about him going into the season. Well and I think you want to see Saskatchewan or excuse me, someone just comment in, you want to see Ottawa do good here just because of the whole 10 year ride anniversary and we're kind of making this be a temp season and we've got new patches and uniforms. You don't want to be Edmonton with the 75th anniversary or whatever and just playing complete dog duty right now. So at least for auto, like I said in the past, I don't really know what it would be like to be an Auto Red Blacks fan, so you like to see that one thing here. And this was music to my ears, my eyes here, Winnipeg continuing, they're losing ways here and it was weird to me. So Farhan came out and said, looks like Lucky Whitehead getting ready to come back, getting ready to sign again. And I'm like, oh, is he going to bc? Is he going back to BC or what's going on here? And Farhan, well he is probably going to go back to Winnipeg. That seems to be, and I tweeted out that Adam Silver is like get ready to learn. Oh and four buddy. I mean they've had so many injuries. I think Winnipeg has to do something here I guess first off, that is a great signing because they need to have something thoughts on I guess lucky going there. Is that enough to offset because Calleros and I know getting banged up here and we have quite the Chris Trevor stat line, we'll get to his play, but I mean it seems like Zach Calleros is just out to the moon right now. Yeah, well you're right about the Lucky Whitehead signing they had to do something and Lucky Whitehead, like him or not, I think that he is a guy that was the most proven veteran receiver that was still out there on the free agent market. So even he took a step back last year in BC where he lost his spot in the pecking order to guys hatcher in rhymes. I think that he's a guy that still can help them and is familiar with that team and that atmosphere from playing there I believe in 2019. So I think he's a guy that is going to really help with that offense especially they have so many young receivers right now that they're trying to work in, but unfortunately when Zach's been in there I think he's been really off his game and I think a huge reason why is he doesn't really trust these young receivers that they have there. It seems like whenever they're moving the chains it is to guys like Demsky and Ky, obviously Lawler's on the shelf and then SCHs on the shelf for the rest of the season. We found out this week. So I mean it's going to be very tough for them to overcome that, especially with Brady Oliveira not at a hundred percent clearly. Yeah, actually because this weekend's just been really kind of crazy with everything with birthdays all. Yeah, I totally forgot Sean was out as well and I'm like, well I mean RIP the season at that point I think you got to make a move. I don't know. I mean it's fine. Winnipegs had so much success here and obviously we joked last week about them walking out on when the BC Lions were there and Wright was that they were walking out when they were losing and all that. But I dunno, I don't know if Lucky Whitehead, I was looking here at age 32 is enough to come in and really spark that. I mean you said lucky it felt like two years ago was really good. Was that the year after he got paid when BC was able to make him the highest paid receiver two years ago and it felt like last year was really up to snuff, if I'm remembering that correctly. He had that year when Mike Riley had his last year with BC and then he had another year with Nathan Rourke when he had that breakthrough season and then last year he was kind of a little bit underwhelming and starting to get up there, been an age obviously into his early thirties now has a lot of tread on those tires and also was a kick returner for a number of years, which obviously would take a toll physically on your body. So what's shown that here broken. I got a blockers on here. What's the injury prognosis on shown that for the season? Like you said, I believe, I know he's out for the season. I believe it was a knee injury that they said and it happened away from the a couple weeks. Played a fortunate injury for them because he's just been a rock star. Jason, let's see if we can get your internet still really cutting out here. Let's see if maybe you can reboot one more time on that. Is that something you want to give a shot to? Yeah, Yeah, talking through all this and like I said, just I don't know, it is weird to see Winnipeg fall off at this point. It's certainly exciting if you're a fan of the CFL West division here and just looking at the standings wild to see here. Wild to see BC at the top three in one Saskatchewan here, both with the winds on that Calgary holding steady. But yeah, you certainly not surprised to see Edmonton. You're the bottom of any standings right now and that's certainly something we'll talk about with Jason. But the Winnipeg in my wildest dreams Jason, I don't know if I would've ever expected Winnipeg at this point. People obviously when I was tweeting with the lucky Whitehead BC riot started in oh and five and they won the Great Cup and all that, I think this feels different. This feels like Winnipeg has quite the uphill battle. It feels like their luck has kind of caught up to them. Everything's not luck from what they've had their success the last couple of years, but they have had a degree to luck to be able to make it to four straight great cups. They have been a team that's been remarkably healthy and that has just not been the case this year. I mean they're also pushing their luck with a lot of players that were getting into their mid thirties, so I think at the end of the day it just be their time to start falling off. I think that it's not always a graceful decline for a lot of these great teams we see in sports. It's usually just a big fall off a lot of the time and it's tough to see if you're a Winnipeg Blue Bombers fan because you figured they would at least be competitive. A lot of people were picking BC coming into the year to make it to the Gray Cup out west, but I think a lot of people thought Winnipeg would be right there in that conversation and so far this year just can't even just get anything together. The interesting and my question for you, you talked with Calis because I've seen both sides, right? Oh well this is exposing and it was always the tools around him and then you're saying that you don't think Claros can trust the guys as much and a lot of the, where do you place the blame on that? Is it Zach not trusting? Is it Zach not having the elite receivers around him? What do you make of that? And I want to talk Shoveler as well. The interesting thing with Zach is that he's had some up and down years in the CFL, we've seen him at his best the last few years, but for the most part of his CFL career, he's had some good seasons and had some very mediocre seasons. Looking back to his time with Saskatchewan Hamilton after a really hot start in Hamilton really tailed off. So I mean if you don't surround him with players, I think that he's definitely best in what he's shown so far this year. But I think at the end of the day's a definitely does need those star players around him. He's definitely not one of those. He is going to make the Hall of Fame but he's not one of those guys I'd put in terms of those all time, just plug him into any situation and he's going to have success. I think he's a guy that really needs those star players around him to step up and he's definitely had that ever since he arrived in Winnipeg, most notably on the offensive line, which has taken a big step back so far this year and that running game, which they've always had kind of always been their bread and butter since he's gotten there with Andrew Harris and now with Brady Oliveira, the last have not been able to get that running game going and it's putting even more the ball with the pass and unfortunately with those receiver injuries that they've had, it's been very tough for them to do. Yeah, you saw Zach get beat up, you saw him laying down, eyes closed, I bet he wished he could have just kind of laid there for the rest of the season, just kind of how everything's going. Weird here to have Ara not even lead rusher here, right? Obviously STR running for some yards on that it seems that Yeah, they can't get Avera signed the big deal he's had the injury stuff. We've seen Augustine a little bit, I guess thoughts on the Ara downturn right now and I want to get thoughts on Reer because he actually ended up having to play a lot in this game. Yeah, I think with Oliveira he's just clearly not a hundred percent. He just reminds me of one of these players in the NHL playoffs that is playing through something like you just clearly just because seen him at such a high level the year before, it's just not possible to see such a huge drop off from him and I think he just hasn't able to get anything going. He had the previous season and I think he's a guy that they definitely need to be a dynamic player. I think he just sees how much the team's struggling right now and he wants to go out there and help his team as much as he can. But I mean I think he's just the way he looks, he shouldn't even really be out there. I feel like he should be given a couple more weeks to heal and recover from this injury, but the team's struggling so much right now. He definitely wants to be out there with his guys and he was even getting a little frustrated I saw on the sideline during this game because I think he wanted more touches and unfortunately just I think the team seeing as the lack of success he's been having, they just didn't want to give him the ball as much. It was like at the end of the Stanley Cup playoffs like you said, and it was like, oh, Edmonton and David had a torn whatever and this and so you find out them, oh and part of that might be a little bit overblown just like, well we lost but my knee was barely even hanging on here and I couldn't even skate now. But I mean they're playing through a lot. I agree with that and I agree with that assessment of them weird that Vera would be upset like that and wanting more. Yeah, clearly I had not seeing the success thus far with that. With Reer came in a lot. This game obviously went down to overtime. We'll talk through the overtime, but how did Reer look actually taking meaningful snaps here and you have to throw the ball? Well I mean he had that drive at the end force overtime, but other than that he looks like the same old quarterback that we saw back in 2019 when he started games for the blue ballers. A guy that you just don't trust to win with his arm, he's a great athlete, you can use him as a gadget type player, but when you ask him to win games from the pocket with his arm, I don't think he can do it. And I think the jury's still out in whether or not he can be a full-time starting quarterback in this league if he's pressed into action for any decent amount of time. So I think it's going to be very interesting to see if he gets a game next week if Claris is not back. But I mean it looks like it was more a precautionary with Claris. That's what they were saying. I believe Michael Sha was saying after the game. So I think at the end of the day, St Traveler's not a guy you can trust in this league to start games for you and at any consistent level unless you build specific offense directly around his running ability. But they're not running the ball well right now, so that's a big problem for Winnipeg. It is weird because like you said, he had the one good drive coming down forced overtime, but then in the overtime completely air mails is in the end zone, gets the interception, Calgary is able to go and they have that weird with the penalty and that got pushed back and all that. But to me that's the difference between Reer and Cody. Fido last year, gray Cup, there's only in a season in a game there's a couple throws you got to make and you can go 50 50 on that and that's the difference between kind of an elite quarterback and not did you like. Right. First is this first overtime game of the season. I am trying to track that we had none in the UFL. I know Mike's a big fan of that. Mike Mitchell, is this the first overtime game we've had? Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, but I think Saskatchewan and Hamilton were close but they threw the interception right there at the last minute and broke my heart again. So his thoughts on that then when exciting, I mean exciting stuff Calgary proves while you always go second in overtime and see what you need to do, thoughts on the overtime win of that of like you said, struggler kind of failing that risk and then Calgary being able to capitalize One specific thing when you look at Calgary stamped sent to felt like they were sending the heat, especially on that interception on the last play of didn't see the field, didn't see the guys coming, didn't have a hot route planned out and unfortunately just like you said, air mailed a ball in the end zone that was pretty easily intercepted. So I pressure, well I think the stamps deserve a lot of Job defensively this season. I think it's not one of the best defenses in the league, but I think it's been very confident to start the season. Cameron Judge has been playing very well for them. Daria Houston got an interception in this one because he was a big part of their off season because he was a guy that they brought in from Winnipeg. He had nine interceptions last year, seven interceptions led the league interceptions last year. So I think that's a good sign for Calgary. The jury's still out on Jake Mayer and whether or not he can be, I'll say, but I think at the end of the day he's looked pretty good so far. The stamps are two in one. They've looked competitive in every game and it was getting a little bit dicey down to the end when Winnipeg tied it because it would've been really bad if Calgary blew this game because when are they ever going to beat Winnipeg if they blew this game. So I think at the end of the day, huge for them to get a win and break a huge losing streak against Winnipeg. Yeah. Let's talk here a little Jake Mayer, I think that's one of the talking points this week as well that Jake's still throwing a million attempts for all this decent here, 2 39 going heavy interception. How's he looking? What's your assessment of him? I agree. I think Calgary has looked pretty good this year, right? They're third in the west. I wanted to talk through Saskatchewan and the injury because obviously by a week this week we'll talk Trevor Harris, but yeah, I mean Jake seems to be doing all right. Yeah, most definitely. I think especially compared to last year where he got off to a really rocky start, he's lucked very steady to start the season and it doesn't look like every second throw was going to turn to an interception. So I think that's a big improvement over last year for Jake. I think the biggest takeaway from watching their offense, I think they played really well so far, but they just don't have that explosive element and I think until they get that and unlock that part of their offense, if it's even there, I think they're not going to be one of those upper echelon teams or be able to beat those up echelon teams in the league like a BC or a Montreal right now. So I think at the end of the day, that's one thing they really need to work on as an offense. They really need to get the running game going, really no help from the running game in this one you average less than four yards per carrying the CFL on the ground. That's pretty rough. So I think at the end of the day, pretty good game from Jake considering the running game wasn't there. He had an interception in this one that wasn't too great, but I think at the end of the day it was a pretty good game for them and it's a pretty good start to the season similar to Ottawa. Well, and I saw interesting, and I don't know if this is just my UFL bleeding into my life here, but a lot of talk right now like CFL attendance and fan interest. I think ratings have been decent, but I didn't even think even Michael Ball has been posting about attendance. I'm like, oh, maybe we should get Michael on to do a UFL recap, but good to see Calgary getting the win at home, right? They've struggled at McMahon for attendance and getting the interest in there. Like we said, we talked and just making the playoffs isn't enough. You need to actually have success. I don't care to be the sixth best team in the league and to get balanced in the playoffs isn't anything to be excited about. I dunno, it feels like arrows up on Calgary right now as far as I can tell. Excuse me. Any other assessments on them? I want to talk to Saskatchewan here. Not too much on Calgary. I mean I think they have a really tough schedule coming up similar to Hamilton. They play Winnipeg again in a couple of weeks, so that'll be a big test for them. I think they have Montreal this week, so another big test for them. So we're going to see what this team's made of. Are they going to be closer to those oh and four teams that we talked about or are they going to be really one of those teams as one of these teams for home Field Advantage come playoff time? We'll find out very shortly for the stamps. So we have the news come out. I think I saw Naylor, I think Brit Gray and Naylor co-signed and tweeted Trevor Harris going to to be out six weeks at knee injury, right? He says, I mean today is my birthday. Trevor Harris had his birthday a couple months ago. We are the same age. No surprise to me at all. I mean you don't want to see anyone injured, but I can't imagine putting Trevor Harris at 38 in this position. Thoughts on the injury because like I said, Saskatchewan's second in the division right now, but I mean you're going to Wright Mason fine here for the next six weeks. Thoughts on the injury? And then what does Saskatchewan do? They're actually going to shape Patterson because they cut Mason fine. That's right, That's right. Preseason Thoughts on Shay? Yeah, us FL draft number one, draft pick 2022. Well, he's a guy that really didn't impress me from a Hamilton fan perspective watching them when he came to the game last week, but it's hard to tell when a guy comes in and didn't get the full week of prep. So we'll have to see how he does in his first CFL start this week. I think it's against Toronto on Thursday night, so that'll be a really interesting matchup. I believe it's in Saskatchewan too, so maybe he has a chance to pull one out and get Saskatchewan to 4.0. But it's just tough to see as a rough riders if you're a rough riders fan because it's almost like deja vu from the last couple of seasons where their quarterback suffered some kind of injury. Even though Cody fdo was able to play through a lot of that injury a couple of years ago. He wasn't the same after getting nicked up early in the season and they went on that big backslide the second half of the year though, each of the last couple of years. So it's certainly not surprising, like you said that Trevor Harris got injured, a 38-year-old quarterback that's not very mobile behind a pretty bad offensive line all things considered. So I think that it's going to be very interesting to see how they do because Trevor Harris was looking very good out there and he just seemed like a guy that could be in contention for an MOP this season. But unfortunately 38 years old, very hard to stay healthy in this league. So we had on Darren bombing last week, bonfire sports and Darren's wealth of football knowledge far outweighs mine and I couldn't even hope to have as much football knowledge as Darren has. But when he said that Shay Patterson was the second best, the best backup quarterback in the C ffo, I almost spit up my water on the laptop. I mean, Shay is not it. I don't care if he came in and was rushed and didn't feel whatever. I mean we've seen Shay Yeah, I agree. Coach Crank here checking in. They should have kept dola gala. They should have kept Mason fine. They should have kept with, I don't see Shea Patterson being it. I do not see that that's an answer. And as you said, Toronto here at Saskatchewan, I think Toronto defense is going to absolutely murder Shea Patterson here. I think we might see a funeral here at Jose Stadium. Just thoughts on that, this match. Yeah, I know we talked about it, but any other thoughts on that? I see this being Toronto, going in with a sledgehammer here. Well, it's weird because I think the history has shown us that there are guys that are a better fit for the CFL game than they are for the NFL game at quarterbacks. So maybe who knows, he can have some kind of success as a starter here for Saskatchewan briefly. But ultimately, like I said, I don't have much confidence in that happening. He's been around the league for a few years, been a third stringer somewhere, being the short yardage guy for a couple of different places. But I think in terms of being a guy you can trust to win games, especially going up against a very, very good Toronto Argonauts defense. I know they didn't fight too well. We'll get to that in a minute, but I think at the end of the day it's going to be very tough for them to win the game. But it could just win a couple of games before Trevor Harris gets back. I think that's going to be the key because you're not, you're not going to win all of these games or even a majority of them, but even if they can split these next four or five games or whatever it is until Trevor Harris gets back, I think that will be a huge win for Saskatchewan. Well, easier said than done here, Toronto at Saskatchewan, then they're facing bc, then they're facing Winnipeg. That might be maybe. And then at Montreal here it's tough. Then they get a buy. No, no, they don't Edmonton. There you go. Week nine, pencil in your first wins, whatever wins is going to be. Yeah, just wild. But like I said, you see this coming and we always stay on here and I will say this the same thing and we'll talk bc, but something is going to happen to Vernon Adams. And this is a concern to me, and I know we have DOLA Gala, the backup, but you can't rely on these guys to stay healthy that long. And to me it's insanity that you would. I love Corey Mac and we've talked about that and they've been playing up to him, but it's insanity to me that you would have your season tied to Trevor Harris at this point. People I don't know. And it must be said that almost the second most important position on a CFL team the last several years has become the backup quarterback because almost every quarterback misses some time during the season. We only had one quarterback start all 18 games last year, and that was Jake Mayer. So I think it's a huge part of a CFL team building these days is getting that backup quarterback position solidified and like I said, don't have that much confidence in Patterson to get it done. And I definitely disagreed with Darren Balming as well when I watched that show, that interview you had on your show this week. So I think at the end of the day, you'll have to prove me wrong, We had to hear a question about the American ratio rule and being only able to play certain downs that was with the new CBA that come out or came out and that you're only able to play so much they want, is that they should talk about this. I presume that means us, we should talk about it. But yeah, I mean that's something that came into effect last season, right going in. They were talking about that Tim White with the Hamilton game. Yeah, it came in. Maybe it's, I'm trying to think if it was implemented last year or this year, because I know the CBA was signed last year before training camp, right? Or was it 2022? Yeah, I always forget. But anyway, the rule is basically it was designed to get Veteran American players more playing time and stick around when they're not going to necessarily be a starter on a team. But unfortunately this rule has kind of been abused and you see even star players being that designated American throughout the game, like the tie cats, they were talking about it a lot on the broadcast last night that Tim White was the designated American for the TCATs, and ultimately they were talking about, oh, how many plays is he allowed to play and whatnot. And to be honest, I don't even fully understand the role, which really, I think that's the crux of the issue right there is that the average football fan, diehard football fan like me can't even fully explain it to people. So I think at the end of the day, it definitely needs some tweaks. I think the CFL's heart was in the right place when they put in this rule, but I think at the end of the day, the implementation of it and trying to track this 51%, 49% of snaps kind of thing for nationalized Americans, I think is a very complicated thing. And I think at the end of the day, it definitely needs some tweaking. There's a spider running across my laptop here. Interesting. Let's go on here. We got two more games we got to get out of here. I have birthday dinner plans tonight. Very excited for that. Let's get into this Toronto Montreal game kind of build. This was going to be the game of the weekend thus far. I think that's what we had the thumbnail out for. All that stuff. Toronto lost. We saw Brian Scott sighting. Was that now I caught up on this game. Was that injury or was that just like, Hey, we're out of it here. Why did Brian Scott make an appearance? Did we lose hussy? I think we lost Jason. Yeah, talking through this with the Brian Scott finally had a touchdown for Toronto here coming near the end. They said it was funny. This is the payoff to the Toronto fans sticking around for all that stuff. Jason, did we get you back or are you still lost? No, let's remove him. Let's see if he gets that figured out, Jason. Then we got to get the Canadian internet situation figured out here. Anyway, Montreal came in. Yeah, yeah, I know. It was interesting. I'm just curious. Again, I was recapping this, if there's, hey, we're setting shutting Dukes down for the game or having Brian come in, good to see. Talked with Brian. I saw him on the sidelines of the game. I think it was last week, I got a screen recorded that said to him, always enjoyed talking with a friend of the show. Brian Scott, MVP of the Spring League. Two time champion for that. What's exciting here, but Montreal coming in, really taking care of business. Did not think this was close. Toronto, like I said, got the touchdown near the end to kind of keep it looking better at the scoreboard. But yeah, not to be here. Cody looking pretty decent here, throwing almost 300 yards at a lot of attempts on that. Walter Fletcher, not really a run game on this one. We saw James Letcher coming in, had a couple big returns. Let's get Jason back in here and see if we can get going here. Jason, friend of the show, James Letcher having quite a bunch of kickoff returns here. What did you make of this one, Montreal coming and really steamrolling Toronto at home? Well, this game is the one I saw the least of this week, unfortunately because I was kind of flipping back and forth with the NHL draft. I wanted to see who my red wings were going to take. So didn't catch all of this game, but it was slipping back and forth I thought. Same old story with Montreal. They're a well-oiled machine. They're dominating in all phases. They just seem like a team that it's going to be a team that doesn't beat themselves. And I think that's always a very hard team to go up against. I think Cody Fido, same old story with him, and I think the most impressive thing about him in this game is that the running game was virtually non-existent for Montreal at all in this game. And that there were still able to move the ball on offense. And that's something that I definitely wouldn't have seen from them last season. So a lot of the receivers are having breakthrough seasons. It looks like having Reggie White back in the receiving court really rounds out that receiving court with another big body. Tyson Phil Pott's breakout season continues. Cole Speaker, another great game from him. And I think the dress Andry also pulled another one of those onside punt things, which my thoughts on that rule, but all credit to him for pulling it off once again. So Montreal, just a well-oiled machine like I said, and another very impressive victory from them About, I forgot to talk about that. So I'm glad and Tim bring into that here. Tim Alette fight deck. Checking in here. Tim always seems to chime in a lot when the alette victory, so it must be nice living that life. Yeah, I saw a lot in the three. Damn, if you don't like this play, you can just move south. I think there are plenty of CFL fans that do not like this play. Jason, would you like to pontificate now if people don't, it's fine. I'm not, again, I'm going to pull what's left of my hair out. I just think it's annoying, but to me it's not so much the play that's annoying, it's in everyone. It's the aftermath of we'll just get the hell out of our country if you don't like this. This is Canadian football. It's like a weird loophole. What's your thoughts on this? I just think it looks stupid. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like football to me personally, but maybe that's just the fact that I watched a lot of NFL growing up and maybe I'm just too Americanized from that perspective to enjoy the finer nuances of the CFL game. But I think at the end of the day, yeah, it just doesn't make sense to me why you would get a first down in that situation. But we've been over this before. I think that this is a very controversial topic. I don't think it's as big of a deal as a lot of people make. It sounded out to be. I mean, you don't really gain any yardage from doing it, but I think at the end of the day it doesn't look like a football play. And that's why I've never really been in favor of it. I want to see just living the life that we have with the UFL and them and them using the NFL kickoff modified now and the NFL using the XFL kickoff and that whole thing. I would love to see Daryl Moose Johnston's reaction to this punt and it just happened to be like, I don't know what this, I would just love to lock Darryl in a room and be like, we're going to show you this play. I mean, I think Darryl's head would explode. He certainly didn't like the XFL kickoff. He wanted it to look like more traditional football. Tim doesn't see the outrage, Tim. That's fine. A lot of other people do. So Tim, it's fine if you don't want to see the outrage, that is fine. I see outrage in a lot of things if people don't, people see outrage in things that I don't. But back to the game here, when you were resetting, we did see a Brian Scott here mop up duty at the end. How did flowing locks Cameron Duke's look in this before the game was out of hand? Well, I mean this was your classic comeback down to earth kind of game. I don't think he played that terribly, but compared to how he played the first couple of games this season where he looked really good, it definitely was a step up in competition playing against a red hot ettes defense. I think he's a guy that he's still very early in his career in terms of starting games. I think this is what his fifth start in the league. So it's going to be very interesting to see how he plays going forward as defense has continued to get more film on him. But I really don't hold much against Cameron Dukes in this one, given that he was going up against that buzz saw of Ettes defense Mean, and we'll get to the last game here. We got 10 minutes left. We'll get out. I mean the ettes are on a different level right now. I mean we've talked about this every week. We just surprised at just how much, I dunno, just how much better they looked at any other team right now. It's really remarkable. Yeah, absolutely. And then I think they kind of remind me of that Green Bay Packers team back in the day that Aaron Rogers won his one Super Bowl with I think that last six or seven games of the season. They won all the regular season and they won four playoff games in a row and then I think they went 15 and one the next year. They went something like a whole calendar year without losing a game. I think Montreal is kind of on that same trajectory right now, starting four and over of this season. But I will say this, and it's definitely worth pointing out that not often does the best team in the regular season the CFL win the Great Cup. It's pretty rare. Well, not pretty rare, but it doesn't always happen. And we've seen that in recent memory where there've been a lot of upsets in the big game and in the playoffs so I think at the end of the day, peaking too early, it could be a possibility for Ettes, but for right now, just really no complaints from what I've seen from them so far. Yeah, peaking too early. That's certainly a thing. Or playing your best football here. Are you surprised in sight football related but I think it was PKP, right? Had our interview this week. There's no money to be made in football or at least in the short term and talking about that and a lot of people correct him of no, there's no money to be made in CFL football I money to be made in American football. But I just, thoughts on that? I thought that was really good. Three down had the writeup on that. I thought that was a good article. Just talking about that and rebuilding the franchise. And I know we've had Tim and Cliff on talking about the resurgence with the owls and everything great for the league, but just thoughts on anything coming up from that? I completely agree with what Pierre Cal Pedo said. I think that ultimately you're not in this league to make money really. I think there's just not the money to be had. Like he said, I think in certain markets you can be profitable, but I think in a small league like this that's so dependent on gate revenue, I think it's really impossible to have all the teams kind of like having a lot of financial success at the same time, which was what would be required really for this league to be very profitable. And I think given the certain situations that certain teams are in stadium wise, Montreal, it's a great location for that stadium, but definitely needs more repairs to that facility or a new facility altogether for that team McMahon in Calgary. And I think that kind of drags down what a lot of these teams can make out of their bottom line. So I think at the end of the day, I kind of agree with Pierre Cadel that there's no money to be made in CFL football. It's more like philanthropy kind of thing for some of these rich owners. So I think at the end of the day, I think he's the right owner for that team. He really has no problem. If you read the interview, I thought he was very comfortable with where the alloys were at. He says there's no pressure for them to draw profit anytime soon or obviously they want to be less in the red. But I think at the end of the day you need an owner that's willing to sit through the bad times with the franchise even when the times are pretty good right now for the ettes on the field. So I think it's a big part of the CFL game to have ownership that's willing to fund the team regardless of the bottom line. Yeah, it must be nice. Buy team win a great cup, but finally everyone can be so lucky. Let's get to the last game here before we get out now BC I was like, I came home from the Kalin Clark game. I had this on. I was like, okay, we got the field goal. Okay, they got, okay, we're going to be able to get this taken care of here. Did I Fever Dream? I thought Williams stand back had a rushing touchdown. Did I Fever Dream that? Was it in? Oh he had a receiving touchdown. Yeah, I see it right there. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think back all the way to Thursday night. I know Fever Dream. So BC taking care of business, barely walk off field goal. I tweeted that Sean White, are you kidding me? Thoughts on this one? It is beginning to be at the point now that Spider has crawled up my leg and under my shorts. You don't want to be the team that drops to Edmonton, right? It's almost becoming that. Now, thoughts on this game. I know it's been a long time ago here, but BC first in the west obviously with the stands right now, but thoughts on this game? I thought it was an overall very entertaining game. Edmonton has definitely been a more exciting watch this year, which has helped in enjoying some of these games that they've been a part of. But I think bc, I think I've liked what I've seen from Vernon Adams so far this season, even though they're not really hitting their full stride in terms of the explosiveness of the offense in comparison to the last two years as of yet. I think that he's been very steady. You look at it every week he's just ends up around 300 yards completing a good percentage of his passes, just really solid stat line and just looking very comfortable in this BC lions offense. And I think they're definitely on track to still be one of the best teams in this league. They had to really be, it was really close at the end of this game, but I think that's more of a result of how Edmonton is really fighting to get that first win right now. They almost were able to, but unfortunately for them BC was able to get that last second field goal and walk it off there at the end where it was around 1:00 AM Eastern time here on Thursday night. So I think at the end of the day, pretty good stuff from BC and Edmonton just breaking the hearts of their fans yet again. Yeah, sparse crowd, excuse me, following the 50 cent and all that, if it was me and I agree BC is good. There's a lot of these teams that aren't great right now. I think bc I wish I could take a shock paddle to Rick Campbell. I would just love to wake him up a little bit because every single one of these post games told you, I watch all, I don't watch all of every team, but I watch every Rick Campbell the little thing they post and sponsored by whatever automotive and all that stuff and he's like, well we won. We didn't get it all together. If we get it all together we could be really dangerous. It's just such the, we got everything we needed. I dunno want them. I just want it to feel like there's some sort of urgency at all. I don't know. We're trying to get everything figured out here and just, to me it doesn't feel like, not that there needs to be urgency in week four going into five, but you are hosting the gray company of this year. There is a lot of that. This is probably the last window you have with VA and all this pieces really get this going. I don't know. To me I would just like a little bit more umph there. BC is great but yeah, they're lacking any sort of a really sexy excitement right now. It just feels like they're kind of going through the motions. Yeah, Rick Campbell is certainly not the most energetic coach I would say. Doesn't seem like he galvanizes the team, at least in terms of what you hear from him talking to the media. But I think at the end of the day, like I said before, he's a hard coach to figure out whether or not he makes such a positive impact on the team or not. Like I said, I think that BC is looking very good this season. I thought that their defense is starting to look good in some areas again, hasn't really hit their full stride on that side of the ball. And like I was saying with Montreal, maybe BC's not really peaking early in the season. Maybe their best football is still yet to come later on this season. They're still dealing with incorporating a lot of new pieces into this team. I think with the injury to Keon Hatcher and the receiving core, that was definitely a difference to their receiving core going into this season. And they're still trying to work in some guys like Aiden Eberhart who had a big game in this one. So I think in trying to establish William stand back as the new running back, tried to run the ball in some key situations in this one to some success but not terrific looking at the 3.8 yards per carry that stand back average. So I think at the end of the day BC is still looking pretty good. But like I said, they haven't really had one game where you're like, wow, this team is really a contender for the best team in the league. What do you think of this David Mackey thing here? We're trying to kind of use him Shorty Yarded, she had the fumble there near the end and I think had the rushing touchdown for that. But thoughts on that because obviously we've had the Vernon and we got rid of Proof Cop and kind of all that stuff. I reading that right or we kind using him so we don't get Vernon beat up, but thoughts on that? Yes, it's very interesting because Hamilton's doing a very similar thing with Ante who's a backup Canadian running back who has been taking the snaps for a lot of the short yard situations for Hamilton. So it's interesting that both of these teams are using a similar route, really trying to limit the amount of hits that they're starting quarterbacks take. And when you're running those shorty yardage plays, you ideally want a bigger quarterback that can really move the pile and not every quarterback room in the league necessarily has one of those players. So I mean I guess this is a better alternative than using Adams as the Shorty Yards quarterback in my opinion. But it definitely is an interesting experiment because they're not used to position players like that, are not used to getting the snap from under center like that. So maybe you get some mistakes like that with the exchange from the Hamilton Tigercat and the BC Lions. So yeah, it's going to be interesting experiment to see going forward. But I kind of like the thinking from the Lions. Last thought here. Is Cornelius around for 10 bucks? Can we get him on, I was looking up, he's a free agent. Is that not someone we can just bring in to short yardage year? I don't. It feels very makeshift to me. This was the last thing I got to get out of here, but just thoughts on, I know to me this is one of those things that's going to come back to bite BC in the ass. I think, Yeah, I mean Cornelius is a strange one because I thought some team was going to fall in love with the physical ability. The fact that he does have a very strong arm can run. He had several big rushing games when he was with Edmonton, but obviously he had such a poor record as their starting quarterback that maybe teams have been like, yeah, we've seen enough film. We'd rather just go in a different direction in terms of bringing in a backup. So I'm kind of shocked that he's still in the streets right now. Maybe he gets signed in the middle of the season here, like Lucky Whitehead just did. But at the end of the day, no bites so far it looks like for him. And it'll be interesting to see if he does get signed by the end of the year. Alright, we're going to get out of here. Thank you Jason. We fought through internet. I appreciate that. Thanks everyone. Check it out and subscribe. Thumbs up the video, hopefully give a thumbs up. You're watching Big interview tomorrow, Oliver Luck. I guess it'll be on the CFL. I think it's CFL this week on the Tie Katz Radio. That's awesome. I don't even know where that is. So Jason I'm sure will let me know and how if we can find that and share and everything else. But I appreciate it. We'll see everyone next time. Thanks everyone.

Buy or Sell? Was UFL 2024 a Financial Success?

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast Reid here. Really great episode today. Appreciate everyone for stopping by to check it out. Rounding out, rounding down our UFL 2024 coverage moving into the CFL. But we have one last great interview to bring you today, longtime friend of the program Ben Fisher coming on. Ben had his big article last week talking about profitability or lack thereof in the UFL in in season one, TV revenue ratings, all that stuff. So we're bringing Ben Fisher on getting his thoughts about the profitability of the UFL moving forward. How did the season perform? Did it meet standards, expectations? Ben's thoughts on the UFL TV ratings versus N-H-L-M-L-S, that whole comparison. How easy would franchising these teams be to local owners? All sorts of great stuff with Ben. If you appreciate the work that we're doing on the podcast, please like and subscribe, give the video a thumbs up. Doesn't cost you a penny. You can also join the channel 99 cents a month. Really appreciate that. Going to have another big giveaway here. We'll announce coming up. Likely some customized jerseys perhaps. We'll see here. Keep you guys posted on that. But get us up to 4,000 subscribers. Should have some cool items coming your way. And then our CFL coverage today, we have Darren bombing a Bonfire Sports coming on the Owen, three Winnipeg blue bombers at what a time to be alive. Darren coming on talking everything. CFL West division including the bombers, BC Lions, Elks, all of that good stuff. And then Mike Hogan, the boys of the Toronto Argonauts coming on. We are getting his thoughts on the Argonauts. They're off to a hot star here. Even Sands, Chad Kelly and everything. Cameron Duke's running wild flowing hair. Really appreciate it. It's been exciting watching the A on that. Who would've thought so getting full CFL coverage as well. So Ben Fisher, Darren Bing, Mike Hogan. We will be back at the end of the program like and subscribe. We'll see you the end. Thanks. Well I appreciate this. We bring on this gentleman X-F-L-U-S-F-L now UFL. We're talking Ben Fisher over at the Sports Business Journal. Ben had this big article here talking the building blocks UFL season one. We got some questions here. We'll get through. Jen, excuse me, Ben, general thoughts here going in, I guess general thoughts you have help before we get into anything specific? Well, just that we've been watching Spring Football League start and stop for a long time and this seems to be in as good a position as any of them, at least from the curb from a thousand miles away. How to say it, not being inside the organization. I don't really know what their books look like, but they seem to be as good position as any of 'em for a term survival. When you heard, and obviously we covered the XFL and USFL separately and now the merger. When you heard of the merger, them coming together, did that strike you as a merger of strengths, a merger of necessity? What did you make of just that general thought process? I just thought it, I mean I thought it was crazy they were competing against each other to begin with. I mean, I don't think it takes a business expert to understand that there hasn't been a single professional league succeed in a long time, much less too, and that while Americans love football, this is very expensive and that it probably is the best way to go about it if you put all of your effort into a single entity. So it didn't surprise me they merged and I think it's the classic case where both leagues had some good markets and some good things, but neither one of them have really developed a full fledge league and you take the strengths of both leagues together and that's probably your best bet going forward. We saw a lot of shift focus here to Fox A, B, C over the air networks, higher, better time slots. We saw the championship game, I think 1.5, I had it around 1.4 estimated. Did the TV ratings meet or exceed your expectations for them coming in? I think overall the season wide average slightly exceeded my expectations. They were more than acceptable. I think from the league's perspective. I think what most impressed me and I thought was probably the best thing that they could talk about was not the league-wide average or the season wide average, but the numbers in the last week of the regular season and the postseason numbers generally got better. I think for people that are building a property like this, you just want to see growth from week to week that it's almost, if you had to choose, it's almost better to have a low average that was growing or at least didn't fall off over time than it is to necessarily have a big number that saw a decline in the dealership. So I think they're really pleased about that and that's probably to me the most encouraging thing for them is that they got people to tune in at the most important parts of the year. We talked last time about what to expect for TV ratings for these averaging high eight hundreds going in, like I said, over a million for the championship. Does that tell you casual audiences this is resonating or is this just okay, they're on better time slots now, so of course they're going to do better? That's a good question. To what extent the difference between 600,000, 800,000 is just on a network versus on a cable channel. I think that does explain most of it, but on the other hand, that doesn't entirely matter. I think from an advertising sales perspective, from a market share of the viewing audience perspective, 800,000 to a million is reasonably good for a brand new property. So even if that is just a function of putting on better times and better channels, I think they'll take that. In terms of the bump that we saw this year, a lot of it was touted and that he had the Mike Mulva Hills, whatever, a Fox saying, okay, look at this 40%, you're not going to see that again next year. Is that, I guess how do you work that narrative next year then when you don't have that same 40% growth? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean that's the problem with all TV ratings. That's the NFL's problem is that you have a 10% bump next year. One year that makes it all the harder to get another growth narrative the next year. And I still think there's room to go with UFL in terms of optimizing viewership windows. It won't be this huge because look, when you take a game from FX or Fox Sports two to a B, C, that's a huge bump and you're not going to get those types of bumps next year. But there's still some stuff they can do to improve that. I think we'll get into the Friday night move I'm sure. But no, I think you're right that next year's growth is going to have to be more organic I think is maybe the word we're looking for. Is this because of an actual increase in the awareness or interest or is it just easier to find? And right now it's hard to parse those numbers next year if they're going to grow by another double digit percentage growth number, it's going to have to be organic. So in some ways getting to the year two is the hard part or is the easy part and showing that growth next year is going to be the hard part I think. Yeah, talking to Fridays originally there was like, oh, are they adding teams? Are we doing And then it came out, no, we're doing the eight teams, we're rolling back. So the move to Friday is relegating some of those games to make room for racing right on Fox does that, I mean now it's the shiny new toy is kind of how I look at it. How do you view that from Fox in that they're going to move those games? Yeah, I mean when I first saw that news, I wondered about it. I muttered to myself a little bit because like, well, okay, the moment you get a new motor sports property, you immediately demote UFL. It doesn't sound like you're really committed to this, but they have explained to me that maybe I'm looking at it a little bit the wrong way that they think Friday night means more Fox Network and less FS one and that is a net positive. If Friday night guarantees it's going to be on the Fox broadcast network instead of a Fox cable channel, then that's worth it. And they've also pushed back on my presumption that all things being equal Saturday and Sunday afternoons and evenings are better than Friday night for viewership. I mean, that's a longstanding presumption in my mind, but I guess in Fox's defense they've had WE on Friday nights for some time and those get pretty good numbers and I think the WE audience is close, if not exactly the audience they'd like to develop with the UFL. So if they believe they can get two 3 million people for wrestling on Friday night, then maybe UFL is just right as they fox on the Fridays. So I've come around a little bit on that from my initial perception that this was a bad side. I'm sure you've never had that before as a reporter asking someone like, oh no Ben, you're just looking at this wrong. We are looking at the correct way. I'm sure that's never happened. Well, that's why I asked the question because I've been doing this for a long time and I think I know the world, but I got to remind myself, I'm a writer, not a TV media strategist, I will say last known on Fridays as opposed to having where we had some simulcast this year kind of region locked. Maybe if you got rid of that, okay, we're having standalones on Friday versus two competing games. I guess that would be one way to spin that as well. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I mean if it's a standalone in theory mean that does well even though the NFL is going backwards and doing some of their Monday night Doubleheaders where the two games are going on at the same time, the NFL is at a totally different level with their numbers. So I mean I think generally speaking, UFL fans, even if it is Friday night, which is on paper not as good a night because more people are out with dinner with their spouses or whatever and less people watching football, if you can get those into standalone windows on broadcast networks, that's probably a net gain where the numbers are right now In terms of this NHL versus UFL or MLS, and obviously we just saw the Stanley cut big ratings, but we see that all the time to me, and we've talked before on here about franchise values and all of that. Is that an apples to apples comparison when you have 10 weeks of UFL versus however many weeks of NBA or NHL? Yeah, well, I mean your question is on the right track that it's not totally fair to compare one of 82 NHL games to one of 10 UFL games. I think just by their nature, the NHL and MLS games are less valuable than any given football game. But from the TV people's perspective, it's a fair cop because the point of the UFL isn't to beat all sports, it's to beat what Fox and ESPN and A BC would otherwise be putting on TV on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon in the spring. And the reason NHL comes up is because that would be something that you might traditionally think of as a classic April Saturday afternoon television option, and I think they compare favorably to that. So you're right, it's not totally apples and apples, but I think they're happy and it makes the point that Eric Shanks and Fox has always tried to make is that we're not comparing ourselves to the NFL, we're comparing ourselves to what is otherwise on TV this time of year. We think we can improve our viewership and our ad revenue by putting on this, Where do you stand in the TV revenue versus gates and getting people into the stands? We talk about this a lot in my view, in terms of what are we selling these franchises for down the road, but you hear this all the time, well, the gate revenue doesn't matter. So I'm just curious your thoughts on that. Is the UFL leaning too much into being the TV only product? Yeah, well, I mean as you and your listeners or viewers know for a sophisticated mature, the TV revenues are everything. I mean, it's a hugely disproportionate number at the NFL and the other leagues, so I understand why they start there, but I think in my story they acknowledged that they need to approve the gates. They are somewhat interconnected. We all learned during the pandemic that the TV product suffers if there's not a critical mass of people in the stands, and to some extent the fans at a game are extras or are in the TV show, and if you overcorrect and go to and say, we only care about tv, you're going to have an inferior TV product there. And I think for a league like the UFL, you have to balance both. I mean as much as maybe in 30 years if this is a success, the TV rights or the TV revenue will dwarf the gate revenue. Right now you've got to have more gate revenue than you do right now if for no other reason that you have to convince local people that it's worth putting money into it in the NFL right now. Sure, seven out of $10 in the NFL comes from the national TV rights, but one of the reasons the teams are so strong is that local hospital systems and local grocery stores can go to a game and give out free samples and do sweepstakes and give away t-shirts at the game. It's both a live event business in a local city and a global broadcast opportunity. And right now UFL is somewhat successful on the broadcast side and except for St. Louis pretty much failing on the local event side. You really have to be both. Just a side note, were you surprised at just how the other attendance, just how much better St. Louis was just nothing else really seemed to crack that mark? Are you surprised? Not entirely because I think with the USFL teams, there wasn't much effort put into that at all under the upmost systems. So I just don't know, even if your average person even in Birmingham, well they might know, but does your average person, if you just stopped the first a hundred people on the street in San Antonio, how many of them would even know about the existence of the bra? So that doesn't surprise me entirely. What surprises me still, I know it's been written about but still is how strong St. Louis is. It's really something because I think they're right where UFL would want. If every team could be what St Louis is, they would be, this would be a grand slam for sure, Except when their team isn't in the championship game and then they sit at home and then That was unfortunate, but I still think they did a decent attendance number for that championship game. It just wasn't quite battle hogs level In terms of the selling off the franchises, this has been the goal and it was five years, whatever, and now it's seven years. How realistic is that from you? I know we did a deep dive on kind the MLS model of that before when you were on, but you'd have to deal with Fox and Redbird and Danny. There's a lot of cooks in that. Do you view that as even possible? Well, you're right to anticipate that being difficult from a contractual financial standpoint. What are you really buying? Are you diluting the current shareholders in this league? What exactly does that deal look like? I think there'd be a lot of skepticism that you could find in agreement where the price would be, right. So let's, for the sake of argument, let's say you want to become the owner operator of the St. Louis Battle hogs. You get X percent of the overall league with the right to operate St. Louis. What is that worth? I think right now there would be maybe a very big difference of opinion on what exactly somebody should pay for that, but there's financial analysts and modelers. I think they could get to that point. I don't mean to get too hung up on that. I think it's completely realistic to think that one day a league could become something that would be something that investors would want. I think it's important for people to remember that alternative asset investing and sports are a very appealing place right now for people with lots of money. They seem to be very stable, they seem to be growing. Everybody likes sports and with high interest rates, it's a good place to put your money rather than just putting it into more traditional financial assets. And I think St. Louis today, there's probably people right now asking about St. Louis. I look at St. Louis, I see a team that is averaging 35,000 people. That's more than a lot of major league baseball teams average in the country's most popular sport. I think the other seven markets probably would probably be struggling to get a serious bidder on some sort of owner operated or grill right now, but DC is not too far behind. They got a good thing going there too, but I don't think it's an unrealistic expectation. I just have to get those attendance numbers to a point that's going to look better across the league. Well, that's where my point always goes back to where people talk about the gate revenue. It's like, yeah, but you need to have more than 6,000 people to want to watch this product in person to make that be a sellable franchise. Yeah, I think and that's the main thing, and you're right, you don't want to be a league that depends on gate revenue. You don't want to be minor league baseball where most of your revenue comes from ticket sales. You want to be a TV first league, but that doesn't mean it's going to be a success without at least 50% of your stadium full or whatever the number is. So obviously the big, not news, but coming out of the article, lack of profitability in the UFL, you wrote about that obviously Fox famously the 60 million loss, which could be more or less that's what they told Forbes. Thoughts on that where the USFL didn't release obviously how well they did the last couple of seasons, thoughts on the UFL losing money and what other insights you got from Fox for that? Yeah, well first of all, I would be, there's nothing surprising to me about that. Of course, this is a money losing effort. It's the core original challenge of spring football is that it's extremely expensive to execute 11 on 11 tackle football, uniquely expensive compared to any other sport and you're just not going to make enough revenue in one year to cover your costs. So none of that surprises me. The name of the game, and we've said this for many years at Sports Business Journal, the successful Spring football league is going to be the one that doesn't get to break even or profitable fast. It's the one that minimizes its losses in that time period before they get to that point. And 60 million, that number seems slightly high for me. Vince McMahon spent hundreds of millions on the 2020 version of it, but I think I estimated that payrolls alone in the UFL this year, were going to be about 25 million for, that's just player payroll. That's not everything else you put into it. So let's say you try to go bare bones and maybe operate this league for one year at 35 or 40 million. I don't think there's any scenario in which your revenue could come close to that. So of course they lose money in the near term. I think it's a little bit of a red herring to talk about profitability or not anyway, because the whole point of the UFL is that Fox and Redbird and Disney are invested in its success and if you say UFL lost money or let's say it made money, but all of their marketing and all of their lawyers are actually on Fox and Disney and Redbirds payroll, that gets real squishy on what even constitutes a profit or loss. I mean, the more appropriate way to look at this is Fox and Disney getting advertising revenue from the UFL games that sufficiently defrays their costs of helping to operate the UFL. And I think the answer right now is yes. Yeah, because I mean that's what I always went back to with the USFL was it felt a little bit more of an upstart with redbird going in and starting this versus USFL, okay, let's have Fox interns kind work on some of this stuff in the meantime. Now I think we're seeing a lot more of that full-time in terms of round out of the conversation before we get out of here talking, moving into next year, we had Darryl Johnson on the show preseason talking about they knew this was a truncated runway to get all this going. Now building into next year, but still kind of having the seasonality of this, where do you put that in terms of the coaches are going to be laid off your seasonally at the end of the month, we might pay them during the summer. How do you operate this business seasonally but still needing to market full season or full year I guess, if that makes sense. Right. And that is the essential challenge facing the people who are deciding how they handle the UFL during the off season right now. And it goes back to the question I just answered where I said is the revenue the UFL creates enough to make us feel like it's worth spending money on it right now. I think when we see things like coaches not getting paid during the off season and we see things like maybe talking about finding better venue deals, but on the other hand starting to pay full-time ticket salesman in the off season we see signs, they will always tell us this is working out financially the way you tell us how much they invest in it. Because when I hear they are not paying coaches in the off season, I think they are still in cost minimization standpoint at all costs. We want to keep a product on the field for as little money as possible, so that's a bad sign. On the other hand, if they're hiring four or five people in every market to go out and buy sell tickets, I think they think that is the case where we are maybe getting a little bit more aggressive with their spending. And coaches don't directly make money. A ticket sales person could pay for their own payroll spot and right now there are literally hundreds of places where Fox and Redbird and Disney could put money into the UFL and every one of them right now is Kaylin this generate enough revenue to justify the position ticket salespeople. They say yes, it has to. Coaches know if there comes a time when coaches are making 12 month salaries, then that's a sign that this is really starting to take off. I think until that point, they're still basically in a, we're just trying to keep this product on the field for as little money as it takes. Last question here. How do you feel about this bullish moving on? Do you think they've learned enough over the last three years? I don't think we would ever think we would get to this position like this, but now that we're here, Like I said at the start, I think this league is in a lot better shape than any other league we've seen come before it. I think the fact that there are two rights holders are also investors, helps a lot on the cost minimization front. I think there's reason to be optimistic about attendance in DC and St. Louis. I think until you see a big jump in butts in seats and kind of the lower tier markets right now, or you see some big true third party revenue generating contract and what I mean by that is some major sponsorship deal where some true blue chip company is putting real money into a relationship with the UFL or you see a big increase in a paid attendance. I still think you have to consider this a little touch and go, so they haven't quite gotten there yet, but I think they're doing all the right things for sure. Ben Fisher Sports Business Journal really appreciate making the time today. Thanks a lot for keeping us informed. Happy to be here anytime. Thanks for having me. Well this is a good time in my life here. Winnipeg oh three never lived through that experience. You're covering the CFLI keep posting. It's like the Meek Mills meme like I've prayed for times like this. Darren Bombing here, bonfire sports, everything. Winnipeg, what the heck? First off, how are you and what the heck's going on with the blue bombers? Yeah, well I I'm doing better than the blue bombers. I say that obviously tongue in cheek oh three, kind of strange. First time a Mike O'Shea head coach team has been oh three. It was 2012 last time Winnipeg was oh three to start a season. But while I am well and I think people here in Winnipeg are doing okay, the bombers are doing okay as well. It's always impressive. The reason Winnipeg has been such a good football team for so long Reid, is that nothing really phases them. They're not a bulletin board team. They're not hard on your sleeve emotional type team. They're a play for your brother, play for your teammate type team, and they do not look at the past. They flush it and move on. The credo that Zach COIs uses is Snap and clear. It doesn't matter if it's an interception or a really bad loss to drop to oh and three or whatever it is. They're just purely focused on the next play. It's very stoic. If any of your viewers out there follow, it's popular right now, the stoic philosophy, it is purely focusing on what you can do about the future. Yeah. Oh and three and then haven't looked good at all. The defense was really bad in week three. Vernon Adams Jr. Your boy lightened things up for 500 yards of total offense, but the offense in Winnipeg has been pretty tepid. Mediocre, below average at best. Yeah. Is it attributed? Obviously injuries coming out early in the season, obviously players getting old. What do you attribute that to? The dropoff? Yeah, I've been doing different radio hits and podcast hits, that sort of thing across all around Canada and good to be on with you in the USA, everyone asking that question about injuries and the age of this team and all that. It does not matter what level of football. It's okay. Injuries should never be an excuse. If you're down your quarterback and you don't have a number two, that can keep the ship afloat. Okay, maybe you can say that injury is an issue or if all of your superstars are hurt and it's just you are supporting cast that's trying to carry the weight, I would get that. But in Winnipeg, Calis is healthy, Brady Alora is healthy. We'll play this week again, he missed week two, but good to go. Otherwise the offensive line is healthy and intact. Yes, they're down to receivers. Dalton Schoen who for my money, the most reliable impact receiver in the CFL today and a huge safety valve. I shouldn't even call him a safety valve. He's Zach Re's go-to guy. He's on the six game injured list, Kerik Wheat fall rookie who broke out for 111 yards in his CFL debut in week two. He's now injured. Kenny Lawler. We know how good he is. So yeah, the receiving corps is banged up, but they still have Nick Demsky and they still have a lot of good players there. It shouldn't be too much of an issue too, too much of an issue. It hurts and defensively Willie Jefferson is healthy and yeah, the D line is pretty nicked up, but Adam Big Hill is healthy. Kyrie Wilson I think is one of the most underrated linebackers in the CFL. He's healthy. Brandon Alexander, their veteran safety healthy Dietrich Nichols back this coming week. He will play after missing last week with a shoulder issue. He's healthy. They got some young guys on that back end, but Evan Holm and Red a crady, they're dime backer, they're all healthy. It shouldn't be an excuse at the best of times, Winnipeg should not be and nor are they the team itself. They're not making any excuses. They know they need to be better, but for fans to say, well, they're injured, that's why they're own three, I think that's baloney. Obviously this is more CFL marathon season here in terms of whatever, and BC had that loss. I mean two in one verse three, and it's not like BC is undefeated here, but what do you think here by the time we get to September, is this all forgotten? I mean, is this enough to kind of hinder anything right now? Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. It's a marathon season and yeah, the riders are three and oh and the ettes are three and oh and they both look really good and Winnipeg versus Calgary will be interesting with the stamps looking like a pretty good team. A lot of people weren't expecting that, myself included there at one and one, all of that said, you know this, now that you've been involved in this league for a long time, Reed is that Labor Day, that's the second season or that's when the real season begins. That final stretch of nine games through September and October and into November in the playoffs, that's when it really ramps up. It's kind of like the National Hockey League where teams play really hard and intense that first month of the season. Then they kind of go into cruise control and then things ramp up with the playoff races and all those sorts of things. They used to say American Thanksgiving, either you're in or you're out and that's how it's going to be come the end of the year. That's not really the case anymore. It wasn't the case this season in the NHL, but excuse me, for Winnipeg or even Edmonton who I think is a lot better than their oh and three record, I think Winnipeg is a lot better than their oh and three record. There's no emergency, there's no panic. There is a lot of football to go in. 2011, people in Winnipeg remember this well, and I imagine your neck of the woods too. In 2011, the BC Lions started the season oh and five and they were calling for the heads of Wally Guano and everybody tear it down, start over, and by the end of the year, the BC lion were the best team in the CFL and they won the gray cup against the Winnipeg Blue bombers. They won it on home turf. Everybody was saying this is a big year, just like this year when you host the Gray Cup, expectations are high. The lion started oh and five. It was pure panic and then two months later they're rolling. Travis Lule a great defense. They were easily the best team in the CFL in 2011 after an oh and five start, it's almost like it doesn't matter. So yeah, the beginning of the season matters. Two points is two points anytime of the year, but there is a lot of football still to play 15 games for an oh three blue ballers team. In terms of speaking of, I'm curious your thoughts on the lions, obviously this playing Winnipeg and winning, because we saw that last year, right? BC came in and kicked the snot out of, I mean it was like 45 to six or whatever the heck it was. It crazy, but thoughts, what does BC look? Yeah, I agree there is a lot of pressure on them. We saw last year tale as old as time and them meeting Winnipeg and the semis or whatever and getting kicked out, but how did they look? I know Vernon played well, but I still, I don't know. To me BC never feels as intense maybe as Winnipeg does when it comes down the stretch. Yeah, it'll be interesting. Look, I think the BC Lions are built to win and they're built to win. Now obviously it was just touching on hosting the Great Cup this year. I have watched Vernon Adams Jr pretty closely through his trials and tribulations and many stops with different teams in Canada and something is different about Vernon Adams Jr. Now he just seems so confident, so composed and so patient with the football, Paul Oli on TSN and his YouTube channel, he's done a great job chopping up VA and saying how years ago this Vernon Adams Jr would've tucked and run in this situation. He stays patient, he stays composed, he stays within the offense and doesn't always rely on the legs and the freelancing like he did when he was probably in high school and definitely in college. I think that is a big reason why BC has a higher floor than they did last season and definitely in seasons prior because from a game to game to game basis, it's the CFL. You never know what you're going to get. You could be Oing three oh and five and win the great Cup. You could have a bad week and then a great week and have everybody in the power rankings all shook up. BC's floor is high right now because of the play of Vernon Adams Jr. The defense, I love their pass rush, the back end, very talented to see a Canadian like Ben Halek continue to just rack up the tackles and lead the league in defensive plays. They got a lot of really good players and a lot of really, you can see that veteran leadership beyond Vernon Adams Jr. I think BC is for my money the team to beat right now, not Saskatchewan. I still think it's bc. Yeah, I guess stay in here on the westward. Just a second. Yeah, Owen three and oh riders here, new head coach, everything else, and I was listening to, I think it was Rod going into the season and well the players are going to play for him but they might not be very good, but they're going to be motivated. But here obviously Trevor Harris get nicked up in the game and that's what we kind of talked about even preseason, but that to me very surprising three in O team. Yeah, no question. And they're playing spirited football and is this a honeymoon period under new head coach Corey Mesa? I don't know, maybe but maybe not. Jamir Thurman, great addition to replace Larry Dean in the line backing core Roland Milligan on the back end wearing number zero, man, that guy makes plays. He's such a lockdown, defensive back and just flies all over the football field. I love watching him. Still very talented. Pass rush and the offense, I mean Trevor Harris, their run game questions about the offensive line as has been the case in Saskatchewan for it seems like forever and they're playing really strong, consistent football and I think that's all you need to do is be consistent and yeah, a bit of a scare when Trevor Harris was nicked up this past week, but they have a bye week now. I think it was a real positive sign to see him come back at least to the sideline still in his gear, get in his coach's ear like, put me in, I'm good to go. Shea Patterson, I think he's the best number two quarterback in the CFL right now, was excellent in the preseason and was very good against Hamilton in relief. So wait and see, we'll see, I am from Winnipeg. People in Winnipeg always have a critical eye on the Saskatchewan rough riders, but I do take my job seriously. I am objective when it comes to covering the teams, but I'm still despite the three and oh start and looking really, really good, I'm still waiting to see how Saskatchewan is in the middle of the season and down the stretch, new head coaches, sometimes it's a flash in the pan, other times it's the real thing. We'll see what we got. It is interesting with she, because I watched the game on recap because we had whatever the heck I had going on, and so I was watching the highlights of Monday before we did our show because we lived through Shea Patterson was the number one pig in the USFL back in 2020. I guess it was 22 mixed results there. So I'm surprised that you're so high. We don't need to do a deep dive on she Patterson right now, but I don't know if that's a long-term sustainable solution there. She Patterson and Well, Trevor Harris is 38, right? I do see she Patterson. He's older than me. Trevor Harris is older than me. It's insane. Yeah, so I'll just say this, I don't, this is just my opinion. I don't put too much weight on quarterback play in those new football leagues in the spring because everything is so new. The coaches, the infrastructure in the organization, how they build the offenses defenses that they're facing, it's also brand new that I think it's hard to get a real gauge of talent and execution ultimately with the QBs. One question we have Mike Hogan on, they're coming on as well, so we'll talk more of the east with him, but I am curious, just you're talking confidence and Vernon to me, Cody Fido here getting kicked out of Saskatchewan, down on his leg, betting on himself, but we've talked on the show, him winning the Gray cup, it's like this is a new man, the monkey is off my back. I'm able to and I see that right and the confidence he's playing in and it's one of those things like that was a life-changing moment, right? And now you never really maybe have to doubt yourself. I'm curious just your thoughts because Montreal looks, I mean runaway right now. Really, really spectacular team. I remember when Cody Fajardo was the quarterback of the Saskatchewan and Ruff riders and they brought in Jason Moss to be the offensive coordinator and I was like, wow, Jason Shiver as the dc of course now he's with bc, but shivers running the DC in Saskatchewan, Cody Fido and Jason Moss running the offense. I'm like, okay. And this is when Cody Fido was coming off West Division MOP Honors, I think it was 2019. I was like, look out for the riders. They got some of the best coaches and coordinators in the league and it did not work. And watching those games, I was curious what's going on. Something seemed off, Cody was forced to make some throws, did not look very comfortable. Is that him? Is that the system? So I made a couple phone calls and I was told that Jason Moss tried to maybe shoehorn Cody Fajardo's into the offense that Jason Moss wanted to run. Well exit Cody Fajardo from Saskatchewan exit Jason Moss from Saskatchewan and the remarriage in Montreal and maybe it took the better part of a season, but we saw the gray cop and we've seen what we've seen so far this season. I think Jason Moss learned what will work with Cody Fido and the confidence I think is a huge part of it. I think it helps when you have a coach that is a former quarterback like Jason Moss, to give a guy that has been downtrodden both externally and probably internally through his football career, to let him know this is your team. We are going to do everything to help you succeed. And whether it was the Gray Cup as the catalyst or something prior to that, it does look like a new Cody fdo, but keep in mind I think it's also a new Jason Moss and a new mentality offensively why Cody fdo is finding that success. Last thing here, so obviously Winnipeg with Calgary this weekend, Calgary has looked good like you said, in my opinion here, I'm looking back obviously the one win against Hamilton, kind of a little duty team right now. I've out playing a little bit better, but Bo and if you have any thoughts about the Hamilton, but then keeping it close with BC and the home opener, but obviously falling short I thoughts on Calgary, I thought they were looking good, but now you're one in one and you look at maybe who they beat if it's less impressive, but thoughts on them going into the matchup. Quick thought on Hamilton, I think Bo looks more comfortable than he ever has in black and gold, but they're just making too many mistakes and handing games away. Calgary, hey, week one. I was like, wow, okay, you don't know what you had in Hamilton yet? Yeah, they're ING three, but it was week one and I'm like, wow, okay, Bo looks pretty good and they're moving the ball, but Calgary's defense looked sharp. I like their pass rush a lot too and just Cam judge in the middle of that defense, very, very good, very talented, but it was Jake Mayer and some really talented receivers like Clark Barnes is a Canadian, Reggie Beton, some of the guys that they got there, Jake Mayer, I don't know. I think he had an off season like Cody Fido where he just got settled and again, his head coach, Dave Dickinson, former quarterback maybe helped him settle in and understand like, Hey, you're our guy, we're sticking with you. Huge kudos to the Calgary Stampeders for staying in the program and in the system they look like a much better team than I gave them credit for. I had them at number nine in my preseason power rankings, which read by the way, I publish every single week on time, right between my ears, I'll share it with anybody, but regardless, Calgary is a good football team and whether the O three or pardon me, whether that one in one start losing to BC in week two, what we're going to get in week four from them against Winnipeg. It's a home game. They're coming off a buy. Winnipeg is downtrodden right now, but I think they're also going to be very motivated to right the ship. This is all you need to know for Saturday when these two teams play the stamps and the bombers have never and still do not like each other, they will always play a increased level of intensity of physical football when they go head to head. It's going to be entertaining and really I think it could determine a lot when it comes to the West division if Calgary's two in one or if Winnipeg is one in three versus oh and four, it could really shake things up in the early going here. Well, I'm excited Darren, I appreciate it making time. I'm like, because I'm living life right now, but obviously in your objective anyway, but it is still, you want Winnipeg to be successful and it's easier to cover a winning franchise, but I appreciate it making time, obviously great work with, excuse me, bonfire sports and everything else. Good luck with everything. Appreciate you a lot, man. Good to do. Let's do this again soon. Okay. Okay, thanks. Well, I think depending on how things would've worked out with the stand and everything else, we might've been talking under different circumstances. We have Mike Hogan here with the Argos Heck of a start here, the 2024 season. How are you doing sir? We're two and oh, life is good. Well, and there was a lot of, I don't want to get into all the controversy preseason, but there was a lot of concerns about the quarterback and what was going to happen if you had told me three weeks into the season going into week four, two and oh Argos without Chad Kelly. Hey, I mean this is pretty good. A team has looked really good. What do you make of it? Yeah, it has, and it's funny because internally I don't think anybody had major concerns about Cam Dukes the same way a year ago. Internally, nobody had any concerns about Chad Kelly after Mcle, Bethel Thompson left. So maybe because Cam is an unknown quantity for the most part, or a guy who has relative inexperience even though he had more snaps in the CFL than Chad Kelly did a year ago. So he's been fine. He's been better than fine. Hasn't throwing an interception yet, touch wood looks good. The running game has helped take some of the pressure off. I mean right now the Argos have averaged what, 37 points a game so far this year and the defense and special teams haven't added to that, so they've been doing a really good job offensively. Well, that's the thing here. Obviously last year and the Argos were in that blessed situation with not all the games mattered as much going into the end of year, so we did see some Cameron Dukes. I mean the guy looks awesome, looks charismatic, seems like the guys are rallying around him. I mean, again, like I said before, we recorded, rarely do I get to Saturday, I do a lot of my CFL recap watching on Mondays before Jason and I do our recaps. Rarely do I have three hours to sit and watch a CFL game on Saturday. I watch the Edmonton games start to finish in Toronto. It just seems like they're having a blast out there. We saw a lot of Chad Kelly last year really kind of joyous on the sidelines hanging with the guys, but it seems the same way with Cameron Dukes really seems like the team rallies around him. Yeah, absolutely. And he's an exceptionally likable guy. You love the story. He comes from Lindsey Wilson College. Full disclosure, I had never heard of it before. He came up here and I think 99.9% of everybody watching right now is saying the same thing, but he was spectacular at the NAIA level, there's no question about that. Let it team to the national championship. MVP, he just everything right goes to the Arena league and I honestly don't know if it was Vince Mare or who got a first look at him or if it was Murph, but he came up here and knocked everybody's socks off. He was really good and I don't know if everybody expected this, I don't think anybody expected no interceptions through two games. That's just part of the learning curve, but he's really protected the ball well aside from one fumble against BC that ended up in his own end zone. Well, and that was the thing because I was the first week a lot of eyes on BC as well coming in and what that's going to look like seemed like BC might've taken care of business already. That was the game I had to watch on replay, whatever. So I knew BC had lost, but I'm watching the score come in. I'm like, man, this looks to be took care of business. Kind of a slow start there against BC and then really the shootout against Edmonton, and I know Edmonton Kind has their own issues and we've talked a lot about that with the McLeod Bethel Thompsons of is he the answer there? Is he not? With all the money and stuff being spent, what did you make of that shootout performance and then just curious your thoughts on McLeod. Not the question is, is he a good quarterback? My question is could we spend $500,000 on other people and make Tre Ford a better quarterback? Yeah, I totally get that. I'm not going to comment on another team's quarterback situation. I will speak to Mac though and I'm a guy who loves Trey. I do Waterloo's fundraising dinner every year, got a chance to watch him a lot in the OUA. There's nothing, not to like about Trey Ford on or off the field. I'm also a big fan of McLeod Bethel Thompson, having gotten to know him here in Toronto and what we saw in the game against Toronto from Mack was Mack being Mack extending plays long enough, finding the right guy on the second or third read making throws that a lot of guys in the league can't make because of his arm strength and what we didn't get out of Mac was that one turnover that seems to plague him and has throughout his career he played mistake three football. Am I surprised? Look at the receiving core they have. Nobody should be surprised. Mitchell had a huge game against the Argos. Gino Lewis is spectacular. Curly gittins. We know all too well here in Toronto. They've got some great receivers there and whether it's Mac or whether it's Trey, all they have to do is get the ball to the Playmakers. They're going to be fine. In terms of Toronto, I think the difference of that game was the run ability. We had the stats about Monday when we talked, but it was 150 to 30 or something like that in terms of yardage. Tremendous job for Coach Dinwitty to be able to tackle that. But thoughts on that and being able to kind of compliment Cameron Dukes while also doing that run game because it felt like then you really kind had the two-prong attack going down the field And the running backs can also catch the football, which helps Dukes a great deal. Put it this way, I know we've only played two games the rest of the league, two or three. Montreal right now is second in the league at 95 rushing yards per game. 95. The Argo lead with over 150, I think it's 153 yards. That's a massive difference. And when you can run the ball that effectively with not one, not two, but three quarterbacks and a running back, that's going to take a lot of pressure off your passer and they've been able to do that with Carrie without a Boyer and McMahon had a nice game. He had that big 44 yard touchdown run on Saturday, which was a brilliant play design. It's a really important aspect of Duke's getting better and then when he's got some time, one thing that I think has impressed everybody about him is if you look at him and just focus on Dukes, you can see him work through his progressions and a lot of times he's got time from the offensive line, the respect of the running backs or he is able to get to his third read. And I don't care if you're D one Power five or NAIA, if you get three chances to look for a receiver, you're going to find one that's open in pro football. It's just odd because the CFL and we have a lot of our listeners obviously been watching the spring leagues and more American football and the running back position. You have to be really good in the cfl, right, because with the three downs and you really only have that one shot to get some yardage in that. I guess just in your opinion of watching the team, just knowing how the CFL game normally is, it just felt almost abnormal this last week how much Toronto was relying on that in a good way. And I don't know if that's something they can build on or just curious your thoughts. Well, if you can establish the run, it makes it a lot easier for the quarterback. Conversely, if you can establish the pass, it makes it a lot easier for the running backs. The fact that the Argos rely on arguably the best offensive line in the league. It was a year ago, especially in pass protection numbers where they gave up 19 sacks all year and next was Winnipeg at 33. It's a really good group of athletes and they're exploiting that. One guy who came in and played exceptionally well last game was Albert Ache who was with Saskatchewan for six years, seven years maybe, but he comes home to Toronto, he's thrilled about being able to play at home again and they put him in playing some fullback, playing some tight end, a natural player at that position as opposed to some of the guys who have played linebacker for most of their career. So I think that's another dimension that they may use a little differently as the season progresses, but it gives them another more natural player at that position. I thought he did a great job. We mentioned if you're mentioning the tight end and fullback on a radio broadcast because of his blocking on multiple occasions, the guy had a pretty good game and Ben Grant and I were doing that more than a handful of times I think on the broadcast on Saturday, Like you said before, too, Kadeem Carey, right? Big off season signing coming from Calgary really has Lookeded. Good just thoughts on him kind of bolstering and Jake Rena as well coming in. I mean there really was a couple of big signings coming into the Argonauts here going in. Yeah, Rena is just crazy good, but we knew that, right? Anybody who played Edmonton last year knew how good he was and the fact that he can move inside or play outside, that's just icing on the cookie as it were. As far as Kadeem Carey goes, it was tough losing AJ Ette, but when you can replace him with a guy that led the league in rushing two years ago and is a different style running back than the other two last year when you had Andrew Harris and Ette and out of a Boer, you had three thunder guys, right? You had that downhill, fantastic downhill runner, all three guys. Now you got out of a Boer who's fantastic downhill, you get Carrie who's good between the tackles and outside, and then you get the scat back in Deontay McMahon, you got a three-headed monster and the Argos have really utilized that well so far this year. I'm curious what the mentality was because obviously playing without your starting quarterback is not the ideal way to enter a season. I guess I'm just curious, business as usual, we're just going through, like you've said before, a lot of faith in Cameron Dukes. I'm just curious, we didn't have a chance to talk to you preseason, just what was the mentality going in just from D Whitty and kind of the locker room and everybody else? And this is the equation I think the team has used. If you have a star player at any position who gets hurt midway through the season and is on the sixth game list and has to go home and rehab, you don't talk very much about him right in the room. You kind of say, okay, who's the next man up? In the back of your mind, you might be thinking, when's he getting back? That's been the same way with Chad, right? Kind of out of sight, out of mind, and we'll see what happens in the future. He may be back after nine games, he may not be, I don't know. We have to rely on the CFL for that, but it may be different if Cam wasn't playing as well as he is. But when you're two and oh and putting up 37 points a game, there's not that added pressure of when's Chad coming back? When's Chad coming back because he's been so good. So that's really taken a lot of pressure off the storyline for lack of a better term because if and when Chad gets back this year, he's still part of the team and a big part of it. So it just gives the Argos second look at quarterback. If Chad ends up back here this year, Obviously big early season, a big match matchup here this weekend Friday with the Montreal there we've kind of seen what Hamilton is, right? At least thus far. And Red Blacks, I'm sorry, as a guy who works for the Argos, you said that wrong. Oh three Hamilton I think is the same. Well in week two I thought, Hey Bo looks pretty good Hamilton, this might not be too bad. And then it kind of all fell off the rails here against Saskatchewan Was a bad one. I have a lot of time for a lot of T Cat fans, but that was a tough one for them. As impossible as it is to feel sorry for the T Cats, that was about as close as you could get. Yeah, we joked that Jason Hussey had to go, he was sick, missed our stream on Monday, had to go home from work sick. I thought maybe he just didn't want to talk about the tie cat, so that might've been what it was at. But anyway, so it's big game this weekend. Montreal looks like Cody Fido looks like the greatest quarterback in the history man time right now. We've talked a lot of like, okay, is the monkey off the back, right? We've won the Great Cup, we're playing free now seeing where the Red Blacks are and where Hamilton is. Oh and three Hamilton big matchup. Thoughts going into that and just what are you looking for? I mean this is I think a test, real first test for the two and oh Argonauts here with Montreal looking as good as they're, I love it. That's early. Let's see, let's get it out of the way. I'm sure a lot of the guys, whether they want to admit it or not, have the dates circled from the day the schedule came out because of the way the Eastern final ended last year. The arrows had great success three and oh in the regular season against Montreal and in the eastern final. The defense had great success against Montreal and I think people forget that Cody threw for 175 yards, Stanback ran for 15 and the defense sat Cody seven times, yet they still blew up the Argos, which is testament to how well their defense played. So, and special teams, they got a return touchdown as well. So it's going to be a tough game and it should be, I'm sure Montreal had it circle as well saying, okay, they were the beast last year in the regular season. We got 'em in the play playoff game and we want to show it's not a fluke and the Argos want to show that it was a bit of a fluke. So that sets everything up nice for Friday night heavyweight tilt in the east and I don't know if these are the two best teams in the CFL, but I think you could make that argument pretty easily. Yeah, no, he's at home right now, but I did hear the call. I think Chad Kelly just threw another interception against Montreal. It's crazy. I dunno who soon. But I guess what is most impressive right now with Montreal, because like you said, the defense hard hitting the game here. I mean just completely swamped Red Blacks and the Gray Cup banner and kind of all that stuff. I guess what is the most important, most impressive thing about Montreal right now? We talked about Edmonton's receivers. Let's do it again. Phil Pot's been dynamite. I think everybody was maybe when you looked at Montreal in the off season, who do they get to replace Mac and they don't need one guy. They're spreading the ball around. And the other thing that's impressed me is how many times they've been able to connect on deep shots and sometimes it's not the Window's a about a foot and somehow they end up coming up with a football and I don't know if that's going to even out over the course of the season, but if it ain't broke, don't break it right. From Montreal's perspective, they've really done a good job with the deep stuff and that's one thing that the Argos have to slow down because they've given up a handful at least of pretty deep balls against them in the first couple of games. So if they can tighten up on that, maybe this is the game they do it and we'll see how much we all reacts if those deep balls don't start falling their way. But boy, they've been fun to watch. There's no question about that. Excuse me, about how long they can keep it up. I don't know, maybe they can keep it up all season. Obviously we hope not from Toronto's perspective, but it's a solid looking team and boy, I'm having fun watching the passing game right now. I hope I don't have that much fun watching it on Friday night. Well that's the thing, I mean Cody is a little bit of an emotional player that way. I think Vernon's a little bit that way too. You're riding momentum if things are going good, it's going good if things and so yeah, I think you just got to make Cody feel a little uncomfortable there and you hope to make a mistake and kind of capitalize on that. Anything else before we get out of here? Like I said, big game this weekend. I'm glad we could talk Argos here under good circumstances right now. Anything else from you? Yeah, I hope more fans start showing up a little light. The first two games, couple of reasons like the weather forecast against Edmonton, they were calling for thunderstorms and tense rain, hail, locusts, flying dogs, all of that stuff. And I think that did keep the attendance down a little bit. Looks good. Friday night honoring Ricky Ray. Going to have another three more honorees at halftime. We'll get into that when we make the official announcement, but it's going to be a fun night at the ballpark payback game against Montreal. I hope people show up and start experiencing just how much fun this Argo team is Now. Mike, if you like attendance talk, you would love our UFL podcast, so I'm just, if you ever wanted to come on and talk. No, but anyway, I appreciate it Mike. Making the time. Like I said, a good start. I like this. I like having a competitive east so far. I guess last question, it's been an exciting season thus far. I mean I think both sides right? East and west I think a lot of intriguing story lines. How are you feeling so far? I think the needle's pointing pretty far up on the season. Yeah, I thought going into this year that there were not going to be any weak sisters for lack of a better term, right? There are nine teams that at the beginning of the season said, Hey, we got not only a shot at the playoffs but I think we can make a run at this thing. Ottawa was really pumped for their turnaround. We've seen what Edmonton's done, they're a much better team. So if you consider those kind of the two weaker teams last year, they both improved exponentially. Although Ottawa didn't look like it in the first half against Montreal last week. But if Brown can play and he's looked okay at times, I mean if you can get some sort of momentum going there, they're a better team on paper. They just have to be able to translate that onto the field and I think they will have a better season obviously than they did last year. Oh well Mike, thanks so much and say hi to Ben in front of the show as well. You guys do great work and everything else I, like I said, appreciate the time making time midweek here, so thanks a lot. Appreciate it pal. Anytime. Huge special thanks as always. To all the guests coming on, really appreciate Ben busy covering the NFL Sunday ticket trial. Lots of different stuff Ben has his fingers in right now, so appreciate Ben taking the time to come on a rapid fire. I thought with him getting through lots of good stuff, his thoughts on everything UFL business wise and then of course CFL coverage here. Mike Hogan and Darren Baum and excuse me, both of them busy gentlemen, really appreciate that. It should be it for me today. We'll see it working on, I previewed this I think on the Monday recap or when I was with John Lewis really working on one of those big fish guest interviews here. We'll see if that comes up. If we get that, we'll have one episode early next week, hopefully before the 4th of July. Otherwise next week might be a bye week. We'll see here. We're going to be traveling east of the mountains here in Washington, spending some time on the river, so we'll see how we do with that. But stay tuned. You will not miss it if we get that. I'll keep you all posted, but otherwise Jason and I'll be back. I think we will do our CFL Monday recap. It'll be my birthday on Monday, July 1st, so we'll see how that goes. And then we might will see if we get our big guests. Otherwise it might be a bi week. And then we'll be back as CFL coverage again the following week and then we'll move back into regular programming. Thank you all so much like and subscribe. Thanks to our guests. We'll see you next time.

CFL Week 3 Results + Reactions! Winners and Losers From CFL 2024 Week 3!!

Well here we are back here. New guest this week. Jason Hussey texted me today. He said, Bri, I got to go home from work, from work sick. Jason raging the headache. I'm going to guess that's probably due to his Hamilton Tiger Cats slow start to the season. We can get into that. We have Evan Willmore back here today. Evan, how the heck are you? I'm good man. Filling in for Jason. Obviously I don't have my tie Katz jersey on or anything like that, but I'll do the best I can to fill his shoes for one show and talk about some of the games that were played this weekend. I watched a couple of 'em. I thought it was a good slate and we'll dive into it. Yeah, so Evan, if anyone's new here to the, well, I got to change battery if anyone's new here to the podcast. Let me see if I can fix this here. Giveaway is currently paused. We'll figure that stuff out if anyone's new here. Evan did all the shows with us last year with Jason and I doing all that up through the gray cup. Evan working now Evan's assistant DPP over at the Vegas Nighthawks. Busy guy here through the summer and they're good season right with everything with the IFL, so Evan, but we get him today. We get his expertise here. A lot of players scouting and development. Evan has a keen eye force and obviously now that Jason doesn't have a great football mind as well, but it'll be good just to get a different voice and opinion as well. I'm here today, I appreciate that. Like I said, like and subscribe, get in here, we'll figure out a new giveaway. Might have a hold on the season ticket giveaway. Evan and I were talking about that off screen. We'll get to that, but really kind of exciting CFL season thus far. I think the games, I watched a couple of the games live. I tracked a couple of the other ones. Dorothy was out of town on Saturday. I watched the Toronto Edmonton game in full. Yet Tim living the life right now must be nice. I don't know if there's anyone happier in the world right now than Tim Capper and Cliffy dine with the PHI Deck podcast, but Evan, three weeks in, I think this has been a very competitive, very compelling CFL season. Yeah, the games have been great. They've got off to a really hot start with a lot of close games. There's been very few games that have been blowouts or ones that you would maybe turn the TV off early for. It's been really good and that's I think what the CFL has needed. I don't remember how things exactly started last year, but I don't think it was this good because I definitely would've remembered it if it was, and it's just good the league because last year we were talking about there were still, I mean the CFL hiatus is four years behind us now for Covid, but we felt like even last year, which was 2023, they started playing again in 2021, but we still felt like there was a bit of a ramp up I think from covid and getting everybody organized Again, not to say that there wasn't good football or anything, but you did feel it at times. I think now I feel like in 2024 we're officially past that now that we've had three full seasons in the CFL post Covid under our belt. Things are a lot more maybe complete and that's why I think we're getting a lot of these really close and really entertaining games And we talked about this last year, I think the hiatus year really horrendous I think for the CFL in terms of getting fans back into the stands. I think we've seen that. We saw Saskatchewan here and Evan we won will talk a lot of attendance today. I promise we get enough of that with the UFL stuff, but I saw Jamie and I tweeting about that. It's tough getting people into Saskatchewan. They're off to a good start, right three and oh here and seeing lackluster crowds there, but I think you saw that with the fans. I think you saw that with the media coverage and then just the play and I think we're finally, now we're fully back up to speed. I thought we saw that going into last season. That first year coming out of the hiatus was really rough, but I agree. I think it's all systems go and then also a lot of the storylines that we were tracking going into the season. I think we've been able to really see here where Bo last year and had kind of the injuries and stuff and even though Hamilton has started slow, I mean this week Bo didn't look great, but he looked pretty decent two weeks ago. McLeod is making moves with Edmonton even though they continue in their losing weight, but what game did they have against Toronto and then who the heck thought Winnipeg would start? Oh and three, I mean every time I tweet out this is the world, I am the happiest person in the world with Winnipeg starting oh three, is that the biggest storyline for you or what do you think is kind of the biggest thing so far going into this young season that you've been paying attention to? Yeah, I definitely think it is and it's a surprise. I don't read too much on social media nowadays, but sometimes I scroll through things. I noticed a couple people were saying like, well, it really shouldn't be a surprise if you look at how much veteran leadership Winnipeg lost and maybe they weren't able to make up for all that, but I still feel like this team is on paper at least much better than Owen three. I think any person who's watched the CFL the past couple seasons, if you had told them that Winnipeg would start Owen three this year, they'd probably be like, you're crazy. There's no way that team just has too much experience. And yes, they did lose some talent and there are a lot of new faces at key positions, but there's just again, too much experience still I think to have that start. But sure enough, they're sitting at oh and three and it's a big change. I mean a team that has dominated the CFL even going back before Covid, right? Their first great cup before this run that they've had four straight that started in 2019 and we just haven't really seen anything like that. I don't know when the last time Winnipeg went oh three was, but I know it's been a long time. Probably over 10 years I'd imagine. So that definitely is the biggest prize surprise for me. No doubt. And we'll get into more details about their team when we talk about again, Yeah, just I've seen comments, Zach is proving maybe what people thought out long where he's maybe an above average quarterback but with kind of elite talent around him versus is he the one Karen? I think we've seen a lot of that. I think Cody Fido has looked totally on the other side. He's on top of the world. I mean the man is the prom king, the homecoming king. I mean just kind of really on top of the world there running to Montreal, really excited that man that we were talking about that in the group chat. He got his gray cup and I think wade's off his back and he's able to rock and roll and I think Cody's really kind of playing kind of that free world right now and I think he's kind got house money. I think that's been really exciting here. So you just kind of looking into the standing here, like I said, Saskatchewan off to good start here, taking care of Hamilton here on Sunday, all my dates are confused with that BC here two and one Calgary looking dominant, I thought that week against BC at home, they're hanging in there Edmonton, Winnipeg, and I think Edmonton certainly looked like they could have win won against Toronto. I thought that was a really competitive back and forth for my money. That was the best game I had seen start to finish all year and I do my best and I do a lot of catch up on Mondays like I did today and working on my best at Dustin Nielson impression watching some of these games on the treadmill. Montreal, it looks like world beaters with that and Toronto taking care of business. I dunno, any general thoughts on the standings and we'll kind of get into the games and we can go reverse chronological. Yeah, well I think another storyline just building off of, we were talking about with Winnipeg. I know Winnipeg lost a great cup to Montreal and we were there obviously in Hamilton to see that, but I think the one interesting thing from that is because that was so unexpected for a lot of people, I think in a lot of people's heads, Montreal wasn't going to start this strong and that maybe them in Winnipeg would still be more balanced just because in a lot of people's heads, Winnipeg was just such a dominant team for so long, but Montreal, they're the best team in the league right now in my opinion and I don't see how you could really think otherwise if you've been watching the games. I mean I know Saskatchewan is three and oh, but again, they've been more surprising and we'll get into them too. I think they got a lot of great things going on, but Montreal just looks so complete and I really do think that if we're talking about Cody fdo specifically, I do think that last drive to beat Winnipeg in the Great Cup where he had the touchdown, the Tyson Phil pot, and obviously the third down conversion and all that that we saw live, it was very exciting. I really do think that that has changed maybe the way that he thinks, or I don't want to say the course of his entire career. We're only a couple games into this season, but he's playing really well and he's playing a lot better than he played last year. He looks a lot more complete, a lot more poised. And again, he didn't play poorly last year, but maybe Jason mentioned this on the show last week. I was listening Cody last year, he didn't look bad, but he didn't look perfect either. He was kind of in the middle. The whole team was kind of in the middle of, we didn't know who they could really be. They were good against all the lower teams below 500 and they sometimes struggled against the teams that were above 500, but now it looks more like he can beat anybody and I think that bodes really well for that team and it is just good to see, right? It's good to see. I think them continue to prove a lot of people wrong. I know the Montreal fans, they're probably like, well, we knew and all that and I get it right, but I think there's a lot of people out there who still expected things to go differently, but we have to give credit to Montreal a great job that they've done. And as for the rest of the standings, I would say they're maybe expected against Saskatchewan being first in the west. Maybe not, and I'll wait to get into them when we talk about the game, like I said, but everything else looks about right. We're only three games in. Some teams have only played two, so still got some time before things really get figured out. The Montreal thing, I agree with you that yeah, because last year they were the big, no one took us seriously. We were under the radar team and they came in and they kept adding all year and then they won. And I agree, you would totally think, okay, then they're not going to come in this year being under the radar like that with the Kraken lived through that here this last year where we got into playoffs the second year kind of overperform where we were supposed to be and then last year we said, oh, okay, now teams are going to take us seriously. And then we did much poor coming into year three because teams were kind of prepping for us extra than you would and I heard that with a lot of feedback from a lot of the media stuff I listened to because obviously I don't cover hockey or know that as well either, but yeah, you would think people would come in, be ready for Montreal, they're kicking ass. I think I do agree or I guess I would add to your point that I do think winning the Gray Cup kind of changed Cody's life in that way that I think athletes are human in that way and I think that there's obviously athletic intangibles that you can't whatever, but a lot of it is mentality and I think Cody got to a point now, and I think he came out of Saskatchewan, kind of like a wounded animal and I'm not wanted and we've got to rebuild and I think he bet on himself. He delivered last year and I think he's riding off that. I remember quitting my job and figuring out what I was going to do and when Dorothy and I wanted to buy our new house and things, I'm like, sometimes you can just with the right mentality just kind of will through and use that and besides even just the physical attributes that you have, so I think Cody's great. I think that team is playing with so much confidence. I remember Jason and I were talking and we'll get to that game here, oh, Ottawa and kind of their elite defense and Bob and all that. I think it was like 28 to one or something I messaged. I said, well, how about that elite Ottawa defense here coming and putting up all these points, but this was talking about raising the banner homecoming, Montreal, putting up the Grand Cup banner rewatched this game today. I was driving to Spokane for work on Thursday, but I mean this was a sch slacking all the way around. Drew Brown looks human now. Okay, never had a turnover, all that. Cody looked great here at three touchdowns threw for a billion yards. I takeaways from this one, if you want to put up the Gray cup banner and have a good joint, I mean this really gave everyone at home a good, everyone there kind of good experience. Yeah, well I know there's been a lot of good games this year, but in terms of individual team performance, I think this might be the best that we've seen all year and I'm talking about Montreal. We already spoke on Cody Fido a bit, but what a phenomenal game he had. I think at halftime, I think he only had two incompletions and already had 200 and something yards and I mean just again, phenomenal. You can't say enough good things about that even added, I think 40 yards on the ground rushing. So very efficient in both departments. The other thing that we didn't talk about with Montreal, yes, their offense has been playing well, you've got Cody fj, you've got Tyson Philpot, Reggie White was back in this one played very well, but I mean Montreal's defense man, that's the other thing. I talk about complete performances and I feel like I don't give defense enough credit whenever I'm on these shows or talking about football or whatever. I don't know. I've always been more of an offensive minded guy. The only football experience that I have playing was on the offensive line in middle school for flag football. But all that aside, when I say complete performance, I got to give a shout out to the defense too. I mean what a game just all around that they played and Tyrese bere hell of a performance by him. I mean just look at every single one of those stat categories is filled out. That means you had a pretty successful day and you were literally all over the place. Again, just speaks for itself. So Montreal undefeated, that's your best win of the year probably they're going to keep rolling. As for Ottawa, I felt like, yeah, they came back down to earth a bit. If I'm a Red Blacks fan, I wouldn't be scared. It was probably a bit of a shock and you go from beating Winnipeg, who again, I know Winnipeg obviously is struggling now. It's not what we expected, but Ottawa, they came back down to earth a bit, but I think that's okay. Again, I think there was still a lot of question marks around that team. Drew Brown, this is his first true starting job in the CFL. I understand he played with Winnipeg last year, looked very good in those games. I like him a lot, but it's a bit different when you're thrusted into the full-time starting role and it's a role that I imagine he'll keep, even if this game, he was a bit slower but Ottawa, it's just one of those days you don't have the start you want. You're going up against the raining great Cup champs. It's a very important night for them. You got to keep in mind, yes, their win against Winnipeg was good and there was the weather delay and all that and that was a good confidence boost. But to me this is still a very young team and they have a lot of new additions. They had to make a lot of changes. Obviously last year didn't go as planned for them, but I think they'll get back on track and I still see a lot of positive things about this team. I still really drew Brown a lot, believe in him. Again, I think that he's going to keep that job and I think that yeah, that was probably it. It's tough and we talked Jason and I last week with Drew Brown and because obviously MLI is kind of here waiting in the wings whenever he's back up, coming back from injury and yeah, is he doing enough? Does Drew going to earn that? And Jason and I said, it's the thing we saw this last season with Dustin Crumb. You can get 5, 6, 7 starts. You can do decently and teams don't have enough film on. You be able to kind of take care of that. But yeah, I don't know if the book's out on Drew Brown now or Montreal's just that good, but I mean they were crazy. Even the highlights I was rewatching today on YouTube, just huge hits by Montreal Defense, just big guys taking care of business. It really felt like they came in and just exerted their will over all of this. Cody's running for touchdowns, he's doing a little flip passes like we were saying in the group chat. He's just seeing the field totally different and just that, I don't know, just a weird boost of confidence there and him and Moss and everything else. Yeah, like I said, not only do they look like the best team in the East by far, but yeah, definitely the best team in the CFL currently and I don't think it's even close. Yeah, no doubt. And just going back to Drew Brown real quick, I think in a sense it's almost good that he had a game like this and I know he probably doesn't feel that way, but at some point you have to have a kind of coming down to earth moment and okay, let's go back to the drawing board. Let's get better. I can learn from this. I honestly think that's good for a lot of players and I can tell you as someone who works with a lot of athletes in the moment you're kind of kicking yourself and Oh, I had a bad game. I hurt the team. As the quarterback, you're supposed to be the leader, but there are some benefits I think from that you can really just go back and say, well, how do I make sure that this doesn't happen again? And maybe Drew Brown comes out of this one and he plays with a chip on his shoulder and we know what Drew Brown can do. Again, that's why I keep saying I don't feel like this should be a loss of confidence for Ottawa fans or anybody there. I mean I think it was just one of those days at some point Drew Brown has been so good, even it's an limited role. I think people have to remember that now that he's the full-time starter, it's still a bit of a different experience even if again, he's been good in the past and he has all the tools and he was brought there for a reason. I think it's just, to me, it's just one of those things that's a part of the game and a part of life, honestly. Yeah, also, I mean there's a reason why he was a backup at Winnipeg. I mean you always got to look at like, okay, and then he's getting the start, but you get that a lot of times with the CFL where even last year, and we love Dane Evans and he's off now coaching or whatever, retired, but Dane, we kind of knew Dane and then he comes to BC and then Vern got hurt and it's like, oh, Dane's going to come in. I mean Dane wasn't great right before he went over. Yeah, I mean he can be the best backup in the league, but it's still kind of different for that looking here. I thought Drew Brown had a couple of really good long completions kind showing off that arm, but Dom Rimes here and I'm like, oh yeah, he's with Ottawa now because watching, I'm still trying to keep up and we're coming off the UFL season. Ottawa had the week went by and I'm like, oh, that's where he, because BC and we've talked about them and we'll talk about them here on the show as well and kind of figuring out their new receiver core. I'm like, okay, Dom Rimes is there is fine. Second receiver at six targets, three on that. If you're going to have someone like him in the mix, let's get him more. I don't know, I just feel like maybe we're utilizing him as well here on the offense. Yeah, well I mean I think too Otto has just got a lot of receiver depth and Jalen Acklin, I think people were quick to write him off, but he was good when he was in Hamilton. I remember him, Nick Martiner promising rookie out of Auburn Braylin. Addison has been around, he was in Hamilton too. He's been around the CFL for a while. They're actually bringing him in on some run plays now, so they're kind of switching things up with him. Maybe that's an opportunity for Dom rhymes to get more reps. But again, like I said, a lot of new pieces on this team, it is going to take a couple games to figure out how everybody gels together and what certain players like, and again, just part of the process. So that's why I was saying it specifically with Drew Brown, but for the team as a whole, for fans and whatever, some things take time. There's a lot of promising things. I already think that this Ottawa team looks better than they did last year. I feel comfortable saying that after, well I guess they've only played two games now, but I feel like they're making progress and that's good. We know how long this team has struggled for and how much they need to have a bit of a turnaround here. Yeah, I'll just be curious and I mean obviously we're early in the season, what does Bob Dice do here in terms of longevity? And he really came in Midseason, what, two years ago Ryan, and had a really kind of crappy last year, Mazzo and all that. So we'll see. I just don't know how many years do you get a mulligan of, okay, the sun was too bright or it was too windy? How many times were we making excuses here? We always talk in the at attendants, the gas station open down the road. How many different things does he get before you got to be judged with the product on the field? But yeah, I thought they were decent. Exciting game here. Let's get into this one. Unless, do you have any other thoughts on the Thursday one? No, I think I'm good. So this was interesting BC at Winnipeg, Mariners had a horrendous loss. I was listening to driving and then tracking this game on Friday coming in. We saw this last season BC coming into Winnipeg, embarrassing them, right? It was like 45 to whatever the heck it was. I remember it was during this game, I think it was Hodge was tweeting out about, oh, the team's finally giving up. I'm like, I saw Winnipeg fans give up on their team last year. They were leaving the third, fourth quarter last season with all this stuff, but they're hard to please your Winnipeg fans. I mean we were talking about Birmingham Stallion fans, so kind of riding with their team, Winnipeg, they really only liked success here, but BC coming in, this was a nailbiter. I really thought Winnipeg was going to take care of it. I've been on the record, I don't know, BC always has the killer instinct, but when they needed it, they got the field goal, what was it? Stand back, right? Got the final yards they needed to kind of get it in and be able to put the game to bed. Thoughts on BC early in the season. Yeah, well I unfortunately didn't get to watch this game, but I know from history and obviously the time that I've been watching the league, BC and Winnipeg have had a lot of good games and a lot of games particularly where the stakes were pretty high in terms of the Western conference and all that. But this was a great win for BC and unfortunately for Winnipeg, I know how you were saying it's hard to please their fans, but it's also hard to go from four gray cups in however many years to an oh and three start. And as history shows, a lot of the teams who start oh and three, the odds of making playoffs are not very high. And of course a lot of things can change. A lot of games left to be played, but that's just how the math has worked for multiple years. But just focusing on BC here for a minute, great win by them against a team who I think still has a lot of potential even with that Owen three start a win that they needed because they had dropped the game to Toronto and maybe some people didn't expect that. And then the Calgary game, I know you had been talking about it where they played really well and it was a good win and you were at home with the 50,000 fans or whatever, but it was a close game. You felt like maybe that they still could have done a bit more just given the circumstances. So even though this win, it was close, it was one of those where you had to kind of wait it out and it was chunk by chunk. It wasn't anything, wasn't like a shootout. Some of them have been, I mean we'll get to the Toronto and Edmonton game obviously, but it was good. And Vernon is still playing great. He's still playing at a high level, don't think there's any concern about him, had had nearly 400 yards passing in this game. He's coming up. Vernon now to me is one of the more experienced and more veteran quarterbacks in the league. I know we've got guys like Trevor Harris who are 38 years old, still out there doing their thing. But to me, Vernon, because ever since he's came over to bc, and again, you can't forget his time in Montreal before that. I feel like he's got a lot of experience in this league now and it's not something you can overlook. I view him as a true veteran and he certainly plays like it. The other good thing for BC too will stand back a bit more productive this game. From what I understand, he's had a bit of a slower start to the season and he kind of came in to bolster a BC run game that I recall struggling pretty immensely last year at times. So good to see him get going again. Takes a couple games to really, I think just find your flow again and you're with a new team and it's a different environment, all that. And then you have Alexander Hollins who looks like he's going to be the next superstar. And I know that BC is a bit thin at receiver, you lost Dom Rhymes, Keon Hatcher is injured, but man, Alex Hollins, he's really stepped up to the plate and I noticed that last year too. I think he was in a bit more of a complimentary role, but he still had his fair share of big games and he to me was somebody who had the potential to develop very well in this league. And this was I guess in a sense the breakout game where you're like, okay, this guy is here to stay and he can be a top option number one in this league for many years to come. BC is, again, I mentioned they were a bit thin at receiver coming in today. They released Travis Fulham who played in this game and he was only, I mean, three catches for 33 yards, not a lot, but still for a team that doesn't have a ton of depth at receiver, you wonder who they're going to replace that with. Stanley Berryhill is the guy who maybe gets worked in more believe he played at Arizona and was slated to play in the XFL actually with the Orlando guardians. If I'm not mistaken. I might have the wrong player, but that's just going off the top of my head here. The other guy though that I think we will be all right down the stretch is Justin McInnis and I think he even last year did not get enough credit for some of the bigger plays that he had, and I think he's a comfortable option to the point where obviously when Keon Hatcher does come back, which is obviously still a bit down the line, I think you'll be all right with this. I think Hollins and McInnis and maybe Barry Hill keeps getting some work in you bring somebody else in now that Travis Fulham is gone, I think until you get Keon Hatcher who was great last year back, they have a lot of depth and that was something I praised about this team last year on offense. I know we didn't talk too much about defense there, but yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. You're looking here and I agree with you, great to see stand back, get back in here really. And especially you look at how Toronto kind of managed the game against Edmonton with that dual kind of run game and we'll get into that. I think utilizing that and having the return guys come in and do that. Interesting. BC has always sucked at running and trying to get Stan back in here. That was their big off season signing to kind of bolster that, like you said. Good to see him kind of get up to that. I agree. Hollins, Alexander Hollins, I was watching today and my Dustin Nielsen impression, but he had a tremendous game, two tds, the big chunk play near the end to get in where they could get the first down near the end zone to end the game that way. McGinnis, like you said, secondary receiver last year, great to see him because yeah, you look on here when Andrew Pearson friend of the show Lyman, when you have Andrew, he took, we had a fat man in the reception there where he was running down. When you have him in the mix, that speaks to me. Yeah, maybe it really feels like we're developing the depth of this receiver court at this point when we have offensive linemen circling him. But yeah, I think Keon is a big miss at this point. We need to get him back basically at this point it feels like, yeah, you have two secondary receivers really trying to step up. Hollands had a big miss last week that then he came back, we were watching at the game in St. Louis. He had the big miss where it hit him, fell out, would've been a touchdown. He redeemed himself last week and good to see him still getting that plenty here with 2 15, 2 touchdowns. I mean he has had a tremendous game on that side. On the Winnipeg side here, Oliveira is still trying to do Oliveira things. I think he was coming back from injury, kind of missed some practice. I don't feel like he's totally up to speed. And then Claros just looks really not comfortable. I don't know. I mean we've been using Vernon a lot and seeing him use his legs and run around, but Claros just really has seemed not comfortable a year kind of playing and I can't remember his season stats at this point, but really down on the year. I mean not super high on touchdown. I want to see if I can get his stats everyone here, but he really has had kind of a downstar to this season thus far. Yeah, zero touchdowns here in 2023. Yeah, and part of that is because again, we were talking about bcs receiving core, how it's kind of a mix. I think they'll be all right, but it certainly wouldn't help to have a guy like Keon Hatcher back. I think they really miss a guy like Kenny Lawler, his ability, you saw it last year. I mean, I know I think it's a fractured hand or something, so I don't know what his timeline is. And last year he didn't come in late. I think he had an issue with his passport or visa or getting up there to do something. So he hasn't played a ton or maybe as much as you would've hoped, but in every game that he's played in, he's been fantastic. And I think that's a guy they really miss. Another guy too that I don't think ever got enough credit was Rashid Bailey who was maybe the second or third option and he went over to Toronto. I think they miss him too. And now the depth there isn't getting any better. I think Dalton Schone, I know he played in this game, but I believe he's injured again and is going to miss some time. Kerik Wheat fall, who was one of their new guys who looked like he was going to step up to the plate and start doing some things. He's now injured as well, and I don't know the timeline on him, but it's tough. The one guy that I was going to mention, it's funny on your, I guess it was the preseason show before everything started. The one guy I wanted to talk about but we ran out of time was Ontario Wilson from Florida State. That's the guy that I really like. He had three catches for 27 yards in this game. That's the guy that I really hope can step up to, especially with all the injuries, maybe he gets some more looks. And again, I think he's a very dynamic player. I'm glad they have him. He hasn't done as much as I would've hoped up to this point. But again, they had a lot of guys and now they don't. If you're not going to have Dalton shown, you're not going to have Kenny Lawler. It's tough for a guy like Zach Ro and he used to have a ton of options. I felt like for all those years that Winnipeg was at the top going to these gray cups that maybe the third or fourth receiver was almost an all-star caliber player in some cases. Now you have a lot of rookies who are still learning the Canadian game. They got to get up to speed. It's a challenge. And like you said too, typically you'd fall back on the run game like Brady Oliveira, who was a phenomenal last year best back in the league still to a lot of people, he was coming off an injury, so still a bit slow. Johnny Augustine getting some work in, and I believe he started last week. I don't think Olivera played in that game. Looked okay from what I remember. But again, you're dealing with a lot of injuries and the depth isn't the same. So now you have a lot of younger guys that are being propelled early into starting roles and typically that's just as history has and even if it's a good opportunity for those guys, not always going to translate to wins. And I really think that's what we're seeing with Winnipeg. Yeah, last thing I hear, it was funny, we're seeing St Traveler Ryan a lot in the short yardage and I think Pat was tweeted in the group, oh great to see str. I'm like, not if you're a BC fan, I'm not happy to see him getting all these touches. Mike here a big UFL guy. Oh no, here's the one. Saskatchewan, BC or Calgary. Who do I root for? I like all these teams. Well, Saskatchewan is Canada's team. That's what they say. Winnipeg, they're kind of the big behemoth that's really been running the league here for the last five years, seeing a little bit of a setback. And BC is America's CFL team. So if you like America, you got to vote for America's CFL team. But I'm good. I'm still cautiously optimistic about bc. I mean I had my heart broken last year. I get very invested in all this stuff, but BC is doing enough defense I think still needs to kind of figure some things out. We talked with Ryan Phillips about all that last week and where the defense has fallen where he looked like he was going to be a head coach candidate here and then now we're seeing a little bit of setbacks on that. Anything else? We've talked to Winnipeg to death here. Anything else on BC before we get out on this one? I don't think so. Alright, so this was exciting. Way more exciting than this had any right to be in my opinion. My wife was out of town, I was off, I had a wedding there, I had a conference Friday, I had a wedding on Sunday, so I was able to watch this game. I thought, well God, I hope this game doesn't suck. I'm going to sit down and watch this whole thing and holy crap. I mean this was the game of the weekend. I think by far a game of the season. I tweeted out, it seems like a lot of people were excited about this Argonauts with a woff field goal to end the game shoot out the whole way through McLeod. I mean dealing in here four touchdowns. I mean this was a tremendous game. Toronto coming off the buy their two and oh after their victory over BC and the opener two TDS for Cameron Dukes, he looks great. We're kind of waiting for Jack Kelly to come back. Toronto staying really pretty competitive here. This was a really fun game and I watched part of this one up until halftime. This was actually, I was doing some work at the office there in Vegas before our game and I had this on and I was kind of multitasking because wanted to see Cameron Dukes what he was doing and it ended up being a great game even in just the half that I watched. It was each team was trading touchdowns a true shootout. I think that's what the definition is of a shootout or what the definition is of a shootout in football is two teams exchanging touchdowns. And that's really it. There's not a lot of defense. Not a lot Of defense For some people maybe isn't great, but for a lot of people who like the entertaining and points being scored, they liked that. I thought this game was great though, but I'll talk about Edmonton first. This wasn't unfortunate for Edmonton. I feel like this was their game where they got up to speed and that they probably played their best game of the season, a pretty complete performance. But I think because their defense is so young and I just said maybe this wasn't the best game if you enjoyed defense, I think you saw that a lot here. And I think that's the reason why they weren't able to pull this one out in the end, even though they did keep it very close. And the offense was fantastic. I mean look at McLeod 28 of 38 passing 342 yards, four touchdowns. I mean that's a damn near perfect game. But when you, defense is young and I think there's some things they got to figure out there. It's tough. And they always say defense wins championships and that's where you want kind of the core to be. Even if it's not the most exciting element, I think that's where you'd want it. But they don't have that right now. And again, they're going through that kind of transitional phase where they got to make some changes to get better. And we knew coming into the season that their defense was relatively young. I know even before this game they were shifting some things around, even up to the starters, not just the depth pieces, but there were some guys in there that I think were playing for the first time and just trying to get some experience in. So ultimately it's tough. Edmonton's Owen three, and I think this might be the third year in a row that they started oh three, which is just really unfortunate. But McLeod, Bethel Thompson was the big offseason acquisition so far. I think he's lived up to what he's meant to be. Just a veteran guy that can come in, you know what to expect. There's no gap in his knowledge or I guess that's the best way to put it, but it hasn't translated to wins yet. So hopefully they can turn that around. And again, they're going to have to keep, I think on defense particularly, they're going to have to keep making some changes and figuring out what's going to be the best unit to move forward with. But then on the Toronto side, I said before the season I said, Toronto's going to be a team to look out for this year. And I think a lot of people were overlooking them because there was so much maybe negative kind of stigma around the Chad Kelly situation. I think that kind of casted a blanket over everything else they were doing in the off season. But I paid attention to the little things. And so far a lot of those have I guess paid off or I was right about 'em because Toronto looks great. Toronto in my opinion, their defense I think is young as well. And they lost a lot of pieces. I know Mike's talked about that they could certainly use some help there too. And I mean they gave up 36 points themselves. So again, both defenses here might need to make some changes or figure out some adjustments, but ultimately Toronto to me looks like a very complete teams. I expected 'em to be. Everybody said, well, we don't know what Cameron Dukes is going to do and there's just too many holes. That was the kind of thing was there's too many holes. We are not going to be able to replace that, therefore we're not going to win games. But I think a lot of the young guys have stepped up really well. Again, in particular, Cameron, she's a former Vegas Nighthawk. He's played great football this year. And I mean in this game he was very efficient, not flashy I would say, but got the job done, high completion percentage, didn't turn the ball over just all around a complete performance. One of the most surprising players for me in the league this year has been Kadeem Carey. I know he was in Calgary last year and people were saying, well, he's getting a bit old, especially for a running back and you're starting to see some wear on those tires, but he's come out hot this year. I mean, he looks really good. Looks, again, people were saying, oh, well they're not going to have AJ Ette, so there's going to be no one in the run game. Not only do you have Kadeem Carey, but you have Deontay McMahon who I scouted when he was in college at McNee State. And he had a very good game this game too, besides throwing a pick, which I missed that I assume that was probably on some trick play, but had a nice touchdown run. Glad to see that they're working in him, working him in, excuse me, he's a smaller shifty back catch the football. And again, ultimately just, I won't go too much in depth on all the other players just for time's sake, but the point being is that I feel like this team has a lot more than people think they do. And so far it's showed now I believe next week they're playing Montreal. That should be a great game, obviously going to be a bit of an uphill battle for them when Montreal had just put up 47 points and we've seen how complete their team is, but it'll be a good test and I think this team is ready for it with the way that they've played. Yeah, the McMahon you brought up there, I was like, oh yeah, what the heck happened there? And it was so off script where it felt like Toronto had had this great balance of running and getting, passing going down the field. And then yeah, they ran this trick play and even I think it was Dungan was on the call and they're like, why would you divert from what you were doing? And if you look here at the team stats, if you look at, you have the rushing yards here, 186 to 35 here between Toronto and Edmonton. And it's weird that we talked about this on here and the run game and the CFL is so different, not as prominent as the NFL with the three downs, and you really got to be in the lead back to kind of be in that position. But you saw Toronto do that all day and it just felt like they ran over Edmonton. They couldn't stop them. I know Mike was talking, like you said, Toronto's young secondary kind of beat there over the top to be expected. But yeah, the Cameron Dukes thing is really, it's like that meme where the primary quarterback's out and they're like, man, this backup quarterback's great. He's like, oh, he's not that great. He's just fine. It feels like Cameron Dukes is kind of playing himself into a starting role here with the Edmonton thing it feels like, and I agree, McLeod's doing well, play the good game. I'm always wondering what does this team look like if you're able to invest in other pieces and you have trade forward there and you're able to spend that money. The broadcast is very much on the McLeod is willingness team here and he's the game changer and he's playing well and he is, but I just wonder if you're not spending half a million on him when you have a backup quarterback that is capable of doing similar things, not reading the field and getting it out as quickly as McLeod. And I know they've talked, that's why they like McLeod and he can be decisive and kind of do that, but if you have half a million you're able to spend on other stuff. I would be curious what this team would look like, but it feels like the CFL announcers are like, no, McLeod, this is the right decision and we're okay with that. Yeah, I mean I think that's still going to get brought up. And look, I think it's the offensive performance here by Edmonton reminded me a lot of, in some ways BC last year because Vernon would frequently throw for 300 if not almost 400 yards per game. And then you look at the rushing statistics where that's obviously going to help boost your offense and in some case win you games if you can keep the right pace. And you saw Toronto do that with a nice balance between throwing the football and running the football, but Edmonton hasn't had that. And unfortunately Kevin Brown, who was a sensation last year has slowed down a lot this year. And I don't know exactly why that is, but Trey Ford's sitting there on the bench and sometimes one, I've been watching Edmonton games this year. I understand McLeod has played well. And again, it's what we expected from him, but I still don't think it would hurt just to put Trey in for a couple. And again, it wouldn't be like the short yardage place got P Cop for that, but kind of like what Chris Reer did with the bombers, and I guess it was 2018 or 2019 when he was last there where they would bring him in at quarterback and he would just run the football. But it's not short yardage. It's like a design run play just for him and then you put McLeod back in. I don't think that would hurt, but so far they haven't done that. And maybe, I don't know, maybe that's a change you can make down the line. But yeah, I mean so far there hasn't been much of a run game at all really from Edmonton this year, from my understanding, at least in the games that I've watched. And I think that'll continue to hurt 'em down the line if they don't do something there. And we talked last week, you had a Kevin Brown is not James's Wilder, right? Where you have that come down any anyway of that. But then, yeah, when Trey Ford played last year, having to account for him kind of freed up Kevin Brown and that was kind of what we had talked through last week and yeah, now don't, McLeod's not doing that, he's not running down feel that way. I mean he can, I mean he's got legs, he can do whatever, but it is not the same thread on there. So I don't know mean Andy is incredulous, we're all incredulous about this Chris Jones and Trey Ford thing and all of that. But yeah, when you look over there on the sidelines and it was early in the game and you see McLeod, Trey Ford and Dakota, like, Jesus, this team should be able to be, you have probably the best three, I would say, quarterback room in the CFL right now, especially with BC getting rid of Dakota. I don't know why they did that. Now they're going to rely on Vernon to do short yardage. I think that is mean. Bookmark that for a week 14 or whatever. Vernon snaps his ankle twist something trying to do that. But yeah, you look at this and you think Edmonton should be able to, but like you said, can't get any run going. Toronto just really, like I said, played a complete game. D Witty was on it the whole time. And Mike says not to doubt him, I just really impressed. And I mean Toronto, if you had said Chad Kelly's out for half the season, like, oh my God. I mean, Cameron Dukes is not the issue of this team at all. I mean, defense giving up too many points, but they're still two and oh, I mean Toronto looks great even with Cameron. Yeah, well, and we knew Toronto's defense was going to be young too, but I still feel like they had a lot of pieces. Like Jake Rena for example, I think was a huge acquisition and no one talked about that Big acquisition and still, he's still doing his thing. And I know I mentioned him and Sean Oakman would be a good pair, and I know they released Sean Oakman, but still Jake Rena had a sack in this game against this former team. I thought there was some interesting storylines in this game. A lot of former guys from each team playing against each other, like McLeod in Toronto and Curly Gittens, and like I said, Jake Sore and a couple others, just felt like there was a lot of, not necessarily revenge in this game, but maybe that's the reason why it was kind of a shootout, right? It was prove it type of thing. And I know in those situations you take it more personally. So I thought that added a nice element to it in terms of the storyline. Yeah, it was cool. They were showing all the hugs and they're like, well, until the game starts and then it's all, so yeah, it was good. It was fun with that. Anyway, good outing here. We'll see. We'll move on here. This one, I thought Hamilton looked decent last week, even though they lost. And I said, man, there's still a really intriguing team here, and Beau looks better. Even if whatever there was, I think it was Rod Smith on the call and there was the, well, only McLeod knows, excuse me, only Bo knows what he saw on that throw where he threw the interception because it's directly into cover. It's like, I just signed that. Well, I can't justify this and well, Beau must have saw something that I didn't see. Bo did not have a good game. We're back to this. We're trying to throw out for 45 attempts here. No run game to speak of when Beau is your leading rusher. That cannot be good. I dunno what James Butler was doing in this game. Really pitiful performance here from Hamilton, I thought for the unlike last week, but this was really bad. Yeah, it was tough. This was one of the games where you felt like early on that Saskatchewan was in control and they weren't going to let go. Like you said, I feel like Hamilton has a lot of good pieces. There's some things to work with there. Obviously James Butler being one of the biggest names there, didn't have the best game. I guess it was yesterday. We're recording this on Monday. Yeah, Sunday. Yeah. He didn't have the best game, and that's okay. You can't rely on one player to do everything. I'll get to Hamilton in a minute, but I really want to talk about Saskatchewan now. I understand it was a bit of a different game for Saskatchewan because Trevor Harris had to leave and everybody kind of think everybody's heart stopped for a minute and they thought, oh, are we going to be having this again where it's a couple weeks into the season and Trevor looks really good, but an injury happens and now we have to figure things out and the slide begins. We saw it last year and obviously it's a different regime now, different story, a lot of different players, but I can understand some of the fear there. I think. So Shea Patterson comes in, former USFL guy, we're familiar with them, had been in the CFL prior with BC in Montreal, which a lot of people I feel kind of forget about because he was just a Shorty Yards guy. But clearly he performed well in camp this year, beat out Mason fine for the backup job, who had been there for several years. Sha comes in and takes that from him. Didn't look overwhelming in this game. I thought. Again, it's kind of growing pains type thing. This is your first game where you're really throwing the football in a while. You kind got to figure things out again, the Canadian game being different than when you played with the Michigan Panthers or when you were at Ole Miss or whatever. So there's some things there, and I hope Trevor is okay. Something tells me that it was a precautionary move. I, Yeah, I was reading today, they said that he wanted to go back in and they felt like they better play it safe. Well, they Were in control of the game and they saw him warming up. I only watched the first half of that game and a bit of the second half when he didn't come back out, but he looked all right to come back in. I just assumed at that point they didn't want to risk it, which is again, after what happened to him last year. And I completely understand that. I think Saskatchewan, they have probably been, I know Winnipeg being Owen three or I said Winnipeg being Owen three was the biggest surprise this year. But I mean, Saskatchewan being three and oh might be the close second With rookie, I mean with the new head coach, I mean new. Yeah, But I've been telling people I felt very strongly about the Cory Mace hire, and again, everybody that I know has spoke very highly of him, and I think it's the idea of being a player's coach, and I've told people this personally, but when you're playing for your players and you're a younger guy, he's only 37. I bring this up every time, but Trevor Harris, who's just starting quarterback, I think is a year older than him. So older than me, right? Yeah. And older than you too. We bring that up, but I'll spare you, but I think it's a culture thing, it's a mentality thing, right? Corey Mace is a younger guy and I think these younger coaches, even if some people might not view them as experienced, I feel like they can relate to a lot of the players better. And when you're bringing in a lot of new guys under a new regime, it's important to establish the culture early and get people going. And we need to be kind of focused on the same goal and task at hand here. I watch every video of Corey Mays talking in the locker room. I love the way that he presents himself. And again, I think that's where a lot of the credit goes is to what he's done. He had his team prepared and ready and he said, I heard the doubters. I understand this team's been in a rough spot for a couple years with the way that they've finished out seasons. I want to make sure that we change that. And I do everybody here, right? Upper management and everything. So it's been really good to see him succeed in that role. And again, if I'm a rough riders fan, maybe you don't let out the sigh of the relief until later in the season when you're still winning because again, that's where they've had a lot of the struggles. When Craig Dickinson was there for a couple years last year, they went on that slide at the end of the year, and again, it's tough and that was a bit different. They lost Trevor Harris and then it was Jake Dolan gala. They had a lot of things going on, but this team looks really good. Another guy I want to talk about too real quick before we go back to Hamilton Agio Ajo, the rookie receiver who had the 40 yard touchdown catch in this game, phenomenal story, and I got to bring this up. I put out a tweet about it, but it really is beating the odds. This guy came out of Garden City Community College straight from community college into the pro level, which you don't see that often. Now. He was a ranked recruit, went to Clemson, went to South Florida, but had some falling outs there, couldn't play injuries. All that went to community college. But typically when guys go to community college to rehab, get reps, whatever, then they go back to NCAA and do something else but a took a chance and he said, you know what? I'm going to go pro and hopefully somebody sees the potential in me. And I don't think he tested very well either. So he didn't necessarily do himself any favors as the process was developing, but Saskatchewan took a chance on him. They took him, I think in the seventh round of the CFL draft, and he made it as one of the guys coming out of camp again, proved himself, kind of like I was talking about Shea Patterson, a guy that maybe people didn't expect to be there, but he's there and now he's starting to make some plays and it is good to see because I feel like a lot of players in any league can be maybe discouraged or some guys, I think, well, a lot of guys I know personally are working pretty hard and pushing and they don't care about the outside noise and that's the way that it should be. But for a guy to go from community college straight to the professional level, even if it's not NFL, that speaks a lot to his work ethic. And I know Anthony mentioned it, but he interviewed him at the combine and he said that he was a really nice guy and saw potential in him too. So it just speaks a lot about owning, I think your journey to a league, whatever league it is, in this case, the CFL. But I hope more players can lean into that and be like, okay, well it doesn't matter as much about where I come from as it does what I do in the moment when I'm given the opportunity, and that's what I tell a lot of players that I recruit and work with all the time. Similar story with Cameron Dukes in Toronto, not to get too off track, but that guy, they always talk about it on the CFL broadcast. Lindsey Wilson College, no one knows where that is. It's a tiny school, 2000 kids or whatever, and I think it's Kentucky. No one knows where that is, but this guy still made a career coming from their NAIA school, went to the IFL first. Obviously I've talked about a bunch of times. I won't plug that anymore. But again, it's just about finding your own path and journey and I think there's a lot of guys in the CFL who are doing that more so now, I'm not going to say than before because I've only fallen this league for a couple years and I'm young, but always just positive to see guys kind of figure that out and craft their own journey. Like I said, We got a comment here, garage Gym Life, we'll get to you in a second here before we round out this, asking about where the watch games. I will say it's interesting on hearing you talk about Saskatchewan and I appreciate your story and of course that's why I bring Evan on to be able to share insights like that, which is great in terms of players backgrounds and stories, but it was so weird, Saskatchewan all year, and we'd have on Saskatchewan Media and Jamie Nye and everybody else and Darryll Davis. Then at the end of the year it was everyone hated Dickinson and they wanted him to get out and they weren't playing for him. And you're like, okay, where was that all year? I didn't hear that. I talk Saskatchewan all the time and now you have Corey Mason there and I remember listening to Rob Peterson show and they're like, well, the team might stink, but at least you're going to play for Corey. Well, the team's playing for Corey, they don't necessarily stink. So you get the best of both worlds, but it really is weird, like you talked about in just the mentality he brings in and the players playing for him. It is just cool to see, I mean Saskatchewan making the whole turnaround here, I don't think a lot of people suspected. I will say this Trevor Harris thing is an issue, was an issue last year and I would be very careful with that because like we saw Jay Patterson here four 10 coming in and the air mailing balls might not be your backup option if anything happens to Trevor. Sure, I mean, but just staying on the player topic here for a minute, another guy, I know I haven't talked enough defense on the show, but I'll talk about it now that I have a chance. And again, because Saskatchewan is such a complete team, there's a lot of great examples of players who are excelling here. CJ Avery, their linebacker, this was a guy played for the Vegas Vipers in the XFL. He's been phenomenal this year. And it's interesting because from what I recall, again, this is all going off the top of my head, I didn't have notes for this, but I think Montreal signed him, let him go. Saskatchewan got him after that and then now he's really developing fast into what looks to be one of the better linebackers in the league. He's made a play in every game this year. I just can't say enough good things about how well he's looked and just strikes me as a guy that can really develop into a leader and someone who again, can play in this league for a long time, right? If we're talking about player development and all that. But I'll put Saskatchewan aside for now. I want to talk about Hamilton before we get out Hamilton, I don't think the expectation was too high for 'em this year. Again, they have a new head coach too, Scott Milanovich, who was with the organization last year and helped turn around a lot of their offense, whether it was Bo Levi Mitchell in, even though he was banged up and it was kind of hard for him to find consistency or Taylor Powell who's still there and I think may end up eventually taking control of things. It's interesting with Bo Levi because he was so good for so many years and then Jake Mayer took his job in Calgary and Jake Mayer so far this season has looked good. Now I wonder with some of these games, and it's nothing against be Levi, I think it's just age and time and situation, a lot of things to play into it, but you wonder, Taylor Powell, who they extended not too long ago, by the way. So they want him there. You wonder, you wonder how long the leash is on a guy like that. And I know again, this wasn't the expectation for Hamilton this year was not to win a great cup, at least from the opposing side of things. Obviously if you're within the organization, your goal is to win a championship and if you don't want to do that then you shouldn't be there, period. I know that from working in sports, but just from the outside perspective, the odds were not in favor of them going very far this year. And you just wonder, and again, teams in those situations, sometimes they like to pivot younger, and again, you just wonder how long I know Bo Levi in the off season we kind of wondered things didn't look great after the playoff game that they lost. And I think Scott Milanovich maybe helped turn his opinion around, but just because he turned his opinion around it doesn't mean that it's going to be his job forever. And that's just how football works. I keep saying that it's part of the business, but it really is. So that's just something I wanted to point out. If we're going back to just talking about players, the last guy I'll really focus in on here, Shamar Bridges, this guy, really, really cool story. Again, he came from a D two school, Fort Valley State, great frame. I think he's 6 4, 6 5, just shy, 210 pounds. So that's what stood out from him coming out of D two. Obviously that's not a level where a ton of guys are going into the NFL, but he had an opportunity with the Baltimore Ravens coming out and it was interesting. He only played I think four games his senior year or final year, which was in 2021 at for Valley, and I think he had like 28 catches in four games, ultra productive, great frame. A guy like that, even from that level is going to get a shot and was with the Ravens, hung around there for a bit. And then now he's starting to do some things here in the CFL and I think this might be kind of the silver lining story in Hamilton. One of those feel good like, Hey, maybe we're not winning, but we're at least given a young guy like this an opportunity because I see a very bright future for him too. So just wanted to point that out. Obviously they've got a lot of guys and I will maybe go, if I'm ever doing this again, I'll do a deeper dive, but we're running out of time here, so I'll leave it at that. Well, that's good. Yeah, coach Craig agreed with you. He says Bridge is balling here. He was seen as between their wide receiver tie end by the NFL. Great to see him killing it. We'll put this one to bed here. We're going to go watch. Well, we got the Stanley Cup here, don't want to compete with that. And we got, there's a lot of sports I have. I know you don't care about hockey, but I'm going to go see the Bike Riders movie with my brother, that Tom Hardy motorcycle game. I'll say, look, I'll say this much. I know you criticized me for not being the big hockey guy, but that game tonight, that's a must watch, at least for me in terms of sports between Oilers and Panthers. I mean, you're talking about for sports that have seven game playoff series. I mean, boy, if Edmonton pulls this one out, which I don't know, again, I really don't know, but they pull that one out. I mean that's history and you want to be able to see that so Well, and it just is, the Kraken have not played meaningful hockey in months, and so it's amazing to think that we're still, we're not done with the playoffs here at this point. I mean, shoot, the hockey season starts in October. Anyway, last thing here. Jim wants to know Greg Garage Gym Life watching the games. It is weird this year because last year it felt like a lot of the summer games we're on CBS Sports Network. And then as they transitioned to CFL plus as they moved into the fall, it's kind of hit or miss. I knew the game was on Saturday. I pulled up the CFL plus on my phone and then it turned into, oh, it wasn't available in the United States, and so then we had to do on the CCBs Sports Network. So you kind got to pick your poison on that. So I would just go on CFL plus check and see. It'll see if it's available in your area or not. You just put it in your email and all that stuff. Otherwise, if you have YouTube, tv, fubu, any of that kind of stuff, it's available on there, the CBS Sports Network. But yeah, it's kind weird. There's not really, well the Thursday Friday games or these games, it's kind of confusing. I don't think it's a great solution. A lot of Canadians tried to convince me that it was the best thing for American people watching unless you live here and have to deal with it anyway, but should be a good slate next week. We won't talk too much about this. I'll just throw it on here while we get out of here. Edmonton and BC should be exciting. I'm going to have on Mike Hogan, we're going to talk some Argos and I'm trying to get Steve Milton on to talk Hamilton as well, but should be a good show. I got Ben Fisher on as well. We're talking UFL and how did they do recap for the season? Evan, anything else from you before we get out of here? Yeah, I was just going to say about the TV schedule and figuring out where, if it's on CFL Plus or CCBs SportsNet, if you look up like CFL TV schedule on Google, there's a, and I did this last year too, there's actually a PDF document that you can find online that has the listing of all the games through the season, what network they're going to be on, whether it's, I mean obviously TSN if you're in Canada, but for the Americans it'll say it'll denote whether it's CBS SportsNet or CFL Plus, because the games that are on CBS SportsNet with the contract, they won't be available on CFL Plus, it's not simultaneous. It'll say it'll be international audiences only if the game is on CCBs sports to end the us. So yes, it's complicated. I'm sure. I don't even know if that made any sense to somebody who hasn't really watched it, but that's the way it is now. Yeah, like I said, I liked the ESPN because at least if you had the TV contract, if you had the right, whatever, everything was on ES pn. Now you did have to have whatever tier of the YouTube TV or whatever to get that, but I at least like that where now it doesn't matter what you pay or what you do, some of the games are only available on your phone. So anyway, that's the tale for another story, whatever. We'll get Jason back next week. Like I said, like and subscribe. Should be a good episode Friday, we'll figure out next week as well. Could be some changes on here. But I appreciate Evan hopping on here last minute. I know Evan wasn't prepped for today, so really appreciate that. Evan, anything else? No, I think that's it, but I think we did a good job. Awesome. We'll see you guys next time and thanks.

UFL 2025 Plans Confirmed: What Does the Future Hold?

Well here we are back here. Mike, adjusting his camera. That's good. Looks great, sounds great. UFL 2024. Season one is in the books. We're going to kind of recap that. I know Mike wants to talk about the title game. We let 'em talk football. We're going to talk kind of how did the season perform and live up to expectations. And then we do actually have a lot of plans confirmed seemingly from Moose Johnston, which I was parading I kind of networking with at the bar there in St. Louis. That was fun. So lots to talk about that. Lots of intel both on the podcast and off with that. But we have UFL Insider Mike Mitchell here. Mike, how are you doing? I'm doing well Reid. Thank you as always for having me on. It'll be good. Yeah, we try to do these midseason and then post after the XFL last year we did. And then the USFL and then Midseason so I could subscribe working on a new giveaway. We was talking about doing some season tickets. Not sure if that will work out anymore, but we will figure out a giveaway, so like and subscribe, support the channel. Get us up to 4,000 subscribers. We have Jason Hussey and I are doing CFL content every Monday. Now. This will be the episode today and then we'll start doing CFL guests. So hopefully here if we get the podcast going again following this week. Mike, the season's done stallions. We'll talk the game. I don't want to do too much. I want this to be a little evergreen, but obviously we'll get your thoughts on that. This was really not a great game Unfortunately for San Antonio. Sometimes they're Every fan in the building. For Birmingham it was tremendous. Anytime you get to see if you're a Birmingham supporter, fan believer, advocate, et cetera, it's tremendous. You get to see them during the postseason. This is how good they are. They always step up to the occasion. So kudos to them. Skip hold Zachary Potter, that whole team, they're going to have a bunch of players sign on with the NFL. Same thing as last year, whatever it was, it was like 18 or 19 different guys. So kudos to Birmingham. I don't want to take anything away from them, but for San Antonio, we've seen this in sports. Sometimes teams get a championship game and they lay an egg. And the most unfortunate side of it to me, and I've been pretty harsh on him, but I'm sorry Chase Garbers, I thought his performance was dreadful. I know you look at the stats and you go, Hey, it wasn't too bad. High completion percentage, et cetera, but he played scared. Now in his defense, he came back from a pretty serious injury, which is cool. And so he hurt and then he had a wrist injury. So there was some if about whether or not he would play in the XFL conference championship game, he eventually did, right? So okay, he's trying to protect himself and a lot of times coaches will tell their quarterbacks, learn how to slide, learn how to slide. Okay, fine. But in the championship game, when your team is struggling to convert on offense, you got to put yourself on the line. So if he's protecting himself for an NFL contract, and I think I said this online, if I was an NFL team and I watched that game, I don't want that guy on my team. So anybody who's selfish, not looking out for the team, not putting it all out because how many opportunities is Chase Garber's going to get to be a starting quarterback anywhere and have an opportunity to win a championship. So that might be his last time he's ever playing in a championship game at any level anywhere. So maybe he'll be like a third stringer or whatever, somewhere by accident like in Canada and end up getting a ring or something like that. So that was podcast. So that's not positive. And just to pull back the curtain, there's a lot of stuff that we share with each other in our infamous chat behind the scenes that I can't really share publicly. So I thank you and all the guys, we've got some interesting guys incognito in our chats who actually pay attention to what I'm assuming what we share. But there were certain things I said about Garber's that I can't say publicly, I wouldn't even say on your show, but he was pussyfooting around during that game. I'll say that much. And that was a disappointing element. I talked to people on the Brahma staff, they were very disappointed. There's some people on that team, they were disappointed with their quarterback. We saw a wide receiver Katie Cannon being pretty vocal about his usage and how he didn't want to be a part of that team anymore. That tells you something right there. I'm not saying that Katie Cannon's in the right for making those comments on social media, but there was a lot of infighting there. Seemed like the team was going to explode during the game. So it was an ugly end for what was otherwise a tremendous season for the Brahmas. Mark Lily Bridge did a tremendous job with that roster. We just saw Cole Laval signed with the New York Jets, awesome signing by the Jets, great for Cole Laval coming from indoor football into Spring Pro football and now getting an opportunity in the NFL. Wade Phillips can't say enough great things about him. What a true legend. It wasn't a shining moment. I'm friendly with him and I respect him, but it wasn't a shining moment for AJ Smith, but it's a little bit hard when you're quarterback plays like that. They could have made a switch. They just decided to dink and dunk. They didn't take any chances. I think them relying on what they did the first time against Birmingham where they only scored 19 points against Birmingham at home where they beat 'em 19 to nine, that the only loss only blemish on Birmingham's record is against San Antonio in that game. The bras, it wasn't like they lit up the world, they only scored 19 points. They had one of their touchdowns was on a wide receiver touchdown pass. So it wasn't like let's rely on what we did prior to them. You didn't light up the world. Their defense hung on for as long as they could skip. Hals made tremendous adjustments and you talked about this, Andy Murray did a tremendous job, you guys recapping the game. But I think removing the football aspect of it, what's interesting here is what happens next with the coaches, Wade Phillips, skip Hultz, they love to be a part of this league, but we don't know for sure if they will be back. Their contracts expire at the end of the month. We'll see what happens. Yeah, so would that be in terms of that and also the question of the AJ Smith of it, because a lot of people thought, well if he goes away, does AJ move up or does he go to a different team to get an opportunity? Do you think that changes that for AJ and then yeah, what is the status kind of on the coaches right now? I know that obviously with the Hines ward of it all and Wade moving, but as far as you know, what status are we at with the eight coaches? Like I said, their contracts expire at the end of the month, so it's just a matter, I know the guys like Anthony Beck, I've been in contact with coaches, Anthony Beck, Bob Stoops, even Wade Phillips, all these guys Skip Holtz. They would love to still be coaching in the league. As far as Ag Smith goes, if by chance some of these veteran coaches don't come back, whatever it is with Stoops, I think a lot of it has to do with the timeline, how it fits his life. If they go back to the week after the Super Bowl, which that's still in talks, we'll get into that. But if they go back to that period, I think stoops will want to come back. If they move more towards a mid April, late April to July kind of thing. I don't think stoops is in one thing. Stoops did. That was great, which a lot of coaches did. That was great. They selflessly agreed to the new contract terms, the seasonal contract terms in order to protect their assistants. That's something Hines Ward did not do. And a lot of those braas assistant coaches ended up out of the league. The Darius Bells, those guys unfortunately they ended up without a job. They thought for sure they were going to be part of this league. So guys like Stoops, Anthony Beck, they made sure to protect their assistants so they kept their jobs. So what you would like to see in these leagues, it's awesome if they go out like say a John Gruden or somebody decides to come in and coach or that'd be kind of cool for the cache of it. It's kind of fun. But it would be awesome to see some of these assistant coaches if by chance some of these veterans leave, be nice to see that progression of guys who have already been in spring pro leagues that have earned, they've been waiting in line. So like in AJ Smith, even though he was on the sidelines this year and he's well loved in the community, Jaron Horton would be nice to see him get an opportunity as a head coach. He did such a phenomenal job with the Mueller's defense. So you'd like to see guys like that. So it would be cool if the Spring Pro leagues not only elevate the players to get NFL opportunities, but actually elevate these assistants to be head coaches on these teams. Sometimes if you get an outsider like a Jeff Fisher or somebody with name recognition, you don't know where their heart is at, whether they're going to treat the job like a vacation, come to practice with flip-flops and let one of the assistants run the practices, that kind of deal. So these young hungry assistants on these staffs would love that opportunity. So if by chance, let's hope Wade Phillips comes back, it's great having him part of the league, right? His energy's tremendous. The legacy that he carries with him, son of bum, let's hope he comes back. But if he doesn't, if for whatever reason the money isn't right and he doesn't like the setup and the league wants to go, I hate to put it this way, the cheaper route, maybe AJ Smith will get a chance to be a coach. I don't want to say it just because affordable, but it would be nice to see young coach like that get an opportunity to lead and sink or swim. Anthony Beck has never been a head coach before and I know some people are critical of his performance, but he's actually, he's done a pretty good job from a leadership standpoint. Maybe sometimes you can go qui about the X's and O's decision-making the end of the XFL conference game wasn't a greatest moment for him. I think they should have cut it down to a one score lead and attempted for the 12. For some reason they're hanging on still trying to get in the end zone with the seconds left anyhow. But some of these things stay with me and I'm a huge Anthony Beck fan, so it's the way it goes. You wonder from the championship game whether or not if AJ McCarran was healthy, whether or not the Brams would've gotten to that point, but San Antonio, nevertheless San Antonio did a tremendous job this season. So you'd like to see Wade Phillips back if he's not, maybe we'll read the defensive coordinator or a g Smith gets that shot In terms of the contract differences here. Right, because talked about that and Andy and I have been asked kind of on the Monday recaps all season, well is Stoops back, is whoever back, and I know you were talking about the scheduling with Stoops, but to me, and we had Rick on Midseason talking about the coach rates as well getting paid and maybe some of 'em were getting overpaid or whatever. I'm just curious that if that money comes into it too, if Stoops is your guy for whatever he's getting paid now, and if I'm getting paid a third of that, maybe I'm not your guy anymore. Right? You had a guest on this season on your podcast. You have so many great guests on that talked about how the coaches were making too much money. I'm trying to remember which I think it was Rick. I'm pretty sure Rick. Rick, yes, yes. And so Stoops, it's no secret. Stoops has a pretty decent contract when the XFO went bankrupt because of Covid and all that kind of stuff, it kind of became public knowledge of how much he was making, how much the legal owe him, et cetera, et cetera. Money is definitely a factor, Reid. So what are these guys going to be, even if they are seasonal for just a few months, what are they going to be paid? They're not going to come in and work for peanuts. And the talk was that Stoops is making upwards of over $600,000, maybe seven 50. So he was the highest paid coach in the league. He's not going to be getting that anymore. So Hydes Ward was getting paid a pretty penny before he decided to walk away. What's The dropoff just as far as you know, what's the dropoff to the USFL coaches contracts? I would think low six figures would be the max on the SFL side. Maybe 90 KA hundred K. If you're paying somebody for, I guess this job would entail, I mean it's year round because you have the draft and analyzing players and all that kind of stuff, but you're paying somebody on the clock for six months. It's kind of like the league probably figures. Why are we going to pay this guy to be home for half of the year? So I would assume, I don't know what Skip Hal's deal, he might have a better contract than let's just say like CJ Johnson and all these other guys. But it wasn't to the level of what stoops got, what Wade Phillips got, what Anthony Beck got. So that's kind of the story there. So it's going to be an interesting, the cool thing is, and you could see it Wade Phillips, could he be back in the NFL? Sure. Why not as that coach? I don't think so. I'm sorry. But not to say that he's not worthy of that opportunity. I just think that that ship has sailed because he's in his late seventies now as a senior defensive assistant, that kind of thing. Maybe assistant head coach. Sure. But I think he likes the gig. I don't see him going to Canada per se. So I mean the league should make some changes in coaching. We saw DeFilippo was crying after the Memphis victory where they secure the first pick and every draft possible we saw him crying because he doesn't know if he's going to be back or not. He's had a very emotional story like health wise and everything to get back to this point. So you feel for guys like that, but I hate to say this, I get in trouble for this stuff, but a couple of changes wouldn't be such a bad thing. You just want the right people in those shoes. Let's transition here, excuse me to let's talk ratings, championship ratings and then we can kind of parlay that into other thoughts, performance for the season here and then obviously move into looking into next year. 1.596 million I think I had said over under was 1.4. I had it slightly under that. I think that this is great in terms of being over that thoughts. First of all, on the championship game, obviously not the most compelling on the field and I know we've talked about that. It was funny because like I said on the Monday recap, we did, even some of the people I saw in the lobby were like, yeah, this wasn't a great game. I said, well, as long as you're saying it because I'm always Mr. Negative Nancy. So as long as you're saying it wasn't the best game, but thoughts on this performance and just overall TV ratings for the year? Sure. Just tracking it, reporting the ratings every week for Sports Illustrated. The week prior I talked, the big theme after the playoff ratings were very positive was whether or not they could surpass what the previous leagues had done. They certainly did that when this number came in, when I got it directly from Nielsen and then the network, I was mildly surprised and then I started thinking to myself almost immediately, good lord, what could they have potentially done if the game was exciting or close or came down to the wire? You see the peak happen while Tom Brady, you got a picture of Tom Brady up there on the screen. Brady was in the booth around six 10. I want to say he stayed for about 10 minutes or so and you call it their highest peak I believe was in that six 15 to six 30. So no coincidence there. And that was a big social media moment because all the mainstream sites, as soon as Brady was in the booth, put that out on social media. Hey, Brady's in the booth, Brady's in the booth and all that stuff. You had all the aggregators and everything, the ML footballs or whatever. Yeah, everyone Going crazy, Ari ov and all these other guys that were out there that went. So I'm not surprised at that. The peak should have been at the end of the game, but why would it be at the end of the game when you had a game like that? 25? Nothing slow plotting. Nearly a zero first half until Birmingham kind of caught on late in that quarter. So I think they could have done much better. It makes you wonder, it wasn't considering that it's Father's Day, right? Considering the timeframe, which I know five o'clock's not that bad. It's not exactly prime time, but it's whatever, two o'clock on the west coast, whatever it is, four o'clock on central time or whatever. So I think in a primetime slot would be more ideal spot and obviously most important aspect of this is the quality of the game. I think it was unfortunate that the game itself wasn't great because with any championship game, you're going to get some eyeballs of people who don't watch during the season and this is the highest rating of the year, but it isn't overly, UFL had a couple of games within that 1, 2, 1 3 range that kind of deal. So this isn't like all of a sudden they shot up to 2 million, but it makes you want to get a lot of casuals. So they got some casuals here, but I think they would've had a better number overall if the game was good and you want that sample audience to come watch this rocking awesome electric game and go, damn, you know what? I screwed up not watching during the whole season. I'm going to come back and watch. I don't know if this championship game gave you that. If you're a casual guy, you probably tuned in and go, his players are not too good. Look at this guy. He's trying to protect himself. He's not trying to get first downs. This Garber's guy and he got clowned by a lot of the mainstream sites out there for doing that. What's the saying? Business decision. So anyhow, so maybe it didn't leave the greatest impression. The broadcast is great. Joe CLA is great. I don't know so much about that Robo dog. That thing was wild. It was there and then I watched the highlights. Half we're sitting there in the pressbox. What is that can almost be PTSD if you were some of those. We had this, I got To tell you, I'm not a hunter, I'm not a violent person. I love dogs. But if I saw one of those robo things in my yard, I might go get a weapon and neutralize it. It'd like creep me out. I don't know is strange, but I get it. But it's just an added thing. You saw the look on Kurt Warner's face. He wasn't exactly going for it, but yeah, so I thought the broadcast was good. It's sleek look great. Joe CLA is amazing. They did such a great job with it. It's unfortunate. The game was great. I don't think about it for us fans like me advocates my whole life since the USFL in the eighties I'll be back, but what I'm thinking about is the league's growth. So I'm thinking about how can you lure people in for the next year and I don't think they destroyed that possibility, but they sure as hell didn't capture that moment. Not their fault. Sometimes these championship games suck. Yeah, I agree with that. I don't know if it was blown by it, but it certainly and to no fault of their own. Like I said, I was talking to league people, this is why I never made sense when WWE e ever had storylines that weren't happy, didn't satisfy the audience. Like you are able to craft this narrative exactly how you want to, you can't control that. But in terms of it just feels like, yeah, like a missed opportunity. A lot of these, well we're not going to do the supplemental draft this year. We're not going to do this. This just felt like another something could have been if this game would've been great. I'm curious your thoughts on the battle hawks of it all not being there. I know we were well on and I heard back from people that were not happy with my comments about that, but even if you had turned on the game and there was 30,000 ballot hawks people there, I think it would've made a difference. Do you have thoughts on that? And we've been asked, would St. Louis host again? I don't think they'd go back to St. Louis. I feel like that was the opportunity. Here's your thoughts. Well, I'll say this point. So before I get into all that, I love your show. You've done a tremendous job in this space for four years, but I don't always agree with your takes, but it's important that we have different takes, right? So I think maybe you were a little bit, I get where you're coming from though. It's fine. You Can Say that. I definitely, I get where you're coming from though. I know that league sources I spoke with, they felt that they were going to have at least 40 5K in attendance for that game. Had St. Louis made it, I believe they would've been in that neighborhood. No question about it. If I get it, look with this league, I'm a fan for the entire league. I want the league to exist because it means thousands of jobs and opportunities for football players. So I don't have a team that I root for per se, so I'm rooting for the entire league. But I get the fandom aspect of it. I'll just say this, I know this is a fairytale world thing, but if I had tickets to the Super Bowl at MetLife and the Jets had gotten to an a FFC championship game, I realize that's fairytale stuff. But if they had gotten to, I mean it's been however many years they did it two years in old Ricks Ryan, but that was like 70 years ago. But anyhow, but if the Jets had gotten a FC championship and they lost in bitter fashion and not gotten a Super Bowl from a fandom aspect, I'd have a hard time going to MetLife and watching say, I don't know, let's just say the Bills beat the jets, watching the bills win a Super Bowl, I'd root against the bills likely if I went there. I know that's petty. So when Battle Hawks fans were in attendance, booing Wade Phillips for the game as a fan, I get it, take it off the journalist cap, the writing cap, all that as a fan, I totally get it. For those who didn't show up, I get it. I can tell you when the Jets lost the Steelers, when the Jets lost the Cols in the A FFC championship and they didn't get to the Super Bowl, it was kind of a fairy tale year. They won nine games that season and they fell short against Paint Manning and then Indianapolis. I watched the Super Bowl with the cults the next week when the Jets lost to the Steelers that next year when they went and they beat Brady and Belichick in New England and Peyton Manning in Indianapolis, when they lost that game to the Steelers, I didn't watch a Super Bowl and that's the first Super Bowl I hadn't watched in a long time. And that's my fandom there. So I say that to say that I understand if any St. Louis fans, this shows you how passionate they were about the league and their team. I understand well how about their team? Not the league, but of course. But they've already proven St. Louis. I'm not saying the entire city of St. Louis, but St. Louis has already proven that they're in on this league. Nobody should get a pass. But if we're going to rank the fan bases, who's most invested in this league? Kind of like St. Louis, above everybody else. I'm sorry. This is the most beloved team in Spring pro football, most beloved team we've seen in this concept for a long time. That's just kind of the story there. So I'm a little hesitant to be harsh on them. Now whether or not they'd ever come back to St. Louis, we knew this was a possibility that if we knew if St Louis gets there, they're going to have a chance to beat the modern day Spring Pro football record. I know USFL in the eighties, CFL in America had some Baltimore stallions had some hugely attended games, but we're talking four, five decades ago. So we know if St. Louis had gotten to the championship game, they would've threatened to surpassed whatever it was 40,000 for their opener this year. So the fact that they, we know again with this attendance stuff, I get it. This is in the venues, they give you the number then. So this is what happens in Major League Baseball, NHL hockey they give you. That's why I purposely put attendance figure not actual attendance. This is the attendance figure they give you. So 27 K was not in that building, right? We know that. But it's tickets paid and tickets distributed. There's a fine line there too because tickets distributed could be sponsors and stuff. They get comps and it could also be tickets that were just given away for free. Whatever your local gas station had a Slurpee thing, so whatever it was. So 27 K, they would've surpassed that. I'm not saying they would've doubled that, but they would've surpassed that by a huge margin, whether or not they'll be back in St. Louis. It all depends on venue availability. A lot of these things, it's kind of a tricky thing they get into with these spring leagues like Michigan Panthers, they lost in the last game of the season, but they almost won the USFL and then the conference and then didn't host the game because Ford Field was unavailable because of a convention. So a lot of this has to do with venue availability. I think considering the circumstances, the bitterness of the battle hawks losing, I thought they did okay. It could have been a lot worse if that game was in Memphis. How many fans do you think we draw? Well, yeah, If that game was in Houston, how many fans do you think we draw? So even whoever's in attendance, whatever the attendance figure is, I don't know. You'd have a hard time getting 27 K in a lot of these places. Can't say that for DY field, obviously, because they're maxes if you really push a 20 k, if you had some seating here and there, but I don't think the Brahma San Antonio, they didn't have, I think their number was 20 2K for the XFL championship. They didn't actually have 20 2K. It seemed like maybe that crowd was larger than what we saw in St. Louis. I don't know. It's hard to say with those stadiums sometimes. But you were there. So I Did people arguing with me, lot of guess someone sat, I was upstairs and downstairs for both games, I can tell you. But yeah, it's fine. I mean the heart too much on that, but I'm just was curious your thoughts just with St. Louis. Yeah, there are people who get free tickets and unfortunately they don't go have that and then that sucks. And then you have the issue with, I hate making excuses for these things, but Father's Day is definitely a factor too in terms of selling tickets and ideally your championship game would not be a day where families together honoring their dad unless their dad's a football fan, you got 'em a ticket. So that kind of deal. So anyhow, On the alternative note, because we took my mom to Mother's Day, I mean Mariner's Baseball sold out on Father's Day. So I mean there is sports, Sports Things that, and I don't, But the thing is, we go through this with the C Ffl too, right? When the C Ffl crowd comes out there and ignorantly goes after some of these newer leagues, Yankees, Mariners, all these different friends, they've been around forever. It's like a built-in institution. There are waiting lists over generations for these leagues have not been around for generations. They not have been around for decades to build up that popularity. They're not at the level, I hate using the term, but these are considered minor league. This is considered a minor league because obviously the NFL is a premier league. They're above everybody in comparison to the NFL. This is a minor league. I don't like that term, but I get it if you're going by that definition. So yeah, the Mariners do well on Father's Day. The Yankees do well on Father's Day, the Mets do well on Father's Day. There are New York Rangers and hockey. They do well on Father's Day, whatever franchises are out there that are established and been around for 30, 40, 50 plus years. Yeah, red Sox do great on Father's Day. It's a little bit, these leagues are still these leagues and these teams are still in the early stages where it's not a must see they're an alternative maybe option. They're not. We got to go, we go see the Mariners, they are like maybe I'll try that out. And then it has to fit into until it becomes a smashing like whatever the fever with Kate and Clark where now the ticket demand is, oh, let's go see it. It's an event. They haven't reached that point yet. They're still planting seeds and trying to grow. Last question on that or I guess here let's move into, I'm just making time code notes. In terms of overall, I think the execs have to be really happy this year. I think in terms of tv, we saw a lot of growth. Obviously the football was good. We expected that the championship game aside and like I said, you can't kind of control that, but thoughts here that kind of round out this part of it and then we'll move to into next season. But what do they think? Because my only hesitation, and I'm always the one with being hesitant, is we saw these TV games this year, you're not going to see again next year, especially moving games to Friday unless you really, really make a marketing push on that. So I guess before we move into next year, what did your sense of how people felt both on the field and off the field for this year? Sure. The expectation level was that the ratings were going to go up and that's something I wrote about, talked about a million times. The more games you have on big network television, on broadcast network television, the better your ratings are going to be. I mean the XFL last year, it's crazy that they had the same regular season numbers as the USFL or a little bit better at considering the fact how many, they only had six games or five games, actually six games, whatever it was during the season on A B, C, which by the way, they averaged over 1.1 million viewers on A, B, C the entire season when they were on there. They had good ratings. So the fact that they had so many big network games through A, B, C, and Fox by default, the ratings were going to go up. So I'm not surprised at all. And then of course they averaged, I want to say it was 945,000 on the big networks. The broadcast networks cable I think was six 30 or something like that. Overall they were eight 30. So when you combine cable in the networks, so I'm not surprised and then nobody inside the league should be surprised that the year over year growth that they saw and whether or not they can carry that into next year, that remains to be seen. I just wrote an article about the attendance at Sports Illustrated, how it was down from the XFL in 2023, not by a lot but it was down. So it was like about factored into about a thousand fans per game to that adds up. So XFLI think did over 630,000 last year and the UFL just finished up at 5 81 I believe 5 81 K. So they definitely need to work on the attendance aspect. Now Danny Garcia, I put her quote in the article or her talking about having a full off season and more of a time to make a sales pitch that'll help out for them, at least in theory. And of course they're sticking with the eight markets. They got to make it work, wait and see on what strategy they use to boost attendance and interest locally. And it's a big question mark for them whether or not they can boost popularity. I would be surprised, and I'm hopefully I'm wrong on this, if they're ahead of the game next year in TV ratings with some hard work, with some hard work, they could be ahead of the game in attendance because they didn't do that great this year. It's just funny here with this article, the XFL homer in me would say, well it's because you subbed out some of these Cashman field that was mocked for 6,000 was celebrated for 6,000 in Memphis. So there is some of that where I think you subbed out for even for poor XFL home markets outperformed presumably the four home markets of the USFL for that. I want to make sure we touch on just real quick here, players already getting signed have to be celebrated by that, that the leagues are happy that that's coming out. Jake Bates and all that Thoughts on that just in terms of players already making the transition and I know you had already talked this week about how excited you are to see that and be able to track that, but I want to make sure we touch down on that. Sure. As a football nerd, I love this stuff. So I'm into rosters in the draft, the second best draft predictor on the planet by the way this past year anyway, but no, I love roster stuff right now. I have a list off to my left of how many actual roster spots are available in the NFL right at this moment and it's 15. Most NFL teams are at 90, that's 15. After all these UFL signings, I believe it's been a dozen. So I did this last year too. Somehow the XFL last year had 69 players that were signed. I know everybody loves that number. 69 players that were signed by the National Football League teams, the USFL ended up having 42 despite a later end to their season. So in order for these UFL players to have an opportunity, there's got to be openings and then sometimes it's ironic and crazy how it works in order for a UFL player to be signed, somebody loses their job, gets cut to free it up and then a lot of times I look at the player as being cut and I'm like, oh man, that guy was great at Georgia. Maybe he'll play in the UFL next year. So it's crazy how that works but how that, I see Luke Barco get cut and it's like wow, he's in the XFL last year doing a great job and then you see whatever the Steelers add at UFL player. So maybe Carlos Davis will see. I love the aspect of it. I'm a nerd. Like I said, I have a list of every team in the NFL off to my left here, how many players they actually have on their roster. Like the Bengals have 87 players right now. So I look at them waiting for them to sign a UFL players, that kind of deal. So that's fluid that changes every day. So if it's 12 players that's signed and there's only 15 spots, that means the max, you can get us 27. But I think we're not going to have the 111 players that signed from both leagues last year because of the timeline and everything else. But I think you'll have a healthy amount. It's great for these players and the players even if the players don't make the teams, the fact that this league is helping them get an additional opportunity is cool. There's no guarantees you're going to make an NFL roster the percentage. It is very challenging. So just these guys getting a second, third, first opportunity is cool. You got a veteran like Gary Conley getting a chance for redemption, he might not make the Cowboys. You got Willie Harvey, maybe he is a star for Dallas, who knows, right? Cole Levo, maybe he turns out to be terrific for the jets he's playing right next to Elijah Verta, who knows, maybe he doesn't, maybe he gets cut. But the fact that these guys, it's awesome guys who came from the indoor league and then tried spring leagues and ended up in the NFL. So it's fun for me. I'm familiar with every single NFL roster, backend front end paying attention to your commanders. So I'm looking at potential players they should sign from the UFL and they've already gone to worked out a bunch of kickers and all that. We'll see what happens with me and med. So it's a fun aspect to this and the people within the league are so proud of when NFL teams sign these players, they feel validation. If you're a gm like a Zachary Potter or Von Hutchins, all these terrific guys, mark Lily Bridge did such an awesome job with the Brams, right? He's got so many former NFL draft picks, Mark West Stevensons, Anthony McFarland, who should be on that NL roster. If you're these guys, Dave Bowler's you're proud of, it speaks to your work as a GM that, and then it speaks to your coaches how good of a job Kyle Caskey did with the Battle Hawks with guys like Jacob Sailors and Wayne Gaman playing special teams and balling out. He also coaches special teams. So when he sees a guy like sailors get a chance. It's funny with a lot of these guys in NFL circles, the fan bases and the media celebrates all these rafted signings and then they're like, oh look how great this is. Look at all that and then as soon as they're cut people forget about the player and they don't even think about 'em. And that's why with Jacob Sailors, he got $10,000 to sign with the Cincinnati Bengals out of East Tennessee state. He didn't make their team impressed enough to land on the Falcons practice squad, the battle hawks bring him in, he has a great season and he's back in the NFL with the New York Giants. Now he's getting another shot. So we'll see how it, but I think it's awesome for guys like that, sailors or Conley or whoever finds their way back in and for the UFL fan, the diehard, it makes the preseason games and training camp more interesting because you're paying attention to how these guys do and you hope they end up like a Donald Parham's going on his six straight season in the NFL. The PJ Walkers somehow still surviving going the Elijah Campbell's one of the best specialties players in the NFL. He played for the DC defenders back in 2020, he's still in the league, he's played with the jet dolphins, et cetera. So you root for these guys and it's a testament to the value of these leagues when the Brandon Aubrey's, Avante, Turpins, young Wade, cos d Johnsons, all these guys because of their playing in these leagues have been able to carve out extended pro careers. Well and I think that it's great, but when you boil down the numbers and we saw the players getting on and you actually sticks, I mean I think it's tremendous. I think that's why this needs to be one of 17 messages promoting the league and not the message promoting The league. Because I think you get into that and I think even last year with the XFL and then it's like, oh we had one guy or two, whatever it was that actually stuck when all was said and done. And I know things changed throughout the season and all of that for the NFL, but that's why you can't build your entire marketing push for the league around, look at all the players we get and then yeah and then like you said, the second that they get cut or whatever, then it's like oh okay, well hey we got 'em on. That counts as signing. So looking here, general consensus, would you agree, happy with everything given the circumstances this season with the truncated off season coming together, the late merger and all of that here, it feels okay, I dunno, not that this season was a punt but almost just like, well we just tried to get through this year and now really is that kind of what you're sensing the focus is and I want to start curtailing this now into looking towards next year, maybe this is UFL season 0.5 and the next year is going to be 1.0 or what was this a beta season? I don't know. How do you view it? Kind had a look. Yeah, it's a good point Reid. It kind of had a beta feel to it because of the short timeframe, the dispersal draft, which is fine, which is fine. I think it lends itself to them potentially being better next year they'll have more time to sell tickets on the football front, they'll have more time to scout. They can actually do things in unison now instead of just taking a dispersal draft where you're divvying up players from nonexisting teams, now you can actually have multiple drafts. You can do a lot of interesting things with the league. You can do full on scouting with the showcases. Everybody's working together late in the process. Last year USFL teams were still conducting business as if they were the generals and the stars, all these guys signing players conducting as if they were pushing forward and they're going to have a standard season. So now they're all together on the showcases and I've reached out to the league asking about another potential combine. It's possible last year there was a centralized combine. People forget that stuff, the rookie draft the XFL had because this whole merger business came on down the road. So they have a chance to be a better football product. They have more time and preparation. They need to iron out what they're going to do with the coaching staffs and figure that all out. That part of it, the GMs, the front office, hopefully everybody's back in play. I know a lot of people want to come back. So the sooner you have that worked out the better. But I think the broadcasting product and I think they can do a better job if they put in the effort. I'm not saying they're going to knock it out of the park, right? Because some markets may not embrace the league, but I think they can do a better job with attendance if they have more time to sell tickets instead of a week before or I think they can strategize it whether or not they take the correct steps that remains to be seen, but whether or not they implement a proper strategy to be more popular in these markets or at least get noticed a little more. So it takes time if you want Russ, Brandon and other people said maybe had a little too much red wine have said things like this is going to be a forever league. But they generally feel that. We'll see. But it takes in the early stages, it does take time. Some of these places is not going to be an overnight success. So now transition here to season two. Obviously we had, and it was funny, this came out, I think it was Monday, I am reading there and I'm like, okay, Darryl did an interview. Okay, who is this? Okay, Eric, he works, it's part of it with the, if I could get this thing up here works, Fox works NFLI reached out to Eric Again Tacoma news anyway, so I'm like, okay, who is this anyway? So I'm like, okay, well he's with Fox again. This is the kind of thing where missed opportunities, I would think in a different world you could have an announcement of like we are excited to be back for all eight cities next year. We're making strong efforts towards this. This is a plan, this is what we're going to be. As Russ Brandon told me when they announced the XFL hub two years ago, we're going to be the first people into the markets. We're going to be the last people out. But instead we have this kind of in a line on the Fox sports.com article like we're going to be back next year. We're concentrating on that. Thoughts on it. We've expected this and there's been rumblings of this similar kind of talking points but kind of came out like this and here we are. There's not going to be expansion next year. We're just rolling with the eight thoughts, how that came out. Sure, the announcement is a tough one. How do you spin that as a positive? How do you say to the people We're not expanding. So those teams that we abandoned put on pause mode, we're not bringing 'em back. And how do you say to some people who are vocally critical about some of the markets that didn't do so great, how do you say to them, Hey, we're sticking it out with you. Don't worry about the 5,006 fans. Don't worry about these two franchises that won one game all season or whatever. We're sticking it out so it's kind of hard. They're showing faith like what Moose told and I reached out to Eric and I asked him, maybe I shouldn't say that, but I asked him a couple of questions, did you ask Moose about the timeline for next season? And there isn't an answer on that quite yet. So I was trying to see if maybe I can, Eric's good, he follows me, I follow him. Obviously he did a very good job with it and he got moose. They wanted, honestly part of it, they wanted to expand in year two of the UFL fact that they're not tells you a couple of different things now they won't say this publicly, but whether or not they're ready financially to make that kind of commitment and whether or not if they had more success, if the eight teams were more of a success, I think they'd be like, okay, let's go to the next one. So the fact that they still feel that they need to do more building repair, fixing of their own current cars, like they got eight cars on the lot, a few of them need some work, let's work on that before we get new cars. Fact that to doing that, it tells you it's not the greatest message of growth. You love the fact that they're saying we have faith in Memphis, we have faith in Michigan, we have faith in Houston, we're seeing this through, we're in this for the long run. You love that sentiment, but it's how do you sell that in a PR kind of deal because a lot of people are expecting expansion. A lot of people were upset that it went from 16 teams to eight in this space. A lot of people want to see something that's a hook for year two of the UFL something that shows a level of growth and they're trying to I guess grow from within, but yeah, could more have been made about it. Sure, but there is the negative side of this that they're not, I'm cool with them not expanding, but there is a negative side to them not expanding and there is a negative side to them not relocating and saying, you know what? It's not going to work here. Let's go to a market where it will because we're going to see the same criticisms. I know people don't like it, people were in the bubble that our UFL supporters don't want to hear it, but we're going to see the same stuff read next year. If Memphis doesn't draw well if certain teams do not draw well they're going to be like, why the hell did the league not leave? I get what you're saying and I think, and I want to get into the quote here and we talk about because we got the protective lease and we've got Michigan and all of that, but I do think there's a way where you come out and I think you do a press conference and we were coming back from the, we were doing the stream. Anthony got to the game early to do the media stuff. Andy and I were finishing up and then we made our way over. I know that they were doing, they had a technology suite where you could go see the drones and things like that, but last year they had Danny and Dwayne on the field pregame and I did attend that and then they did obviously the post game with the trophy presentation. But I do think that you get Danny there or Russ there or Daryl or Eric, But what's the message? Is it like a wolf of Wall Street? We're not leaving, Hey Memphis, we're not leaving you. It's like I'm not leaving my girlfriend, I'm staying with her. Even though she had some moments. Think you say We've had tremendous growth this season. We've seen the stuff that Mike Movahill posts all the time. We've seen 35% growth year over year and the markets that we've stayed in that we have year over year where battle hawks increases. You just say, well the markets, I Hear you. And then you say, now we're making the commitment now for the next. I think there's a way to do it and make an announcement and have it spin up. We're investing in and we're going to be having street teams in these markets over the next six months and we're going to be looking to come out to community events and build. I just think there's a way that you can do it versus a throwaway line in the Fox sports.com article with no disrespect to Eric Williams. But yeah, we're going to make a commitment next year. I just think that there's a way to Not retreating. I hear you. To moose's credit, I don't know moose personally obviously, but to his credit he's been very transparent with this stuff. So a lot's like admitting that we're not where we should be in these places. It's kind of like the gist of what he's been saying even earlier this season in Memphis Media talking about how, and he obviously did that last year when the USFL was separate from the XFL, he was pretty down on Birmingham. So no surprise, here we are in UFL and the attendance of Birmingham wasn't great. So I mean they could have done something. Danny Garcia talked about how they didn't see the year over year growth that they wanted in attendance. So they think that with more time for sales to have, they got a point there. If they do having more time could help in theory, it's how they implement it, what they do. I don't disagree with that. They were kind of rushed into scheduling and all that in terms of even the TV schedule like Moose mentioned, the fact that less than ideal that they had somebody battle the Hawks games going directly against Cardinals games. They end their battle hawks ended up doing pretty decently all things considered, but sometimes it was close too intended. So anyhow, it is what it is. But yeah, I definitely could have painted it better just in a simple throwaway. I think people with all due respect, when I shared Eric Williams' article, it was on X for maybe 20 minutes or so. I had zero likes, zero retweets, and then I shared it. Now he's got several hundred likes and all that kind of stuff. So I'm glad that I was able to do that for him because he's been writing good articles all year about the UFL and he does a very good job with the NFL and all that and sometimes these things get kind of lost. So I'm glad I was able to share it, if anything on my timeline and then all of a sudden a lot of people saw it, read it well. Oh, look at that. There was some cool stuff in there. There was also an article for an office sports this week with a great quote from Oliver Luck that really didn't get a lot of attention. I was glad I was able to share that too out there. Oliver Luck. Pretty interesting opinions on things in terms of investing, spending money and when the timeline of the league should be. So yeah, it could probably be worded a little bit differently. I think they need to do more with their actions. What are you doing in Memphis? What are you doing in Michigan? Rather than just some vague response about, yeah, we're going to be the first in the markets and the last ones out and we're going to do this. Show some things you're doing. Yeah, I like because I was just looking on you. I'll take a partial for those impressions on there. I'm doing my job to get that. I'm doing my job to get Eric. I Was happy. I said, oh my goodness, this has zero likes. Zero likes is pretty bad. At least your grandmother will like it or something. I said, this has Zero likes and I'm like, boom. It was good to see it. People reading it, checking it out. So just to make sure we touch on this if you haven't and yeah, I was looking into the Oliver like thing and maybe I don't even know what luck is up to nowadays, maybe track that down, but I hear with home markets, we got to build that trust there. We're not going to leave and that league isn't going to fold. We've got a couple cities historically been part of spring football. They've committed to the team and the team has left. We've still got some trust to build in home markets. I think we were selling tickets for the home opener in Houston seven days out and Michigan seven days out last year was getting the merger complete, getting everything in place and then putting the season together. This year we've already been planning for season two of the UFL nine months out. We've had lots of think pieces during the season with Todd Merko, former Arena Football exec on here and even Dan Kaplan, the sports business reporter for decades. And what does that mean to you? Just more marketing. I mean we're doubling down. I want to talk leases here, but we're just kind of doubling down. What is your thoughts of what does that mean for looking into the next year? Scheduling earlier, like having an earlier schedule come out, putting tickets on sale earlier and then whether or not they do this remains to be seen whether or not they want to put resources in having actual sales teams working when they're doing seasonal employees, that makes it kind of difficult. And then actually doing more things in the community, reaching out to high schools and youth programs and all this kind of stuff. And then if so, be it. You have to give out some tickets, some comps to youth programs and people in the community that you get them to come out to the game because maybe you have some young people that come out to the games and then go tell their dad and mom, I want to go back. It was cool. We saw a little bit UFL this season. There were some young fans, I'm forgetting the please forgive me kid's name who was actually drawing all the logos to the UFL teams. But that's cool because when I was a kid I became this crazy, now I'm dating myself here, but over four decades of being a football fan. So I became a fan of the CFL and the USFL and of course the NFL and all this stuff as a kid and did the drawings and writing stuff and all that. So it's cool to see that you have to appeal to the young crowd when you appeal to the young crowd, it's way it goes to tickets. They can't go to the games by themselves. This is why Disney and animated stuff, all this stuff exists because instead of getting two adults coming into your game, you got mom and dad bring a bunch of the kids. That's how you multiply attendance. So I think they need to have certain activities and more actions just more time. They were late to the finish line. There was a couple of hangups in terms of the paperwork they filed with the government for the merger. It wasn't clear cut. They had to come back with paperwork in order to get the merger pushed through. And there was a time where they, and I was on your show and I know it's funny, people think they have receipts and stuff, but there was a time where this league was actually going to have 10 teams but they decided on eight. So that was at the end of the run there. They just didn't have enough time to even go beyond that. And the hope was that a year or two they would have more teams, but I don't think they feel they're sound. It tells me that they don't feel they're sound enough at their base to start branching outward. And then we'll talk about leases in a second, but that's also a factor in all this. So we'll see whether or not that changes the game plan, what Moose is talking about, what he told Eric Williams. We'll see. Yeah, let's move on to that. So year, I guess it's year four now of the US FL teams, right? A lot of 'em here. Year three of some of the XFL we're seeing lease issues or not lease issues but Protective Stadium was on a three year lease, right? We're talking Detroit we had and we looked that up beforehand. Mike, with the alternative football network, talking about the Detroit Lions kind of lease being up, do we do any moving around there in terms of Birmingham and Detroit or I know Houston, we're talking to T-D-E-C-U where we stay in the markets and we're moving venues. Any thoughts on any of that? You got to look at all options. So a lot of times people don't focus in on the fact that some of these venues with the league, the XFL had a very good deal with the Dome at America Center in terms of percentage of ticket sales beyond a certain point, et cetera, where they actually exceeded that and were able to profit you promise. So I don't know what the specifics are with Ford Field, whether or not, obviously the attendance hasn't been great there. They had some moments but for the most part it wasn't great. So I don't know if they're going to stay. The lease is important. Will they look at alternative options in Michigan? They very well could. They got to make that decision relatively early and not let that stagnate and go on and with Vegas we saw with the Vipers where they didn't have a location for the longest time and then they announced Cashman almost at the, and they looked at Bishop Gorman and all this other stuff, all these other alternative options there. So if you're going to make a move away from Ford Field or whatever, you need to do that as soon as possible. You have to not wait until the teenth hour. You got to get these deals done way in advance so you can set up scheduling and all that and then you can sell tickets early. I don't like the fact that tickets are sold so late in the process. That doesn't help. In terms of selling tickets, I wanted to get your thoughts and we talked a little bit during the pregame show for the UFL championship game, but in terms of walking this line between being built just for TV or versus wanting to be in because a lot of what their words are saying and we talked like the Darryl Johnston here, it feels like they're saying the right things in terms of we want to build these home markets. But you see a lot of the actions and we have all the time these debates about gates and everything else. Where does that line exist between them wanting to be built just for TV versus actually wanting to build these fan bases there and sell? What's your read on that? I think that's the fall. A lot of people who are supporters of this league want to say that the UFL only cares about being a TV product. And I think the reason why the merger happened is because the USFL side, the Fox side wanted to see people butts in seats. They wanted to see attendance improve. So they don't want to just be a tv. Of course that's important for Disney for Fox. They like the fact that they own a league, they don't have to pay a rights fee and they've got this relatively, and pro football is not cheap but relatively affordable programming and they don't have to pay a rights fee for it. So they want to be more successful than they are. So I think this, I've said a million times on your show and everywhere else I've ever been this merger bought them more time and they have a respectable floor. They've done a good job with TV viewership, but I think they see and they would want to do much better than they have. So I think it's can they rope in more sponsors more than just Army? That was great. Army gave 'em 10 million bucks. It was important Dwayne Johnson and everybody to go lobby basically to get that deal. Wait When they had the whole showing in Congress and all of that? Yeah. So Does it have to do with Well no, it's like them recruit. Yes, rock running for president. No, he is trying to get money And it helped having the rock for that, right As salesman, a lot of those people, they were happy to share rub shoulders with a movie star athlete et cetera. So they need to rope in more sponsors and then that helps with ratings. The championship game rating didn't hurt. You can point to their year over year growth. Fox and Disney, they're happy with the product. They think they see the potential of it right now whether or not they can get to where they can create a new ceiling where this can become a hot property in the sports world, I think a lot of that's going to take them. Attracting more casual fans, they haven't been really accomplished that yet. There's still a lot of people that are unaware of the product. They don't know it exists or there are many who know that it's in the periphery but they don't care about it to even watch. It's not on the radar. They don't care. They're more interested in N-H-L-N-B-A established leagues. Why would I want to watch that? So that's kind of the story. So how do you convince some of those people to watch your league? And so that's the potential of these leagues. I think Spring Pro, I know a lot of people that in the community that write about the NFL that don't watch this league and I try my best to do the sales pitch. You really should watch the games are fun, the league is great. There's so many cool players, my goodness, this, that and the other. I'm like if I can only imagine me as an NFL fan, if I could watch a Jets game where Robert Sala was miked the whole game talking to players, good lord if NLI don't think they'll ever, maybe they'll enter it, who knows. But the NFL ever entered the type of access that you have during UFL games because these players, like for the casual fan, the players casual fan doesn't really know these players. But if you are watching an NFL game all a sudden everybody and Jayn Daniels on the sideline and him and Terry McLaurin are going at it whatever or Dan Quinn's yelling at his defensive players and I mean you're seeing all that stuff are playing so good, right? He's saying yeah or he fired up, he's happy but oh, I can't even imagine how people would be blown away if you just took one NFL game and did what the UFL does just won. And I think we're kind of spoiled people in the UL space. So it's like we're used to it by now. We've seen it for so long, but it's such a cool feature that, so anyway, how do you get and then how do you brand these players? Because a lot of people, it's unfortunate a lot of people, there's still a lot of ignorant fools out there that think these players are some kind of weird semi-pro guys hang out at the bar. So it's not all these, all Americans in college and SEC guys and former NFL draft picks over 90% of the players in the league have professional experience all that. I got young players too. They've been in NFL camps that just haven't had an opportunity to break through and get playing time. They're getting that chance now how do you attract without, because the problem with the minor league and the G League thing is sure everybody says oh the NFL needs a G league, but people ignore minor leagues. If people think I'm sorry, if people think the outcomes of the games don't matter, that's that fine line. The UFL has it, it wants to be a great partner in the space and it likes to promote the fact that their players are going to the NFL and that they're trying to get to the NFL. But you can't have what NFL Europe had. Their biggest weakness was that NFL teams sent bottom end guys off the roster there and they were mandated to play a certain amount of reps. So the actual outcomes of the games did not matter. So who cares if the Barcelona Dragons beat the Rhine fire or whatever. So you don't ever want to get to that point. You like what you have now where the stallions are angry and they want to prove to the world the bras can't wait to knock off St. Louis in St. Louis. He liked the fact that the games matter except for Chase Garbers. I don't know what he was thinking. Maybe it didn't matter as much for him, but I'm sure I'm going to hear about that. But I'm sorry I can't watch that's agreed. That's sinful to me. I get more mad, I get more mad about that stuff than the guy messed up a little bit off the field and did something, whatever. But I get more mad about that. That's like a sin against the sport. But anyhow, it is what it is. But I think until you can somehow find a way to attract the casual fan to sample your league and not think of it as just these meaningful, it's a meaningless, people think it's meaningless. So you really want to get away from that and people enjoy it for what it is because it's a quality football product. It's fun to watch. Once you get into a pick a team, get into it, you can really get into these leagues. So hopefully it comes a day where it's going to take time before you build up trust. And that's what Moose and these guys are talking about building up trust in these markets. Last couple here, we'll round out, I appreciate it extended here as always. We asked this on the stream if anyone missed the UFL pre-game stream and all that, but the end game for the UFL here, what is the ultimate end game? I know you were just talking, that's what kind of brought me back to my mind if they wanted to be the minor league or wanting to be like, I don't know what is the future here? Because you want to market the players, get into the NFL, but you want to market that's an alternative and you want to focus on sports betting. What in your opinion, what is the end game for the UFL here as we sit going into season two? I think they want to be a viable pro sports league that lasts, that has the same kind of sponsorship and tension, give it to 'em that other leagues, similar leagues have. They want to fill that craving that football fans have when the NF L's not around, when college football's not around, they want to be a viable league like the MLS. They want to be around forever. They want the league to. I understand. So business wise, we'll see as far as sponsors, investors, you got to make money, you got to create revenue streams. The arrow's got to be pointed upward. At some point you got to see more growth, but they actually want to be a viable spring. There is no other football going on during the spring. You know what I mean? I know there's indoor leagues and all that. I understand that. And you have other leagues that are popping up. European League of football's doing a very good job. So I'll be careful when I say that, but I mean there isn't an NFL like property when the NFL is away. So they want to actually be a legitimate, like what MLS is. They want to be a legitimate league that has a strong base that follows them. Even if the UFL sometimes does better than other established leagues, those leagues already have built in sponsorships, built in fan base, all that. The UFL has a hard time as any most upstart leagues have is making inroads in that vein. But that's their end game. I don't know. And I got a little bit trouble after I got off the air with our pregame shows because I questioned whether or not Redbird is in this for a long haul. I had somebody Red that was my follow up. I had somebody redbird come out to me and say, Mike, we're completely in on this. And I'm like, I don't know. So it is like a little tough. I'm unsure of it because you say all the right things and they don't have to be front and center with everything they do. Jerry Cardinal and all that. They operate behind the scenes. They have brilliant people who work for Redbird Capital. I know, but sometimes with the history of investment firms and all that they have don't have a tendency for long-term. A lot of times what they do is they get in and they get out and then they move on to the next thing and then maximize the investment and then make their move whether or not they see the potential for a max. Everybody who's ever tried to start a Spring Pro football league has seen, oh my god, what if we were like the NFL? Oh my god, if we had owners and franchise, the kind of sponsors, we could have Budweiser, McDonald's, all these because they don't have anywhere to, there's no NFL going on. NFL can't be year round. No matter how much they try, the NFL can't be, they're going to stretch it as much as they can. But the NFL can't be 365. These players will die if they can't play 162 game season. They can't be done the reason why it is only 16 games or whatever. So I think Redbird with Rock, Danny Garcia with Fox, they have high hopes for this, but I wonder if they don't see the light at the end of the tunnel if they don't see a potential higher ceiling, whether or not they just gracefully get out of it. Well, and that's my thing. And just to kind of round out all season and we've seen varying support and the Rock put it out some tweets and it was even, I think it was during the playoff games and he's like, this is why we bought the UFL. There's some of that. I know Danny was at the championship game, but it really struck me as we were at the hotel and I don't want to, but there was a lot of Fox and UFL people there, a lot of executives. And it just struck me of, and I understand that Danny's got a lot of projects and a lot of things going on and the rock wasn't there and all that, but it felt like Danny was in and out where a lot of those guys, men, women, everybody was there celebrating, Hey, we completed this and we made it through this and congrats on the season. And it was just interesting to me of like, well here's a whole piece of the pie that's just in and out and I understand and there's other people have other things going, but you would just think for even an hour that you would be there and celebrate kind of this thing. And I'm not saying that they don't feel tremendously proud or that they did celebrate in their own way. It just struck me as interesting. Here's 80% of the executive branch here of the government and then you have the presidents out already. It just felt it was just a little interesting kind of vibe to keep an eye on. Yeah, Dwayne's very busy. Danny Garcia really loves this concept. She's really, I know she took a lower profile this year. We saw her all against, but Danny Garcia is really happy. She really believes in this concept. She really wants this to work. This is her baby because this whole thing, the XFL doesn't come out of death bankruptcy if it wasn't for her spurring on Dwayne to come aboard and then Redbird being Lord by the fact of the whole DW Johnson kind of thing. Yeah, let's do this. So Danny's the reason why the XFL really came out of bankruptcy. It was funny because Fox was luring near the property too and Fox's commitment towards this. Not bad when you think about it, right? Because I know people have a hard time with it. Especially now I'm saying this after I wrote about Eric Shanks and the whole deal with the Fridays and UFL games going on Friday, so they have a hard time believing this. But I will say this for Fox, they were obviously in on the XFL in 2020, did a good job with it there. We know what happened there. But then they actually aired spring league games on Fox right in 2021, followed the whole season, wrote about it, all that, even the ratings. It was funny comparing that to this. And then of course, and then so 20 20, 20 21, 20 22, 20 23, 20 24, Fox has been a part of, Fox has been in it. I'm not saying they're going to be in it forever, but maybe, but they're really into it. So I don't know about Redbird, I don't know. So I mean you got to prove it to me because I've always been skeptical not of their track record or the success they've had. I'd be foolish to criticize any of that. Yankees, Liverpool, all this stuff. They did great working LeBron James, I know billions of dollars. I get it. But I just wonder how invested are they in this being a forever property? How invested are they in putting in the effort and the money in making this? You're not going to get to where you want to get to without investing and putting more money into it. And then the reason why we've gotten this far with all this with Fox in a way, in a sense is because they haven't gone crazy with spending, which is good, but at some point you need to be a little bit more strategic and you need to swing for the fences. They don't want to strike out, which is a good thing. You don't want to strike out and go under and go in the red. But I also think at some point they're going to look at the property and they're going to say, okay, what are we? Are we ever going to be any more than what we are? And I think they can be more than what they are. They just have to put in the money. My opinion is they need to sit down and strategically allocate their resources in specific areas to grow their product and to grow the visibility of their product. That's the biggest hurdle they have. It's not the product itself, it's the actual visibility. There are people that were on social media going, oh my God, there's a UFL championship game going on. What Then their season just start. How long is their season? Is it three weeks? So I mean there's those kind of responses towards it. So attention is a big, getting their Q rating is not very high amongst us. We think about it, talk about it all the time. Lord knows how much you've done for these leagues, interviewing everybody, c ffo, all this stuff the last four or five years. So there's a lot of people out there, the mainstream people outside of our bubble that don't pay no mind to this league. And then until you get to that point, you're not going to be able to reel in all of them. So you get to the point where you get more people to sample and more of the mainstream crowds to watch your games and pay attention to your games and write about your games. That's why I shout out to anybody who covered it, like pro football talk. All these guys that actually tried at least a little bit. It's better than nothing because a lot of these, there's a lot of nothing. Trust me when it comes to covering these leagues and in terms of the mainstream crowds. Anyhow, It was funny as I was flying out from St. Louis on Monday, I guess I was getting on my plane and the guy that hosts our bar trivia that knows that I do alternative football, he follows the podcast. He is like, oh yeah, oh wow, you're up in Canada and you're up and whatever. And he's from St. Louis and we're getting on the plane. He's like, what are you doing here? I'm like, you're from St. Louis. And he was like, oh yeah. Oh yeah, that was going on. Anyway, it's just interesting talking about the QA and all that. Anything else? Anything else before we get out of here? I mean, we talked relocation. Are you surprised? I mean I think it's probably for the best here to kind of roll it out. Anything else you want to touch on before we get out of here? Once you make that commitment to stay somewhere, then I think you're living and dying. You're living and dying and maybe the eventual, hopefully not death of the league, but once you come out there and say, we're going to make Memphis work, we're going to make Michigan work. It's kind of hard to a year later go, we're going to North Carolina, we're going to Canton, we're going to whatever. Unless it's an expansion thing. If you were going to relocate, you'd have to pull the plug now and do it. But I think there's a lot of people on the USFL side of things that only three markets made it from the USFL side and they're holding out hope that Birmingham becomes a smash hit and they're confident about Memphis and Michigan and they really want to see it work. It's like if you draft a quarterback in the first round and he's had some struggles the first two years and you don't want to give up on Sam Donald yet or whomever you want, give it a, you think that you see the potential there. So I think if they fail in Memphis and Michigan, it's going to be tougher like a year from now. See, we'll know that this league has made it. If they can get to the point where they can actually expand legitimately without haphazardly relocating teams, we will know things are looking pretty good. That's going to send a message too to the public. Oh wow, they're going to 10 teams. Oh wow, they're going to 12 teams. They're not going to do that just for show. They're going to do that because hey, we got the funding. This is, we're going to make more money if we do this. They're not going to just do that because a lot of other leagues expanded like crazy. We've seen what's happening with Crazy Arena League. Let's come back with a hundred teams and then everybody's folding in week two, week three, a whole bunch of craziness. So a lot of leagues make that mistake of expanding just for show and not being really ready to go. They want to be ready to go. So I think this is going to be a fascinating, I think the football's going to be good. The product on the field is going to be good. It's going to be interesting to see how they schedule things. If you're doing the Friday night deal, I would do defenders games on Friday nights since you seem to draw a younger crowd there anyway, everybody going out Friday night and having a bunch of beers. So maybe you can kind lean into that aspect and then maybe more of the family atmosphere for the weekends. But yeah, I'm going to judge what they do. We always do, Reid, you're tough critic and that sometimes you rub people the wrong way because of that. And I don't always agree with you with stuff, but we care about this and you've cared about this for a long time. So we'll see how this journey goes into 2025. I'm looking forward to it. I think they should launch after the Super Bowl. That would be my play. And That's still TBD, right? We're still TBD on. That's still TBD. And I'm digging on that and I've been asking, I've been annoying people about that. We don't know yet. We're still thinking about it. I think we're definitely going to have a different timeline next year than the march. They only started in late March because of the lateness of the merger being accepted and launch point and all that. Last thing for me, do you think enough juice going into the season or going into next year without having expansion talk, do you think that there's enough there if they just double down? I think so. But again, like I said, I think they're going to need to up their promotion and marketing to get, I think they got us, you know what I mean? I think we'll come back and we'll be interested in it there. Maybe there'll be some cool moves and all that, but I think you do need some added hook. So it's unfortunate expansion's not on the, I think the football product could be good. I think it's more outside the bubble where their work is, the people that are ignoring them, how do you get them to pay attention? So I think that's the deal with it. And we'll see. I think it's a crucial year for them at the gate. And in terms of marketing and promotion and drawing in more fans on TV and at the gates. Well Mike, I appreciate it extended here. Mike, all season here with Sports Illustrated now transitioning and we got CFL stuff going on and Anthony Miller and everyone else had taken the time he came on the show for the pregame and writing and all the work he does. And you appreciate that. We'll see, like I said, I would give the league probably a b plus, right? I don't know what would be your final grade for the season? I think there should be a lot of optimism. I just still hope the words now going back into these markets that you go along with that, I guess what would be your final rating for the league for this season? Yeah, grade them on a curve and then there's different grades for different areas, but I think B plus is fair. Maybe a minus. Before the season started, there was modest expectations for them, attendance wise because of the timeline they had. We knew their ratings were going to go up and they did more games. You have on broadcast network television, the more eyeballs you'll get. It's as simple as that. And then, so if you're on FX or ES, ESPN two, you're not going to draw a million views. Sorry. It'd have to be a really special event. So anyhow, yeah, I think b plus is fair. Sure. Well here we go. Like I said, like and subscribe. I'll play the outro here. We'll get it here. Full mic episode. I appreciate it. We'll see, like I said that Jason, and I'll be back. We'll figure out I think Monday for the CFL recap and then we'll figure out that what we got going on here, coming up in the future. We'll see you guys. Thanks.

CFL Week 2 Results + Reactions! Winners and Losers From CFL 2024 Week 2!!

Well here we are back here Tuesday this week. I just returned from the UFL championship game here back talking CFL here week two. Let's see if we can bring in hussy here. Internet's a little hit and go. We'll see how we do here. Jason, how are you doing sir? Doing good Reid. Thanks for having me as always and yeah, happy to be here. It's good here. We got Zach checking in here. We got Chris checking in here. It's good. Caught up on everything today. Missed a lot of the excitement this week. Although I will say Hussie, we were live in the hotel lobby bar with all the UFL executives. The professor Andrew Murray and I and Anthony Miller were there watching the BC Lions game on Andy's iPad. So just like I'm doing my work and then I caught up on everything today but we were literally like Russ Brandon sitting there, moose Johnston is sitting there. We are watching the BC Alliance really kind of hairy win there and we'll talk about that. I don't think it was maybe as decisive as that we wanted, but overall what'd you think CFL week two here seems like some pretty exciting games. Yeah, I don't think there's been a bad game this year so far and I mean you can't really say that about the previous couple of seasons so I'm really excited to talk about it today. Yeah, it's good here. So I thought just first off here, we got Tim Che again here as well, so we'll probably try to switch back to Mondays here. I think if we can, obviously traveling back yesterday and Jason being really nice and working out with schedules, make sure if you're new like it subscribe, we gave away a bunch of tickets to the UFL championship game. We'll do the same for the UFL kickoff if we get that for season tickets and we'll do jerseys and stuff. We gave away a Doug Flutie one at some point. We can get some real retros jerseys on there as well to give by the way. But I thought today first off, and we'll obviously go game by game on here, but I thought Mike's got his power rankings up here. I thought this might be just kind of a cool conversation starter here over at Sports Illustrated. I know Anthony as well on there, but the interesting thing to me, Jason, obviously Montreal ettes number one maybe that's no surprise here, but Winnipeg Blue Bombers, what a time in our lives here. Winnipeg ranked ninth in the power rankings. What do you think about that? I personally would still not have them ninth. I know I definitely would have the Elks below them personally based on what I've seen. Winnipeg has had a couple of rough weeks, but I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt more than almost any other team and they have their problems like I said, but I think that they'll bounce back probably this week. Well we'll see. And I pulled up over@cfl.ca here to get everything. Of course now I can't even pull up the site when I switched over here. I mean the first thing is what's going on with the blue bombers? I tweeted, I mean this feels like a lifetime ago here on Thursday with the red black game and the weather delay and all that. I mean I've prayed for a time like this in the west where Winnipeg's Owen two can't score. Zach looks human injuries here and now we've even seen this week even more, right? I think Vera's not practicing, they got a lot of guys out. I saw Farhan, I think it was Farhan tweeted about like is it just time has come for the blue bombers? I mean what do you make of this? Well I definitely think that they've lost some of their core pieces on the offensive line, Jackson, Jeff coat on the defensive line, but also like you said, age I think is starting to catch up with them a bit. They don't have the same margin of error that they once did. I think that they have to have that high level play from Zach Calis and their other SARS on offense in order for them to have success and they just haven't been playing very well through two weeks. Zach has just looked probably the worst two games I've seen from him as a blue bomber through the first couple weeks. He's probably almost most definitely been the worst starting quarterback in the CFL statistically through two weeks here. So I mean if that continues, I don't think this team is going anywhere And it was weird to me because obviously the Red Black Home opener Thursday, I watched that live kind of through that whole weather delay and all of that, which is really weird. Is Ottawa just in the storm front? I feel like every other week we have a weather delay in Ottawa. Is that the case here, Andrew? We're the professor checking in here back in, but it really feels like the Red Blacks have a lot of weather delays. Well they definitely do. I think that I always make the joke and everybody always makes the joke that it rains every Red Lax home game, but in terms of the meteorology of it, I'm not completely certain that Ottawa gets more rain than others, but I think just based on the game days, it's been pretty interesting to see what's happened the last few years with the weather there in Ottawa. Yeah, it's weird. It used to be that it was like the Marshall Ferguson curse and now I don't know. My point is even in that game and Winnipeg tied it up at one point there in the, it never felt like Ottawa was in danger. It felt like, I dunno, to me I felt watching that we're going to win this game. The Mariners have had some games recently with, and not that Winnipeg you would traditionally think is an inferior opponent, but at least in that game Thursday they felt inferior. It never really felt like they were in danger. Zach had the interception, they called back because of defensive passeng interference immediately throws another interception. It just really felt like nothing was there. I know they did the weather delay. I'm like, let's just call this game and I know they came back and they have the Hail Mary there at the end, but I'm like, let's just call this it's two minutes left. It never really felt like a Winnipeg had any chance to get anything going. Yeah, I thought Ottawa looked very composed throughout this game. I thought that Drew Brown looked like the veteran quarterback out of these two in this game and I really wasn't scared for Ottawa. I was pulling for Ottawa obviously just to see something different in the CFL from what we've seen the last couple of years and I wasn't too concerned with them being able to hold onto the lead other than right before the rain delay when Winnipeg started to get a nice looking drive going but then the game was halted for a better part of an hour and just didn't happen. So in terms of Ottawa here, and I guess we'll start talking about them, but we can go reverse chronological through the weekend just since we're on it, but we have Drew Brown now we're not dealing with Okay, Moz at some point and getting hurt last year. Dustin Crumm is back to me in the shorty yardage guy. We're seeing really good defense it feels like from Bob Deis. Is this kind of the vision that the red blocks are always supposed to be? Yeah, I think that Drew Brown, if they were going to reach their highest potential, drew Brown had to step up and be the guy. I think from what we've seen from Drew Brown at the CFL level, especially last year, he's looked very like a high level quarterback in this league and a guy that could potentially be one of the best quarterbacks in this league. I mean look at last year, just statistically alone, not touchdown, zero interceptions again did not throw an interception in this game and that's really key for Ottawa. They have not been able to avoid those turnovers from their quarterbacks the last few seasons and I think that's one thing that Drew Brown has always excelled at. You look back to his college career, they brought that up on the broadcast that's always had a good touchdown to interception ratio and I think he's a guy that's willing to take chances down the field. I think they have a really well called offense now with Tommy Dale, the former offense coordinator for the Hamilton Tigercat being there, Addison's there from his time in Hamilton. You're starting to see similar concepts. Brail and Addison took a couple of snaps out of the backfield in this one. I believe the first play of the game from scrimmage was a handoff to Brail and Addison playing running back. So you're starting to see some of those concepts creep up from his time in Ottawa for his time in Hamilton that is in Ottawa and I think maybe Condell just needed a fresh start to get out of Hamilton and maybe he's going to have a great season calling place for the Red Blacks. Question for Drew Brown and obviously with Winnipeg last year in the secondary role here, do you think it's, and obviously we saw him last year and all that stuff now, is there just one of those, there's not enough tape on him. We saw that with Dustin Crumb last year and he had a couple of weeks where it was like Cru Sanity or C ch mania and then it kind of came back down to earth because teams is this just like we haven't seen enough of him yet and we're going to game plan about that going forward. I'm curious kind of your thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean I would say no. I think that he's probably going to be one of those guys that's going to be able to overcome it because the level of play that we've seen from him has just been so high and he's just doing the right thing so consistently. But you never know when you've seen a guy like Jake Mayer who I think we both were very high on before last season, really come back down to earth after he hit that 15 starts or so threshold and like you said, get defenses, got tape on him. So I think at the end of the day we'll have to wait and see if that's the case for Drew Brown Here on the Winnipeg side here, Zach, with a couple of those interceptions, like we said, he had the one that got called back immediately throws it over again. Even penalties, right? Big Hill took a penalty I felt like. Didn't he miss week one? I felt like maybe he was trying to make up for lost time here, getting a little excited there and that they waved that off because it was such a far completion but I don't know, it feels like Winnipeg, I don't know if their confidence is shook in. It just feels like okay now to we're almost trying to play in spite of whatever and coming up with some of those mistakes. Yeah, I think that Zach just looks like he's, they've had opportunities to make plays, they've had open receivers and it just seems like they're just a little bit off and like I said, they can't afford to have those mistakes from him at this point because their defense isn't as good as they used to be. Their offense is missing key contributors right now. Ra out of the lineup. Johnny Augustine's a good player. I like him as a backup running back, but he is no Brady Oliveira and it was quite clear to see that in this one. Really they didn't trust him. Only the seven carries in this game. So I mean I think going forward they need to get healthy. I mean Kenny Lawler's going to be out for a number of weeks still based on his injury. So I mean it's going to be very interesting to see how these next few weeks, because I believe they have BC this Friday, that's going to be a big measuring stick game for both clubs really with, I think both of those teams have looked a little bit shaky in the early going here and then I think Winnipeg has Calgary the week after that if I'm not mistaken. So a couple of big West matchups coming up for the blue bombers and they hope to avoid that. Oh and four start, Well and we'll talk Calgary here, but Calgary looks like they could be one of the best teams in the league. I mean I don't saw Daniel Austin sometimes friend of the show tweeted about them last week. Kind of feels like the West is running through them, but we can get to them a little bit. But yeah, I mean a couple tough matchup Augustine here getting action. Obviously the touchdown and all that we're making up for Avera not being in there. Like I said, a lot of guys injured this week. I just don't know where that relief comes here. Like you said Kenny Lawler being out, it just doesn't feel like they're one week away of okay, let's get a couple guys back in here. It's going to make a difference. Yeah, I agree. I completely agree In terms of Ottawa defense, really good keeping Winnipeg under wraps with that. We see Dom rhymes here coming off of the Lions last season. Anyone else stand out for you, surprise you because just like I said, we've seen the Bob d kind of coach team here the last year and whatever year and a half where we took over the interim role, it feels like defense is playing up. Feels like they're kind of a force to be reckoned with now. Yeah, I think I have to point out Rewa Armstead who I believe he fifth run pick or something like that of the Jacksonville Jaguars a few years back, a big powerful running back. I think that there was one play where it looked like he ran into a bunch of bodies right in on just a basic halfback dive play and he broke out of it and made a big play out of it. Just a lot of tough running him in this game and if they can have that element because they lost Devonte Williams in the off season due to a season ending injury, I think if they can have that production from the running back position, it would do a lot of good things for Drew Brown in that offense and I think his performance was noteworthy. Curious what Ottawa does, right? mli still on the men coming back I presume at some point, but is Drew Brown playing his way into just keeping the role here? I think he has a pretty long, I think that even though those other two guys have starting experience, most notably Mazzoli, I mean you can't really trust him at this point even if he gets on the field stay healthy. So I think you've got to roll with Drew Brown, at least give him a handful of weeks to really what he can be at the CFL level and get over that 15 start threshold I think. How many games has he started now in the CFL of less than 10 still? So I think it's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out. Dustin, I don't think that's really an option. Even though we saw him start a number of games last year, I think that's a team that similar to Edmonton, it doesn't get talked about as enough as much as Edmonton, but they need to win right now and I think Drew Brown gives them the best chance to do so. Yeah, I mean they have a lot of the talk. It was the 10 year anniversary of the team returning to Ottawa. Okay, we're playing against Winnipeg we had played against before. Do you feel like this home win, like you said season now, trying to get people excited about this? I mean it feels like we're trying, I don't know, like I've said for a couple of years here, I don't know what it looks like to be an Ottawa Red black fan right now. I dunno what lineage you have for that say it feels like a fortune to go Gray Cup that they won. It feels like this is kind of a time where we got to get this team going. Well I hope so. I hope that this team can, I wouldn't even mind. It's sacrilegious to say as a TCATs fan, but I wouldn't even mind if they had a good season this year and the T Cats had, they seemed like they're trending towards being a bad team this year. I think Ottawa, I think I would be happy if they had a season this year, but I've been fooled before by them in 2019. I believe they started two and oh and then lost 15 of the black 16 games. So I've been fooled by them before but it was a good start to the season for them. Yeah, it's good. It's good to see some of these teams that we'll talk at Edmonton here coming up some of these teams that maybe you hope were going to be better but good for the crowd here sticking out. I don't know how many people actually stuck around threw the weather delay and all that. Do you like that new rule that okay, if it's an hour, if it's after, was it partway through the third quarter then we can call it if it's up and if it's size can be a time. Do you like that? I think this was the first, if I could say that word, implementation of it this year. Yeah, I'm not too sure the specifics on the rules, but I do know it was very close to being called. I remember they were saying they were really debating it on the TSM broadcast, whether or not they were going to go back out there and finish the game. I think that they have to call it after a certain point. It sucks obviously, and it's not necessarily fair. It would've been really, really unfortunate in a game like this that was still hanging in the balance of one score game. I believe there was actually a game called back in, I want to say 2017 or 2018 or something between Montreal and Saskatchewan where the game was called midway through the third quarter. I think that was a two score game, but still a lot of time left and I thought that was really unfortunate that it didn't get to finish, but at this certain point you have to call the game and I don't think the CFL has the financial resources really to reschedule the game to a different date to finish out just a part of a game. So I get it from that perspective from the league's perspective. But yeah, it's unfortunate if it ever comes to actually canceling the rest of the game, It feels like they really stretch it out. And I will say very rarely do I get to watch the CFL live a lot on the weekends. It's catching up. But yeah, it struck me as ironic that Thursday I'm sitting there, I have my laptop pulled out to watch the game. I'm like, oh great, it's a weather delay for an hour. This is, but it's what it's like I said shout out for that. Anything else? I'm looking at the standings here but it's good to see, we'll talk Hamilton, but it's good to see Ottawa at least alive here. Jenna is excited about it. I feel maybe better than I certainly did last year with Ottawa. I can't remember the week that Moz went down, but I don't know. To me I feel like the arrow is pointing up right now for Ottawa. Last thoughts on that, do you feel that way and anything else from this game? Yeah, I mean I think similar to Winnipeg, what I was saying before, I think this week's measuring stick game for Ottawa as well. They play Montreal obviously defending great cup champions who are looking very good themselves. If they can go into Montreal and that's Montreal's home opener, I do believe and win that game. I think we can safely say that this team is vastly improved over a year ago. Yeah, big. I'm looking ahead here. Yeah, big East division matchup here coming up. I mean Montreal is looking firing all season year. Let's get over. I'll get the game pulled up here. But we had to Montreal, speaking of going into Edmonton here, I will say first off I felt like I was watching the USFL game. I'm just going to say not a lot of people in the stands. Holy god. And I understand that Edmonton is in the Stanley Cup playoffs and they lost, they rebounded Saturday and won eight one. We were watching that at the bar alongside the BC Alliance game. We really have. I had the Texas Mariners game on, we had the CFL and then that, but there was 2000 people. I mean this is rough times for Edmonton right now. It's tough to see them struggle like this. It really is. And I mean every game it's similar to Ottawa what I was just saying about Ottawa, it's like you're pulling from the get it going, get some wins for those fans and hopefully get some pause momentum back. They keep shooting themselves in the foot and in this game I thought they played well. I think there's no question you look at them through two weeks, the Elks are improved, especially on offense, but the turns of the game when they had a chance to take the lead, there was a one score game for a lot of the second half and they just turnovers at inopportune times and penalties at inopportune times. And I think that's ultimately what did them in, I thought they played overall just a grand view of things. I thought they played really well in this game but they just couldn't come away with the key plays to win. I thought both quarterbacks felt pretty uncomfortable. I thought Cody get knocked down quite a bit. McLeod as well. We talked about that preseason and everything of do you have Tray Ford in there? Do you have McLeod in there? A 28 4 2 throw him for a lot of yard. It's had the two interceptions there. Lots debates we've had with MBT and everything on here. Are the Elks winning with Tre Ford? Are they not? I don't know at this point. What's your thoughts? Well, I mean McLeod definitely has moved the offense better from a passing game perspective than Tre forward. But one thing I want to point out is Kevin Brown's been pretty quiet through two weeks and I think a lot of his success last year, he's a great player, but I think a lot of his success last year down the stretch was when Trey Ford came into the lineup because they had to account for Trey Ford keeping the ball and edge. And I think that Kevin Brown got a lot of open run lanes and when the cloud in there, that's the polar opposite. I think that he's a guy that he's get the ball out quick trademark, quick release and everything like that, but he's not going to be the guy that's going to really help your run game in that way. So I think getting Kevin Brown going is going to be a big thing for them in the next few weeks. They're going to have to be a little more creative in that regard, but I don't know how much they can do with the cloud back there from that perspective, but I do think their pass the game looks very good. I think that some of the receivers are looking really good. I think Eugene Lewis has been a bit of a disappointment this year, the first couple of weeks considering he missed most of last year. I thought maybe he's going to come into this year really hungry and create a lot of big plays. Obviously there's still lots of time for him to do so, but I think other guys not receiving Cork, gits clearly McLeod, Bethel Thompson still has a lot of good chemistry with him, her G, my Alice, the guy I wanted to talk about because the first year I started making YouTube videos in 2021, I always did the seeds of predictions for the awards and everything like that. And I actually picked him to win standing Canadian in 2021 because in 2019 he joined the Stampedes halfway through the season it had seven touchdowns or something like that and half a season. And I thought, okay, second year in the league with improved training, I think he's going to have a big breakthrough year and it just never happened. And he's bounced around to a couple of different spots since then Montreal and then Hamilton last year and then comes into Edmonton as basically insurance and I believe that's what Dave can said and he won a job and he's looked very good and he's a big part of this offense in the early going here. So really happy to see that from him. Dylan Mitchell looks like he's primed for a bounce back year after under last year. So there's lots to love on this Elk's offense, but I think their defense is what I have a bigger problem with. And again, the turnovers on offense are really the one key thing that has really shot themselves in the foot. Yeah, I wanted to co-sign you with the Kevin Brown here. I remember because Wilder got hurt, whatever with partway through last year or had to retire and then they really were leaning on Kevin Brown and I agree with that. And it was really halfway through the season and it was kind of that trade forward, I think you're completely right. And it felt like finally that was kind of the back they needed. It was such a dropdown for Wilder with all of that. Was it Gits Jr that had the, or excuse me that wasn't on the Montreal side. I'll get to that in a minute. I got another story about that. But no, my other thing was, and I was sitting there watching the highlights again this morning with McLeod and it was so funny because he's sitting there getting paid half a million dollars and he's looking around, there's 15 people in the stand to juxtapose that with BC and they've got it sold out. Okay, well what did it cost to get 50 cent in there? But you got 50,000 people buying popcorn and stuff and I'm like, they're making half a million dollars with not a soul in the stamp. Just kind of a really weird dynamic I think for Edmonton right now, at least on that side as well. But yeah, there's good pieces here. Just feels like, I don't know man, I see Chris Jones after the game and he's walking over and shaking Jason Moss's hand. I just don't know what the future holds for Chris Jones. Well, I mean got to give credit to the three down nations guys. I was listening to their podcast the other week and their prediction is after week five, that's when Chris Jones is going to get let go because I think they have a week six buy and they don't look like they're going to be a team that's going to be able to string many wins together until then. And I think it's very realistic that they could still have zero wins by then and ultimately that's probably a good time to make that change because at the point the losses just keep piling up. It doesn't matter what state your team is in. I mean it's like over Hugh Jackson when he was with the Cleveland Browns, I mean I think won win over two years, they had that whole process that they were doing, but I think at the end of the day you have to win some games and Chris Jones just hasn't been doing that in the last few years ever since he came back to Edmonton. We've talked about this before, but at some point it's the definition of insanity and you've had Chris Jones there and you've given him the time and I remember it was a huge deal when he came in, obviously the history of all that stuff, but I remember Rod and everyone was going crazy about all that and then now it's insanity and then the trade for thing, we've talked about that and whether it's personality or otherwise, but now you're buying McLeod to come in to offset and put it, okay, now we're doing this kind kick the can down the road, but at some point you've had enough. And I love him and I respect him and he's been on the show and he's a great coach. But I mean I think it's very obvious like okay, we're going to bring this in and do a big splash, but if you're not changing anything else and if the answer that you want is under your nose anyway and you're just too foolish or blowhard or mentality, whatever to see that, I can't help you at that point, but I would've loved to have seen Trey Ford get all the snaps, come into the season and be ready to go as opposed to further delay in all this. And then Chris Jones gets out of there, then you got McLeod. It's like lame duck quarterback situation. I just think that makes to be a mess and McLeod will be fine, right? He's good and sad and career-wise and life-wise and everything, but you're leaving Tre forward here languishing. I don't like that and I just think it's kind of set up for failure at this point. Yeah, I feel the same way about Chris Jones loved the guy as a person. I'm happy that he's in the league, but I think his time as a head coach in this league, he went off to a great start when he was with Edmonton, won that great cop, but he also had a star level quarterback and Mike Riley and I think he didn't come into this situation with an established quarterback and I think that's a big part of the problem. This team just can't decide what direction they want to go. Full-time at quarterback. It's going to be very interesting to see what direction they go with the next head coach. Assuming that Chris Jones make a massive turnaround here, I mean do they go with more of a inexperienced guy, one of the up and coming coordinators around the league or do they go with a guy that's been a head coach before? I know those guys aren't hanging around them too much, but it's going to be very interesting to see because they're in a very dire situation and I'm just very interested to see what the new owner, which by the way this team may get sold in this season according to Dave Naer. It's going to be very interesting to see what the ownership group to do once they come in. Well, and we talked about this before, but in any other situation where you had a GM that's keeping an eye on things that isn't Chris Jones and you have ownership that isn't in flux and we're trying to sell this, I think that there's just a lot more scrutiny on what's going on where, I mean obviously there is since a lot of eyes on Edmonton, but I feel like you would've a lot more internal pressure there as well. And I just don't know the power dynamic there, but I have a feeling like I am president and teacher and I'm here or principal, whatever, and I don't have to really deal with anyone and they're worried about all the sale and I don't know, it just feels like a mess on the other side here. I mean Cody Fido, the ettes look phenomenal and I know Tim's happy about that. He says, great Cup Band unveiled Thursday. I'm sure there'll be plenty of ring, ring, ring, I'm sure that'll be fine. But Montreal Ettes look like the best team in the league. I know Mike had them number one, but I would co-sign that. I mean the Ettes number one team by a mile right now. I really don't think they have a weakness when I look at them through two weeks. I think that if anything last year I think Cody Fido's just ceiling was the weakness for this team. I thought that maybe they weren't the most explosive team, but you see it this year, he's playing more loose, he's playing more confident, he's taking the shots down the field. Case in point, the first play of the game bombed to Keon Julian Grant and it really set the tone for the rest of the game. And he's a guy that now that he's had a lot of starts under his belt in the CFL, we know he can play at an acceptable level at his worst. He's a guy that's willing to take more chances now that he has that great cup ring and he's really playing like it. And I think another thing is Walter Fletcher I think is an upgrade on William Stand back from last year. I think William stand back hasn't looked pretty good in the first couple weeks with DC. I didn't think he looked very good the last couple of years with Montreal getting up there in age. And Walter Fletcher, who by the way was originally traded from Edmonton to Montreal after having a promising debut with Edmonton, he looks like an incredible running back and a great fit for this offense mixed place through the air as well as on the ground, pretty exploring back. So I think you pair that with a great group of receivers, a couple of really good Canadian receivers, which is always important in the CF valve. Very hard to have success if you don't have at least a couple of good starting caliber receivers or starting caliber options at receiver. And they have that in Phil Pot and Julian Grant and Cole Speaker stepping up as well. I mean I had that concern I said last week that they wouldn't be able to replace Austin Mack, but I think they've done a really good job of doing that so far. Yeah, Phil Pott looks great as Cliffy with Let's Find Deck Podcast predicted they beginning to, it's almost like they know that team. It's almost like they really know what they're talking about over there with Yawe. But I will say, and it is such a cool situation for Cody, we've talked about this, but the Saskatchewan and all that, but I do feel like, and this is such a stupid thing like winning the gray cup, it's so hard, but Cody is like maid now, right? If you're Cody, that was the big, everything was against you. You felt that way whether it was or not, but it certainly felt that way to Cody and you're in such a tough situation and you go to the outlets and you really bet on yourself and you're there with Moss and you really kind of prove all the doubters, whatever you do it. And now I feel like yeah, I can play free. I made forever if I never do another thing ever in my life, I'm a great cup winning quarterback and I had that. I feel like he's totally, like you said, just playing free now and it's just kind of a different level. We talked last week on here, Cody's a very emotional quarterback. The same with va. I mean a lot of guys, but I dunno, like I said, monkey off. It's like I was in the runnings for the Seattle best wedding stuff for a long time and he was always like, and then I won. I'm like, I don't care if I ever win again. Now I'm an award-winning. You don't have to deal with that, but I do feel that way. And then you have to love this with the Walter Fletcher, they kept talking about that like, oh it was with Edmonton, you got to love that. And him just absolutely running rock shot over at Edmonton all over the field. Well Chris Jones, he always feel that way too because there was another guy too with Montreal than that, what was I going to say here? Charleston Rambo looked really good. Julian Grant, was he the one that I texted you the one arm catch and Dustin Neil said, oh my god, how did he do that? Cole speaker actually. Cole Speaker. Yeah, I was watching on the tremor, I had to get my dust in. He said, oh my god, what is he doing? What is he doing? But no, I mean ettes look great. Like I said, Tyson, Phil bought all that other stuff coming in, so they're going to have their home opener Thursday. I'm looking ahead here. Ottawa going in should be a big matchup. I expect Montreal to ride the emotions and open up at home. Maybe a way that the tie cats did not. We'll get to that. But what do you make here? Just kind of early preview with Ottawa going to Montreal? Yeah, I'm very interested to see how the Ottawa Red Blacks offense plays against the Alouettes defense. I think that one thing I wanted to bring up is the Sean Lemon situation. I think Dave Naor said his arbitration date for that gambling suspension is set for early July, so we could play up to four games before that. And he's clearly, when you watch him, he's clearly a difference maker out there still, even at his advanced age, he's a guy that makes a difference for that team. And so with him out there on Thursday, I think that it's going to be very interesting to see how those inaugural Red Blacks tackles do in that situation. And I think Darnell Sanky another guy that I had a really good game in this one having his first full season as an Alouette. So I'm really excited to see how that game plays out and I'll be watching it on Thursday. Alright, so let's move on here. Let's go the big, and like I said, we're watching this up, you never doubt, never doubt the, I would've loved to be at this game. I just am like, well I got to do the championship game stream and all that. But we did go either just to put in perspective, not quite Gray Cup numbers. I think we had 30 504,000 people, we had like 67,000 people. The Gray Cup shows is slightly different for that. But it was good to get all that first off. So obviously we had the 50 cent thing, which was cool. Have you been tracking all of the kinds of controversy where people came for the concert and didn't care about the game? Have you been tracking any of that on Twitter? I think that that was kind of an interesting debate. We don't have to go super far on it, but I do think it's interesting. We are bringing people in. Are they staying for the game? Is that better? Is that worse? Amar Doman kind of buying attendance? Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I do have thoughts on that. I think that, I hate the negative discourse around it. I think that nobody, I'm not one of these CFL old heads that agrees with everything the league does. I do think the league has to change some stuff, but when they do make a good thing, we just celebrate that they did a good thing and they're making the extra effort. I think that obviously a lot of those all left after the concert. I think a lot of those people, it's the same thing with them. Anytime there's a big music act playing at a sporting event, a lot of people are just there for that. But even if they retain 1% or half a percent of those people that came, I think it's worth it because you did get increased exposure and just be able to put out that attendance number. I think it's absolutely worth it for the BC lions. And I definitely don't agree with the negative comments that I've been seeing from people on that. My feeling is, and I agree with you that you can't scream do something and then people do something and then it's not like that. Not like that. And Paul and I dealt with that for a long time with some of the CFL online, the really, really homer kind of the three down adjacent kind of there. And they're like, we want more people to cover the cfl. And they're like, Paul and I would talk about it. No, not like that. Not like that. It's like, well no, that's not how it works. And we deal with that with the UFL of like, okay, we want to do ding and then I have, well we don't, you can't kind of control the narrative the whole way across there. But I agree with you, he's taking the swing, he's buying attendance. It is what it is. Can you do that every week? No. Like you said, you get 52, what was it, 52,700, whatever the heck it was in there. Biggest home opener of franchise history. Even if you retain 1% of that, they're making it back off of the merch and concessions everything else in there for that. I think you have to applaud that when people are taking swings because not all ownership is either willing to do that or equipped to do that. I think you need to take that and especially this season with BC being in the spotlight hosting the gray cup and everything, I think you need to have an owner, a marman that's willing to take swings like that. Did we lose you? Yeah, a hundred percent agree. I think that it's going to be interest to see. Sorry. You're good. Okay. Sorry. I was just say it's going to be interesting to see if other ownership groups around the league when the new Edmonton ownership groups around the league, what they try to do to get fans in the building because I think this is a good template to at least try to temporarily boost attendance. And I think it would be very interesting to see, like I said, what other teams do because I think Omar Doman is doing great things in bc. I don't think he should listen to the haters. I think he's going to put on a great festival this year. And I think overall, if you look at the Lion's attendance, it is up over though. I think ultimately at the end of the day, I think the lions are doing good things. And also last thing on that, just like you said with the other ownership, it puts a target out there of like, Hey, this is what we're doing. It kind of encourages other people to do stuff like that. I don't see, again, mantra T's ownership. Great. I don't see them boasting any big, big concerts or anything like that thus far here. Let's see how your internet holds up here. Jason, as we get into this, BC felt very close to losing this game. We watched it live, we watched the highlights today, Calgary looks like the better team. I thought general overall thoughts of this game and then we can dive down into some players. I mean there's never necessarily a good loss, but I think Calgary looked very good in this game. I think that you're starting to see those good signs from Jake Mayer again, I think that is so important for this team, obviously for them to have success this season. And I think the receivers are starting to make plays. I think Jalen Philpot being back out there, that is huge for this team. After missing all of last year, I think their defense still not taking the ball away. And I think that was really the difference of this game is that one interception that mayor through, which was his fault, granted because he did kind of aim it, it was a short pass, he aimed it a little too much, went a little high deflected and was intercepted. So I think that was a big turning point in this game. But I think otherwise they were punched for punch with bc much more competitive in this game than they were a year ago. And I think when you look at the history of the last couple of years between these two teams, BC has really took control of this series and it's been really one sided. So I think Calgary should hang their hat on that and be able to come out next time and potentially get the W against them. To me, like you said, way different than maybe kind of last year where, oh, Calgary's coming in chalk this in the wind column, we're at home. I am scared of Calgary right now. I watch these games and I watch the physicality and especially the physicality they run as well. Calgary really scares me in a way that I've said before on here in kind of the softness of BC Calgary just looks really impressive. And then I know we've talked, what did they change in the off season? What did they move? It just feels like a totally new breadth of energy there. I don't know. To me they feel like they're firing on all cylinders and maybe, I don't know if that's a bad thing and just how long the CFL season is, but it feels like they're at least cresting pretty high right now. Well I think the biggest thing for them is that their biggest addition was the players that got healthy over the off season because I think this was the most injured team, quote me if I'm wrong, but I think that, correct me if I'm wrong, I should say, but I think they were the most injured team by the end of last season. The most players on injured reserve. So I think that just by that alone, I think they should improve. And I think we have seen that through a couple of weeks. I think BC you're also seeing the opposite side of that because they lost a couple of players in the playoff game last year against Winnipeg. TJ Lee, longtime leader in that secondary, secondary didn't play terrible in this game, but I think they're still missing him back there. And then Keon Hatcher, I think missing him, I think he's arguably, he arguably was their best receiver last year. So I think that having those two guys missing right now for bc, they just a little bit of that upside that they did and that explosiveness that they had last year. So I think that it kind of closes the gap between the bottom teams in the west and the top teams in the west. Well I think if you look here, even in Vernon's receiving core here, Hollins and McGinnis getting kind of the bulk of that, but really it doesn't feel like it's spread out maybe as it normally used to be with that where it felt like VA had five or six targets that he could really go to consistently. McGinnis I think has looked really good. Hollins, I think it was Hollins had the ball basically in the breath over the shoulder in his hands, bounced up, was almost picked, came back and got the touchdown later on to kind of make that up. But you have to catch that. I mean can't hitting him in stride, perfect throw from va, stand back here trying to get something going. I agree with you. I don't know if stand back, we talked about this last week with the Vernon bringing him in and the friendship and all of that and then Vernon's still taking way too many hits here. I don't love how you have Vernon as a short yardage guy. I know PR cop was playing with Edmonton, right? Am I a fever dream with all of that stuff? But I don't know, to me way too long of a season that'd be Vernon having QB sneaks here in the second game of the season. Yeah, absolutely. I think that VA is not the biggest guy either. He's not a guy that you want take, he said I think he's a valuable player for this team. He has really become and grown into this team's franchise quarterback, if you will. And I think he's still playing very well. I think that's a good sign. I think that he's still playing at a sustainable level that he did last year. So I think that is a really good sign. But I think at the end of the day, like you said, they're not spreading the ball around. They used to in that receiving core, a couple of rookies, Aiden Eberhart, he had the nice reception in this one, but besides that, didn't have any other targets. Travis ful gum, I think he was a guy that was a draft pick and got some playing time in the NFL, but he got a lot of targets in this one didn't take advantage. I can't remember if those throws were just off from Vernon or what, but I think want to see more production out of those other guys in the receiving core. And I think they just looked like a less potent offense this year than they did a year ago. I think their defense looked better this week. I thought against Toronto they looked pretty poor defensively, but this week against Calgary they were able to stop the run, which is something that they've been lamented before for not being able to do, especially in those matchups going up to Winnipeg. So I think the additions of Christian Covington up upfront that's really going to help them in that regard. He had his first career CL sack in this one, and if you didn't know, he's actually the son of Grover Covington who is the CFL's all time leading Sac leader who played his entire career with Hamilton. So good to see that for Covington. Hopefully that continues as he gets more adjusted to the CFL game after playing a long time the NFL. So I think there's some good signs for bc, but I think at the end of the day they need to still show that upside and a big test is coming up this Friday against Winnipeg. Yeah, no, I want to touch on that and yeah, it's like the whole thing with Vernon has had injury history, even last season, lower body injury history, foot, leg, ankle, kind of whatever, that banged up and that's his strength. I mean Vernon running, passing in motion, escaping, and I'm not a football coach, but I can't where that is still his strength and God knows how long he's going to be able to be that mobile just with age and kind of everything else, but still having that mobility and then yeah, we're also just going to throw him into a pile of 10 other guys. That just seems like a great situation where that's the one difference he has over Trevor Harris. Even like Cody and Cody can run. I mean Cody can get some action going, but I feel like Vernon is a couple steps quicker and kind of more mobile than that. Just really weird to me. And you said here, coming up against Winnipeg, let's kick 'em all. They're down bc. Winnipeg's traditionally owned you, especially at home. Let's come in here, let's take care of business. I hope that they step, I mean to me this is a huge game and know it's early in the season, but start making some separation because these games are going to come back in the end. We talked about this all last year, like, oh well it's going to come back to the final two weeks of the season, who's got home field advantage? So go in there, kick a wounded animal. I don't know. I mean if Winnipeg starts oh and three, I don't know which would be more surprising. BC one and two or Winnipeg, I mean clearly Winnipeg oh and three, but either one, it doesn't feel like either team can really afford this loss this early. Yeah, I mean I was starting to contemplate when we saw how Calgary was really hanging in this game, what would it be like if BC and Winnipeg started Owen two? And it looked like a very real possibility for a while there, but ultimately BC gets the win there I think. Yeah, like I said, huge game on Friday. I think that Winnipeg, I mean you can't count anybody out in the CFL because we did see once upon a time win five team go on to win the gray cup and that was BC back in 2011. So things can happen in a small league like this where it's relatively easy to make the playoffs and get hot at the right time. But I mean you don't want to start oh and three I think you don't even want to start one and two if you're the Lions because it's going to be a very tight race because we'll get to them in a minute. But Saskatchewan one also looking very good despite playing kind of sloppy the first couple of weeks, but coming out with a couple of victories. So yeah, it's going to be a very interesting year in the west. Last thing for me, and we were talking about this, I was talking about this with Andy and Anthony and kind of the whole BC of it all. I love Rick Campbell and certainly BC has had a lot of success, but I don't know here, I mean you got to see, and especially with hosting and everything this year, but I just feel like they've had so much talent on the roster the last couple of years and the big edition here of Stand Back and we kind of went Poo P back and forth about that and this whole P cop thing, I just don't know. He's not on a short leash, but I feel like he should, I don't know if Rick is the guy here to get them over the hump later on. I dunno. I'm curious if you have any updated thoughts on Campbell. We were talking about it. I don't know if it's a coaching style, it's whatever. It always feels like a little too lax. I get that he's a hard-edged guy, but it doesn't feel like it always comes across that way. I mean, I've debated with myself for years whether or not Rick Campbell is a good CFL head coach or not. I mean he did win a great cup with Ottawa, but that team let's remember was eight, nine and one. I believe they had a losing record that year and they had a couple of good years in Ottawa where they had a winning record, but otherwise I believe they had a losing record over the course of his tenure there. And then he comes to bc, they have Mike Riley at the beginning have a disappointing year and then I think because of what you call it, because he was a first year head coach, they didn't let him go after that first season with bc. And so he kind of catches fire two years ago with Nathan Rourke and then last year he has some sustained success and I'm thinking, oh, maybe he is actually a good coach, but you always wonder what schematically does he bring to the table? I mean, I think he's more of a defensive guy. You look at his background, but I don't think he doesn't call plays. I don't think he's a guy that, yeah, I don't think he's a guy that innovates very much. I think I'm obviously not inside the locker room, but I don't think you're seeing the adjustment mid game with him. And I think, like I said, I've always debated with myself whether or not this guy's a good coach because I think he's really that middle line where it's like, if you're better than Rick Campbell, you are a good coach. But if you're worse than Rick Campbell, I think you probably need a new coach. No, I agree. I think that's really good. I appreciate you being as just eloquent with that. And I don't know because I agree with that. Also to me, Ryan Phillips kind of questionable right now where it felt like he was kind of the hotshot coach and the coach and kind of the coaching waiting and all that. I don't feel like BC's defense is looked exceptional. And obviously he got promoted last year, he was the full DC and the now, but people were talking about him taking over head coaching positions. Any thoughts on him and just kind of that before we get to the last game. Yeah, like I said, I thought the defense played very poorly week one against Toronto, especially against a guy in Cameron Dukes head who had made very few starts before that point, but this week I thought they looked okay. I thought nothing too concerning from that perspective. Like I said, I think they've had some changes on that team. Josh Woods is a guy that's starting in the line backing core for them now. They changed the look to try to make it a more run stopping heavy defense than they were more of a pass defense defense before. So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out over the course of the season. Obviously last year you had the donut boys with those two shout outs against Edmonton, but it's going to be interesting to see how they play against some of these better teams and better offenses in the CFL as we go forward with the season. Last game here, let's get to heartbreaker now. Huie Father's Day, we had a lot of touchy, a lot of talk about the UFL, the championship game being on Father's Day. Did you make it out to the hammer on Father's Day? I did, yes. I saw every single second of this one. Boy, it was a great game. I mean from an objective perspective it was a great game. But yeah, the Ty Cats always seemed to be on the wrong end of these. Yeah, so thoughts on this here? I mean, okay, let's start on the positive Bo's back, right? Bo is officially, is he back? Yes. It kind of looks like it. It looks like you're starting to see Yeah, the numbers are there. Obviously great numbers. Definitely the best game I saw from Beau in a long time. Bar none, but I think just the physical health you're starting to see. I think he's moving around so much better than he has been the last couple of years. He's taking the deep shots down the field and actually connecting on them because how many times have we seen the last couple of years taking deep shots down the field and just it's sailing over receiver's head. So I think at the end of the day this is the biggest positive to take away from this game. If you're Hamilton, you have other guys on this offense that are playing well right now, some that aren't playing well. Tim White unfortunately just had a couple of rough weeks, but like I said last week, I think very inconsistent player, he's going to pop off one of these weeks for 150 yards. You just know what's going to happen. But I think at the end of the day some untimely drops and I think if they just make a couple of different plays, I think they win this game obviously. Yeah, Butler looking good. Kind of run the middle over the field. I just like, to me, because we caught the last half of this game, we had just got done with the championship again, we're back at the bar with all the UFL people we're watching the game. We knew that Saskatchewan won kickoff with a walk-off kick, kind of all that stuff. But even I'm rewatching the game this morning, I'm like, okay, I understand the Saskatchewan with S game. I don't really know how though because it really felt like the tie cats were the better team leading up to, I don't know, the last 10 minutes of the game. Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest thing though is that Hamilton did not step on their throat when they had the lead. I think they just let 'em hang around in that 10 point range and I think you really have to get to that two score or two touchdown lead in the CFL to feel any sort of comfort because even with four minutes left in the game, which I believe that's when Saskatchewan scored their first points to get it back to not first points of the game, but first points to cut the deficit to seven points and then you could get a quick two and out and get the ball right back in the CFL. So you really don't need much time to make up some ground I think, and Saskatchewan really did that and we'll get to them, but they look really good offensively. I think that Trevor Harris, I mean for what it's worth two weeks into the season, probably the MOP front runner right now. But like I said, long way to go on that one. But read your take from the preseason is not looking too good with Trevor Harris, but It's not looking good. But I wanted to talk about this because, and I saw Hodge going crazy about this as well, the penalties that the riders are facing and we got a penalty problem, they're two and oh who cares. Yeah, I mean these are the type of things you can complain about, but at the end of the day, what really matters? Like you said two and oh, and I think that's kind of the scary thing about them is that they haven't played very clean football through two weeks. They've had some turnovers, they've had a lot of penalties like you said, leading the league in penalties. But at the end of the day, and obviously they've had to come back from multiple double digit deficits two weeks in a row, so they haven't played perfect football but they're still two and oh and I think under a new coach those things are going to be corrected and I think at the end of the day Saskatchewan's looking pretty good here and they're only going, Yeah. Let's talk the AJ outline of it all. How is he looking here? I think we said first week he wasn't looking maybe back up to form, but what do you make about aj? Yeah, he's been pretty quiet the first couple of weeks. I don't know if that's because defenses are kind of loading the box against 'em or Atch one's offensive line isn't as good as Toronto's, which I definitely don't think it is as good. But yeah, just not the reduction you want to see early on this season, but the passing game is more than made up for it. I think you're seeing a lot of guys really step up and have really good chemistry with Trevor Harris. Jira Sterns really had a big breakthrough game in this one. I can see him being a huge part of this offense now with Sean Bain left the game with injury so we'll see if he misses multiple weeks. But I think Jira Sterns is a guy that's going to step up in his absence if he misses extended time and play a bigger role. Keon Schafer Baker, one of the best Canadian receivers in the league. We've seen that the last couple of years and I think he's a guy that is more capable playing number one or number two receiver role in this league. So I think this is a team that has a lot of talent, a lot of flexibility on the offensive side of the ball. I think if their offensive line can hold up, which is the biggest question, I think this is going to be a very offense this year and I think Trevor Harris deserves a lot of credit for looking like he's in great shape at 38 years older than Reed and I think that going to be a guy that as long as he's healthy, this offense is going to keep humming. Yeah. Last thing here, we'll round this out here. I get out of here at the top of the hour. Hamilton Owen chew here. Like I said, I thought they looked really good in the game. If like Bo really Joan with the guys, I think if he's good to be back and obviously having a lot of rest here through the last half of last season and even if he's a little bit older here, okay, he's been able to make some time on his side, rebuild all that. I think Hamilton looks good. Like I said, they're ING two, are they too far out? I mean what do you make about that? To me it feels like they can still be competitive here and just feel like this game, it was an interception turnover there right at the end, put 'em in field goal range or else this is going to overtime and God knows what happens. It doesn't feel like Hamilton's an O2 team. Yeah, definitely. I think they've had some great moments in these games against Calgary. They made it a very competitive game despite on their best and last week I thought they were the better team or this week I should say. I thought they were the better team. But honestly speaking as a fan, I'm just so tired of them starting off the seasons like this. I mean they've been doing this all my life basically the last three years in particular. So I think this is the third year in a row they've started oh and two, if they lose next week it'll be the third straight year they start oh and three and last year they actually started oh and four. So we'll see if they do that. But I mean you can overcome it. Like I said in the CFL big, you can make up ground, especially with a lot of the head-to-head matchups, but you don't want to keep dicking yourself such a big hole. And basically what it does, it doesn't eliminate you from making the playoffs, but what it does early in the season, it kind of eliminates you from that first place race. And I think that's going to be so crucial to winning the Gray Cup. It's very much easier just to win that one game and get to the gray cup. And you've talked about it all the time with BC that it's just much easier to do that and win a game at home than it is to win two games to get to the Gray Cup like Montreal did last year. So I think at the end of the day I'm just tired of it as a tie cat span. I think they need to start getting off to seasons better. I think they've lost this going back to last week, but they lost 16 of the last 17 opening games of the season. Something crazy like that. It's just been happening all my life and like I said, I'm tired of it. Let's look ahead here and we'll get out of here. So coming up this week, like we talked about Montreal having their home opener here with Ottawa, Saskatchewan as well, opening it at home. You got this already in the season. We got the home and home here with say Hamilton going back into Saskatchewan, BC at Winnipeg, should be competitive there and then Toronto's back. I predict a third loss for Edmonton. Toronto looked really good week one here. Any other thoughts looking at these games coming up? I know we talked Montreal and all of that and bc but Hamilton running into the buzz. I mean Saskatchewan, let's say they repeated at home here. Could Owen three for Hamilton not going to be good? Yeah, I mean let's not talk about that game. Let's talk about Edmondson Toronto and I think one thing I'm looking at in this game is McLeod Bethel's return to Toronto. I'm sure he'll have a warm reception given he gave a good five years of his career there and obviously was a huge part in that 2022 Great Cup winning team. So interested to see how he plays in his return to Toronto. Definitely do not expect the Elks to win that one. Given that Toronto is an incredibly hard place to play. Toronto's coming off the vibe this week, it's going to be a tough task for Edmonton to win that game. But Edmonton has looked intriguing. I'll say that the first couple of weeks they definitely look a lot more entertaining than they did at points last year. So we'll have to see if they can string together enough plays to keep it competitive in Toronto. But looking forward to that game and all of these games next week. Well there you go. Here week two in the books should have UFL Insider Mike Mitchell on for Friday's episode. We'll be an abbreviated just Mike this week. I got to travel across the mountain on Thursday night to do some work on Friday over in Spokane. We'll do that with Mike and then Jason, I'll be back next week for our CFL week three recap and then I will start getting some player interviews at that point. Once we're back from the UFL championship and all of this stuff, I'll get back on the horse. We'll start getting that stuff going here for the Friday episodes now that we're done with UFL coverage. Jason, anything else before we get out of here? No, I just wanted to say that it's looking like a great season this year. I really am very optimistic about what we've seen so far, especially from these quarterbacks. I think Zach Claris has been the worst of them and I think there's a good chance he rebounds. So I think at the end of the day, that's a great sign for the league and this season going forward. Well, and I agree and as someone that has covered the UFL here the last couple weeks of the season, were pretty dull just with teams being locked up and kind of positioning and certain teams being out beginning of the season. I do think even the teams like we talked with Hamilton, even the teams that are struggling right now I think have a lot of upside to look at. Or you have teams like Winnipeg where you're like, Jesus, what the hell's going to happen here if they're oh and three or one in three or oh and three or one in four, whatever. So should be interesting that way. Be subscribed on here. Appreciate everyone checking out Chris, with a lot of comments as always. Appreciate it and we'll see you guys next time. Let's get out of here. Thanks guys.

UFL 2024 Championship Results + Analysis!!!

Well here we are back again. We didn't know if we were going to do this or not, but we're here back live and the professor Andrew Murray and I, Anthony Miller is still alive, right? We didn't do him and I think he's up and moving. I think he's just writing articles. Yeah, maybe he is a little hungover, but Anthony's here. Andy, we're back live following the UFL Championship game. How are you? I'm great. How are you doing? You managed to survive the hotel shenanigans. It was good. Yeah. Funny stories here. We'll preface, get into everything. Appreciate it and subscribe if you enjoy the work. Like I said, live here today from St. Louis. We got people checking in. We'll throw up some comments here. Not the greatest game Abdul. We will get to all of that, but live here. St. Louis Hussy and I are going to be doing our CFL recap show tomorrow. Regular episode Friday. Look for UFL Insider Mike Mitchell, kind of full season recap of the UFL 2024 season. What worked, what didn't work but it subscribed. We added subscribers last night. I think we had like 3,500 people. Check out the UFL championship pregame show. Obviously most watched again with all that. I appreciate everybody, but yeah, it subscribe. If you're part of that, click join. I had comments last night, how did we get back? How you can do a thanks. You can do a super chat, you can do join the channel, the nine, 9 cents a month. But we'll get to stories here. But first off, I can corroborate with talking with some of the XFL execs that were at the hotel last night. We really were in the hotbed, but not a great game and they know that. Yeah, no, I mean just kind of bewildering honestly and honestly in a word confusing considering what one team did and another team didn't do. But look this game, there's so much that really kind of compacts as far as what happened first of all on the field. I mean Birmingham made a statement. They made history, they, they've won three in a row, blah, blah, blah. Since then it's into Eskimos. I'm not going to steal my Michel thunder on that. He's talked about that plenty of times, but just a tremendous accomplishment from them. You and I were sitting in Birmingham three years ago, just the beginning inaugural season of the USFL and you're sitting there wondering, well how many of these are there going to be? How many games? How many us FP games? How's this hub concept? Who's this Birmingham team? We don't even know anything. We didn't know. How much did we know about Skip Pols? Not very much. How much did we know about Jaymar Smith, Alex Magoo, all these characters and you've just seen this basically parade of them the last three years. People who come in have made contributions. Guys who've been on the team for three years, guys who were hurt last year, like IEA Marlon Williams, he tears up his Achilles last year and he comes back this year stronger than ever and he plays in the championship game. He was tweeting last night like, oh man, I can't believe I have three rings. Think about that. As a pro football player, having three championship rings in a league, that's not easy to do in any league and to do it three consecutive years and changing formats and changing environments with players coming in and out and coaching changes that we even saw this year with them. Truly remarkable from their standpoint. I have to tip my cap to them. It just doesn't happen in a lot of sports and especially in pro football. It's so, so hard to do and I just want to appreciate it for what, Yeah, no, like I said, let's congratulate. Let's congratulate at Birmingham for you three time at championship here. Lots of excitement Last night, like I said, we were at the hotel bar. We didn't even really know we had just booked and then we kind of figured that out Friday or I guess going into Saturday. Okay, we're at the Birmingham, but all the brass was there last night. I shook Darryl Moose Johnston's hand. He told me, yes, Reed, that we're going to bring back the XFL kickoff next year actually. He said, Hey Mark, we're going to bring back the kickoff next year. But no, I talked with Daryl, put some football execs there. Skip Holtz was a celebrity number one there came in. We ran into Gregory, Gregory Crawford, one of our longtime listeners. You know love when you just sit down at the bar and you know us and we run this podcast and someone walks up to you in full Birmingham stallions regalia and goes, do you know who I am? I was like, ah. Oh yes, Gregory. So Gregory was very nice and he's watching this. Oh, I was going to show here. We saw one of our friends here. We ran into James taking photos. So we had a good time. Any standout interactions that you had either before or after the game? There were so many wonderful people. I just want to say it was a convention basically. And not only that, we were next to convention center. I mean literally it was almost like a convention itself in that there were so many different people from this space that we got to meet. Obviously there were league executives that were in the hotel, fans, personnel, just a lot of people that we've interacted with online and we finally got to meet in person. A lot of characters that I've interacted with over the last three years and that we've been able to finally see in person. And Gregory Crawford was fantastic. He gave us a little bit of a tough time with some of the things we've mentioned about Birmingham this year. Obviously the attendance numbers, which I'm not going to really get into today. That's not My concern. Oh, we are going to to talk attendance here. Not too much though, but not as much as Uncle Ambassador about it. But look, no, it's been wonderful meeting everybody here. Really the gentleman, you set me up sitting next to me the entire Day. Yeah, jaw Jaw's on here. Josh's checking in on the show. Yeah, J was great. Jaw, wherever he is right now, he was, I love talking to him and chopping it up with him. Russ Julio came over and talked to us. He was just super cordial, super nice, really loved interaction with him. Skip Holtz, nice. Just very hospitable and warm with his time. Great gentleman. Really wonderful to see him in that space. So yeah, honestly Reid, it's hard for me to really pinpoint one because there are so many great people that we got to talk to and really share. This is a community and this is a community that you and I very much care deeply about because there's a lot of really interesting people on and you get to meet so many different kinds of people in this space who just, I think last night you just saw a giant celebration of what was going on. So I really appreciate that and I really hope I get to experience that more, especially if I make the Great Cup this year, be able to experience the Canada side of it, but I really love to be able to experience this part of it, especially after the last three Years. Yeah, I got the photo here. You can see Holts, we got Gregory back here. I mean it really was, I'll tell you lots of, I don't think that Skip Holts a will ever have to buy a drink in the city of Birmingham ever again. And he certainly was not last night. Very well taken care of very well and rightfully so. Like I said, a lot, it reminded me, and we weren't because last year we were obviously at the championship game in San Antonio and I think we talked at the bar, the Dwayne and Danny of it all, and I think she was in and out, but a lot of the league execs, right, were here. I mean, Danny's off doing whatever. A lot of people are here. We Russ Brandon's there holding court, talking to people. You got Darryl Johnson walking around, but we didn't see that last year. But we did the first year in Birmingham with the Fox people, Eric Shanks and Joel Klatt, who you talked to, everybody at the bar following that. And it was just cool to see that again last night that it felt like this is a celebration. We're through this. We saw a lot of the media people. Corey was walking around ticket sale, Corey from the Guardians and now with the stallions and he's got a ring, right? Or gets a hold the trophy, kind of all that stuff. So it's cool to see just really kind of exciting and it felt an accomplishment. It's cool to see that. It was just really fun kind of eavesdropping, watching all that. Nothing too out of the realm. And then Leon here, no, they're not bringing back together yet. Although I did talk to some league execs involved in rules and regulations and I said, we're going to do that, right? We're going to do that. So we'll see, but at least put a bug in the ear for all of that, but really appreciate that. Yeah, no Chris, did Moose leaking the expansion teams? No, but Moose was having a good time because we were there, lights came on, it was time to go. It was really fun. Nothing out of the real, but we did see maybe a knocked over beer or too. It was kind of interesting to see some people, I won't say who, It's a good time when the entire bar collectively groans when they turn the lights on and tell you to go home and people really didn't go home for quite a while. I mean, I'm just so taken aback by the kinetic energy in that room the last two nights. I mean people were just staying down there and just continuing to chop it up. Really just something I've not really been part of in a while and especially in a hotel bar of all places, but man really just, there was a lot of energy in that room in that lobby for the last two nights and you really felt it. Alright, so let's talk here. Let's get the first out of the way then we'll talk game and then we'll kind of talk about what's coming up next. So we knew attendance was going to be rough. We talked about that and the battle hawks and all of that. I'm curious you were in the crowd. I came down, I started in the press box. I wanted to see who was up there and then came down, felt very anti bras. The people that were there. It felt like a lot of battle hawks people that weren't. Mike reports 27,396. This was the photo at kickoff that I took. I imagined that that is the distributed tickets. I imagine there was not a lot of battle hawks people that were there. We did see a good contingent of Birmingham soundings people, including Gregory that traveled up. But thoughts on that? And it was just a weird crowd dynamic. It really felt like, we don't want the braas here at all, but it's like, well, you should have just won last week. I mean, that's the thing. It was a lot of bitter St. Louis fans and the ones that begrudgingly showed up to root against them. I give them their due, they showed up. Yeah, you're able to do. You bought your Tickets, you buy your tickets and that's fine. I will say I did see a lot of jerseys from a lot of the XFL teams. I did see Rough, well, I guess rough XUSL now, but jerseys from last year. I saw that Roughneck jerseys from last year. I saw Broms, obviously we saw DC fans, saw people from other parts of the league. This is becoming a thing that I've noticed, especially last year too, where there are fans from other teams that will travel and just say, we want to support the league. We just want to show up. And that's great. You need to have that and continue to build off that because the kind of energy, I'd like to see a couple of some USFL fans here and there, but I think there was just so much negative Rama energy that it felt like it was going to be the stallions party no matter what. Although it was so funny because certain players would get booed depending on who got honored for what. The Player awards was really a standout thing. Adrian Martinez's, MVP was not well received. A lot of people weren't crazy about that. Also, do not mention Tom Brady's name in the stadium because that's not going to go well. But he's obviously not on the field from a playing standpoint. There were so many random people and so many different dynamics there where I think the crowd was trying to figure out where are we going for here? And it felt neutral, I'll say that because everyone kind of picked their own corner to kind of sit in, not just literally, but figuratively too in terms of what am I supposed to be supporting here? So that was really interesting. But as far as the crowd, the size of the crowd, I got to be honest, I thought the San Antonio crowd was a little bit bigger last year. I just thought there was a few more people in there. I mean, not significantly, but it just felt that it was a little bit more filled out in the ALO Dome last year. And those were people that there was none of, we'll get into this later, but whether or not someone bought the ticket and actually showed up, I mean those people did actually show up in the stadium. And I could feel that with this case, obviously there were some missing party members and it was interesting trying to sort of sift through the energy in the crowd and trying to figure out what was going on. Yeah, I don't know why this cable's feeling weird here. That's not a U problem. That's the cable problem. Yeah, it felt weird. And I will just say, and first off, never say the league isn't listening. I came in on Friday, when did we come in? Saturday, I went to the arch, did my cock cry, babies and all that, and I ran into a league executive walking out of the elevator. They said, Hey Reid, what about the cock cry babies? Oh, you like that? They said, no, not really, but I want to create a spark and I want to say something because, and this is what I didn't get about all this. When you're in A CFL, when you're in A UFL, when you're in one of these leagues where you have these neutral site games, this is what is part of the deal. And I said the same thing and was negative about the CFL, the Roughrider fans two years ago when they sat at home, when Winnipeg was there, their conference division rival and they didn't want to go. I don't know that to me, you have to get over that. And I felt like last year, for whatever reason, and I don't know there was, I mean last year was a home. I mean it was the San Antonio. There was no San Antonio, but there wasn't that negative energy that there was this year. And it was just really weird. We were there last year, the press box and the Almo Dome was wide open. You were in the stands, but that to me felt more like a celebration where this to me felt like we're mad that you guys are here or we're going to stay at home to prove a point. And I just don't that, to me, that's a battle HOKs issue because fan issue, we were there last year and that did not happen. So clearly there is a difference between, well, the bra is last year, well, they were kind of an no okay franchise. They do fine. We're doing the game here. It's kind of a tourist spot. We got a lot of fans. It's kind center of the United States. But this year it was totally different. And having been in both, I will say there was a stark difference. This is the thing, and I think Gregory Parks actually brought this up on Twitter. He said that basically this is the risk you run when you put this in a third party venue. What happens when you decide let's go for broke and just hope that maybe the team who's in this home stadium will actually host it. And again, most people were banking on that happening. A lot of people really thought St. Louis would be here, including me, including Mike Mitchell, including a number of people. And that didn't happen. And this is the result of what happens. Look, I can't fault fans for not wanting to show up when their team doesn't make it okay. I can't tell 'em like, look, your team's not here, but get over it. I understand that part, but maybe it's a little more complicated in this sense in that it's not a league that financially is booming and it is not having all their stocks go to the moon. So it's not this case with the NFL or some of the other established leads where they'll be fine, somebody will show up and fill that seat. But in this case, that's not necessarily the case. Who else is going to take that seat as a neutral party member and take over that seat that you had allocated before and resold? And I don't know if that's going to happen. Same with Saskatchewan. We saw that it didn't really pan out that way when they didn't make it. And they especially didn't want to sell tickets to Winnipeg Blue Bar fans who were their enemies. And I'm not sure if St. Louis fans would've felt that way. I'm not sure if it's the same thing in America, but as a fan, it's complicated. On one hand, I understand your emotion not wouldn't show up. On the other hand, you want to see people support the league and be able to support the product and just say, look, if you don't show up, it looks bad on the league and it looks bad on the support and looks bad on tv. And we have to think more in a long-term setting here. And look, I don't want, don't want to call it selfish because I understand it, but there is definitely certain arguments you can make both ways where, and I know that's very citrus to me to do, but it is tough because I can see it going both ways. But in one sense, I understand in terms of you have to be able to support something that it's not guaranteed to just be around. That's the thing. There's no promises. They might never get a game back here. The battle hawks for the league standings or for whatever. I mean, this might be the last playoff championship game ever in St. Louis for the next decade. You have no idea. You can't take that for Granted. Well, I mean, and I don't want to throw his name out there too much, but me and Jah were talking about last night, he just said, is this the last time that we have it here? And I said, it's possible. Does the league decide? And that's the thing, does the league kind of take this and decide, do we just do neutral settings from here, from out? Do we just go back to can, do we do something else? Do we do a smaller venue? Do we not try to run this risk anymore? I mean, these are mitigating factors now they have to think about because they try this experiment and it didn't work. And when the team that they thought was going to win didn't win. And something that was funnily mentioned to me too a couple of times was if they really wanted to have the fix in for this team and get them into the game, they could have, because guess what this replace system, I mean basically Mike Prayer and Dino, our God, and you can do whatever you want basically. And I'm not saying they're fixing games, but if you really, really wanted to, they could have done that. But for competition's sake, that's not going to happen. So this is something that the league's going to have to think about going forward. Are they going to have to go to more neutral settings and just decide whatever party people we get? If we can't have that big home crowd, so be it. We'll see what happens. A couple comments here and then we'll get to the game. I know you get half the people want to talk attendance expansion, half of that. We have a couple questions here and then I want to talk to you all this because my comment and then a couple comments here. I worried, and I don't know if the league even cares, I mean we were talking about it last night, the league really feels like, okay, we want to be a TV product. And I want to talk with Mike this week, and I don't know if that's the title of the episode, but is the UFL two folks on being a TV product? If that's the case, then you don't care, right? Hey, we're broadcasting this nationally as long as we have some people here to make some noise. And I don't know if that's a good or bad thing because I think along with attendance that goes, we've talked about it before, people watching the games and making it more appealing for people to buy the franchises and all that, that all goes into that. Maybe they don't care. And I would say that that's a bad thing that they don't care enough. Just a couple of comments, Mike here says, it was literally Father's Day and that's great. My problem is not the people that didn't want to go because it was a holiday, the tickets, it was Father's Day, whether or not the Battle Hawks were in there. So the people that were going to go bought the tickets knowing it was Father's Day, it was that we decided not to go or sell our tickets or stay home or Well, I saw comments. I had bought six tickets and we went, but we couldn't get rid of the other four. We had Jaw won our tickets, but it was even hard trying to find people like, Hey, okay, my schedule changed or this happened or that happened. And just the other thing with this was Abdul, do you think the league will do best team host a championship? I know it'd be added cost. I think it's just stadium availability. I mean, you can't hold that many venues. You have to know where you're going to be that day. You can't say, well, we're going to wait and then the week or two before, not that the battle dome's hosting the law, but you can't book a stadium like that a week out like, Hey, we actually need a championship game next weekend. Yeah, no, there needs to be a little bit more just if possible, have a little more planned out for people so that they could buy those tickets ahead of time. As far as the father day thing goes, I mean they mentioned a number of times in the stadium and they also, I remember that one point they did the Simba camp thing when you called your child up. I mean, look, this is actually, if your father is into football, this is actually kind of a cool thing to go with your dad. My dad, I wish I could have brought my dad here, but he's in love with the game of sport golf too much to really make that sort of sacrifice. But you know what? I just wonder if there's going to be questions as like who chooses what over whom? And look, St. Louis fans would've chosen this game and they made it absolutely. They're choosing to go here regardless of whether Father's Day happens, it's the more spread out audience that makes that conscious choice of do I really want to miss Father's Day for this game? And that's consumer choice. That's the choice that the consumer makes that says, well, I make that sacrifice. I'll have to go do this because this isn't like how people say, honey, let's not get married on Super Bowl Sunday. I don't want to miss the Super Bowl. People actually think like that, right? And so there, there's choices that have to be made in that way. So I mean, it is funny, we've talked about this earlier. They played the expo championship game the day before, mother's Day last year, and this case with Father's Day weekend. So are they going to the schedule in terms of are we going to have this even happen? Yeah, Move earlier, Move. They've really experimented with this. I mean, the US L championship game was on July 4th weekend and there's always this kind of holiday weekend that they try to go towards Memorial Day weekend. These are again, continuing analytical questions they're going to have to keep addressing if they're going to think about logistically how many they're going to get people there in. But like you said, maybe they just care that it's on TV matter. If there's enough people, then that's fine by 'em. Okay, last comment here. We're moving on Mike. 27,000 isn't bad for the battle hawks, but there wasn't 27,000 that was tickets distributed. So that was on the high end. Had there been, I mean obviously more battle hawks people would've bought this week going into it, but there was not. I would say honestly, there's probably 12,000 people there on the high end. I mean, I was there upstairs looking down. I went downstairs, walked around both kickoff during the game after the game. So it's fine. And there's a lot of circumstances and like I said, maybe they don't even care, but there was not 27,000. I know that's the number Mike reported, that's the number distributed, but there was not 27,000 people there. Like I subscribed here. Like I said, moving on in terms of the Brahma's game plan here, I tweeted last night, there's a John Cena clip where he just says the word ass. And I said, that seemed to be the Brahma's game plan going in here. What did you make? This was first shutout that we know of in kind of modern spring football history. It's never happened. We were thinking about that. The bar I texted, I dunno, Mike, there was also not 22,000 in San Antonio thoughts on just the overall, the Braas did not even get off the plane. You said that last night. Their offense certainly didn't, and I just didn't understand really what the game plan was as far as how they were attacking that defense. I really thought they would try to maybe just at least try some things downfield or try some trick plays or try something that was at least getting the bras because the stallions were so on point with their tackling and with their focus and they knew exactly where the ball was going. Every single time the bras offense continued to make it a horizontal of passing attack. They just continued to attack the sideline and it just didn't seem to really go anywhere. They couldn't run the ball very much. I mean, Bernie hands run defense was number one in the league, so it was going to be hard to run against them, but I just thought they'd be a little bit more creative in how they implemented some of their playmakers, like Anthony McFarland and John Lovett, maybe just some screen passes, something they just could not, I mean, neither team crossed midfield about 20 minutes into the game and you're sitting here thinking, are we going to get any points before this happens? And obviously the stallion scored eight points before the half was over, but I mean it was just such a stalemate. But from the promise standpoint, I'm just bewildered of the fact that there was really, there was just nothing. They could get absolutely nothing. And I know some of it is, well, they couldn't create any turnovers. Their defense couldn't really do anything, but you're stopping the stallions on every drive. You got to do something with that. You have to be able to move the ball. And it never came to fruition. They absolutely could not get anything going in the passing game. I honestly, I'm not going to fault Garber's too much. I thought he played fine. I don't think he was really him. I just don't think the scheme really fit anything. And this stallion team knew exactly what they were doing on every play and they had 'em snuffed out from the beginning. It was just, honestly, it was bewildering to see it happen. And obviously we'll watch. I want to check out the broadcast and the replay here. Now, obviously we were in the stands and watching that, I wanted to see the whole sock change thing we had early in the game or one of was the science players. Daryl made him in violation of that. But I texted when I moved down because I didn't even really don't even think I'm like, oh shoot, I'm sitting there in the Sands. I'm like, oh, there's Brock. So I sent him a message and I was like, Hey, see if we can get him on the show this week. He said he's traveling, but I said, man, this is not, because I saw his face and we were laughing like, God is he trying to talk? He was on the Brahma sidelines. We were over there. And I'm like, it doesn't look like he wants to talk to anyone. It doesn't look like anyone wants to talk to him. And I messaged him, he goes, this is a volatile sideline right now. And we even saw, I think it was RJ tweeted, which I don't even know if RJ was at the game between Wade was throwing his headset down and people arguing and the defense screaming at the offense because they're doing their job and leaving the bench really just felt like just an utter collapse. I mean, I can't even think of a better way to phrase it. A lot of resentment on that sideline. And look, that's what's going to happen when the defense is doing its job and one side of the ball is doing its job and the other one isn't. It's going to be a lot of resentment on the sideline. And it's unfortunate because this Brams defense, I actually thought played a really good game, actually. I mean, they did give up a lot of running yards. I mean, the biggest tell in this entire game is the fact that the stallions ran for 210 yards. Ramas ran for 52. I mean, you basically quadruple the number of rushing yards they have. And that physicality really came through and it just wore down the promise. I mean, the defense was just on the field way too much, especially in the second half. And it just wore them down eventually. And I'm sure that spilled out on the sideline because the offense was just doing absolutely nothing. And it's unfortunate this team kind of losing, its cool. And just emotionally, I mean the most fight I saw from them was when they were literally fighting the other players from the other sideline when they were literally getting into altercations. We had an ejection litter in the game. I mean, just a lot of just emotional pieces there. And for the bras, they just completely lost their cool Wade Phillips spikes his head second at one point. He's just not having a good time. It was just frustration all around. I could see, I remember watching Brock, you and I both watched Brock, you were trying to approach it and it was trying to walk towards a hornet's nest, like an angry hornet's nest. And I think he just realized I got to cut my losses. This is not tenable to be around right now, but just to see them lose their cool so much like that, it was honestly disappointing because they'd just been so cool and levelheaded the entire season. Even when the offense wasn't doing much, they would find ways to win games or peeing games, but they were just out of it, especially in the second Half. We have a couple comments here, and I will say, yeah, with the Brock thing, it was like a playing frogger or something. I'm trying to walk into traffic and I'm trying to, I don't really know if I want to do that. Yeah, where's the log? Where's the log? I can jump it. It was just wild and just Anthony was at the post game and he said that Wade didn't want to talk a lot about the game, talked more about the season. We're proud of the guys and that's fine, I guess. So we've got to make sure we talk about a Adrian Martinez here. We have some comments from Zach I want to pull up, but I want to see general thoughts if the battle hawks are here instead. Obviously a lot of other things change, but do they fare any better? I mean, Birmingham, it felt like, especially when they scored that first touchdown, it was like, okay, this is over. Right? Then they get, and then they got the, what was it, the fumble, whatever. Okay, this is totally gone. I mean, it felt like two scores and then three was insurmountable. But with the battle hawks, would that be different if they're there? I mean, I think they actually score for one, but they at least put up some points. But I don't know if they really fared that much better because it all boils down to AJ McCan's Health and his angle. Obviously it was just shocked by the end of the season, and I don't know, without AJ's leadership and his ability to kind of be mobile and be able to really command the offense that he had earlier in the season, I don't know. I mean, I think the stallions team look, the stallions, they're a great team. They have all the assets. This team has lost, as Anthony said yesterday, four games in the last three years, and they have three championships, and there's a reason why their defense has always been quite exceptional. They've always been able to find a way. Like I said, it's remarkable that they've managed to get through this, especially with all the coaching changes, they've managed to find a way to just come back and have this kind of effort at the end of the season. So to be honest, I think maybe the battle hawks would've put up a little bit more of a fight on offense, but I don't know, I think the same result would've happened. This stallion's team was just ready, and I think they were ready for whatever was thrown at them. And I think it was just mitigating circumstances. Do I think the XFL conference, I honestly believe this, the XFL conference as a whole was probably stronger than the US FL conference, but Birmingham was by far the best team. I mean, they're clear head and shoulders above everybody else. Yeah, we talked about that too. Walking. Yeah, I think generally talent level XFL conference higher. But the stallions I think is in another tier above. I think if they're the S tier, I think battle hawks or that a braas maybe that B plus A, right? But there's such a jump between I think any team and the stallions. Yeah, I and it bear out that way. But I do think St. Louis could have put up more of a fight, but I'll say, well, it could Have been argue plus It's true. Well, less, I don't even want to think about that honestly. But I mean, that was the thing. We had a comment earlier from, this was way at the beginning from Mar, and I love him. And we talked in Hamilton last year, Regina, but he said the first half of sub boring had to turn it off, and we will get Randy tomorrow and we'll see all that. And we had said, I think 1.3 and 1.4 would be great. But yeah, if you were turning on that game, that was a horrendous first half to try to entice anybody to watch. I mean, we were sitting, I mean, I was watching the Mariner game on my phone and the press box. I'm like, this is brutally slow. I sent a picture into the chat, I think it was a picture of a skeleton and a scene, and I said, waiting for someone to score. And it really felt like that sometimes. And I hate feeling that way, but I could say that the collective crowd felt that way too, where it's just, I mean, everyone was just begging for a ball to be thrown down field, and that really didn't happen. Speaking of which, by the way, I want to give Adrian Martinez's due for winning the MVP in this game, but I'll say this, if you had told me that Adrian Martinez was going to throw 98 yards through the air, I would've thought you had a fantastic chance to win. And that didn't happen because this ground game was so brutal. I really think that Ricky Pearson, a person, really may have had a good chance to win the MVP award. He had 102 yards rushing, but he ran Marshawn Lynch, he just absolutely bodied people and threw 'em into the dirt or the turf in this case, and was honestly probably the best player on the field on offense. And I really believe that he set the tone for Birmingham to kind of break out of their bowl and be able to actually do something on offense, because the bra, this pasty was really, really good. They kept everything in front of them. Nobody let any big plays happen over the top. They made sure that everything was kind of in front of them. They just got worn down in the run game. But yeah, it was lack of a better word. It was brutal to watch in the first half just because there's just nothing happening. Again, not crossing midfield for 20 minutes in a game is really tough. That's some of the most stagnant offense I've watched in football. Not only in person, but just in general in quite some time. Yeah. What did you think? So we had the Adrian Martinez, we had the MVP, we had the Tom Brady, obviously we were there and didn't see, I saw the clips, the Brady presentation. Well, Adrian, this is a good trophy onto that. That was weird. They saw the clip of Tom, they really need to get the ball down field. I'm like, use that. I'm so glad. Like $300 million. This is the key expert analysis. Throwing it out here. I think Brady, I don't think it makes it, I think you get one of those, what was say that who was, or Guy Jabre that did it for a year, and then they're like, you're terrible. I don't know. We'll see about that. But that was interesting. What'd you think of Tom Brady? What we saw and then what'd you think of, yeah, Adrian Martinez getting the mvp. I mean, it's not like there was a lot else. You can't give it to the whole Birmingham defense. Well, I think Tom Brady is obviously exceedingly knowledgeable by football. I mean, he'll know 10 times as much as I have in my entire lifetime. That doesn't mean, but how do you translate that on television? That's the thing. I think as a color commentator, you really have to actually paint the picture for everybody and be able to describe it in a way that makes sense and is able to teach people certain things. I mean, that's why I really love someone like Joel Colla. I mean, he's very colorful. He understands a lot about the game, but he's also able to present it in a way that makes sense and teaches you something. And I think that's something Brady's going to have to learn, whether he has the acumen to be in that mold. We'll see. But I think you get nervous, especially at the beginning, because you want to be safe. You don't want to be controversial. You don't want to just be opinionated, which I understand, but you have to be able to put yourself out there a little bit. CV personality is different than obviously your normal life personality, and it's something that you have to kind of work with and mold with. But I don't know how much of a leash he's going to be given. And I'm sure, I mean, obviously a $300 million leash next to him, so Fox will give him as much time as he needs to. But it's up to him if he's going to be better. But I do believe that Brady will work at it. Brady is a workaholic. He will want to get better at That. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Hear, yeah, Brady was, I mean, this is a separate conversation. I would just stick with Greg Olson. I don't think you could tell me that. I don't think that there's 20% more people tuned in to watch the game on the call. I think you're going to get that the first. I think you're going to get that the first week. But regardless, yeah, Jenny here says the game was not fun. Chris, who was brittle. Let me know in the chat that does that. I saw comments on the Twitter, this ruined the season or this, what a terrible way to end it. Do you feel that way? And put it in the chat. It is what it is. Like I said, we were talking with the league execs. It is live sports. That's the difference. And when I used to always watch WWE as I'm like, you're able to script the perfect ending every single time, where here in the obviously real life sports you can't. But does that ruin the season for you? Does that ruin the season? Let me know. I'm going to say no. I don't believe it actually ruins anything for me. Is it disappointing? Yeah, of course it is. You want to have a much better game and a better product to showcase than this, and you don't want it to be so lopsided too. But no, I don't believe it ruins the season at all. The season was compelling enough in its own way. I do think it was funny that Mike was still hemorrhaging to have overtime so badly. And if it had happened, that would've been wild. God forbid it'd be a zero zero overtime because there was thoughts of that starting to happen. But no, I mean, look, it is what it is. One team showed up and the other one had a unit that didn't get off the plane. I know that's harsh to say, but the offense just really just couldn't, the bra was offense really just disappeared. And I just don't think it really, but I don't think it ruined the season for me. So back to the broadness thing and the AJ of it all. We've talked about this and even going into last year and injuries and stuff going into the end of the season. I mean, I love aj. He's been on the show twice at least once. If not, I can't remember. I can't if we got 'em on the season. But is this an AJ thing too? I mean, it just felt like we saw the same play over and over. I know you talked about the top about that a lot of slant we're going back you this way, this way. It felt like there was no attempt at all. And is that him not trusting Garbers? And we had a comment here, is Garbers trying to get an NFL opportunity? Did that hinder why would think you'd want to play better in the championship because of that? But because the Dormy came in, we saw Megan's, the plays, like what's going on with a J Smith, I guess? Well, it is interesting how they control the offense so much more with Chase Garbers. And look, Anthony made a good point. AJ Smith said before the season that this guy, chase Garbers is who he thinks of as his PJ Walker. Well, PJ Walker threw the ball down the field. Garbers doesn't really do that. He's very much more short to intermediate routes. And that's fine when you're controlling the pace of play. But they weren't, and they needed to be more aggressive. Downfield Dormy, for better or worse, is going to do that. Is he going to throw over the ball in harm's way? Yes, but he is going to push the ball downfield. And we saw that one drive where they finally got into the red zone at last. They didn't score, obviously, because they were desperate and they were trying to go for it, but at least there was something going on in the passing game. And there were finally plays being made that were beyond five or 10 yards. And there's maybe two different kinds of games you can play with those sorts of players. And maybe Dormy would've just been a better fit. Are you going to get some risks? Yes, I know you don't want to be risky, but it felt like the bras were playing not to lose instead of to win. And that to me is what really was emblematic about the way that Chase Garbers played. And then what happened when we saw Dormy out there. Well, and I think, yeah, I think even Mike, and we were talking in the chat and obviously Brady's intrepid kind of stuff too about, well, the teams are feeling each other out. It felt like that for a little bit, but it felt like the bra has never got into second gear at all, where they're just like, oh, we're kind of just like he said, playing not to lose. And it felt like there was no risk. There was no imagination, there was no creativity. And at some point they know what you're going to do, and they were trying to get the interception. So when you're doing the same play over and over, I'm able to read that and kind of react to it. It felt like very weird that, I don't know, to put the blame on Wade or aj, just certainly not the team that we expected to show up. No, not at all. And just, again, I don't know if that would've meant that Dormy should have been switched in earlier. I don't know if that would've saved them at some point. I mean, as a coaching staff, you understand the game plan is just not working, and it was just too little too late. By the time they switched out Garber's in Dormy, We had a comment here, Jenna. Jenna is mad. Jenna is mad. Birmingham carry the USFL. If Birmingham was losing, would support us. It's not fixed. I will say we joked last night, there were some smiling faces in the hotel bar like, oh, I bet that person's happy that the US FL one year. I mean, it's interesting that we make those jokes about all that stuff, but I think that gives relevance to a lot of that. Maybe. Does it give a boost now that Michigan made into the playoffs when you want these teams to have success, it's really hard to get people to go to Memphis or Houston games because they suck at least Birmingham. I don't know. I mean, we saw people, it feels too predictable. I mean, you got to win. You can't blame a team for winning. But I do think that Birmingham stallions being successful helps that conference. Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, they're carrying the torch. They have been carrying the torch for three years. They are by far the stalwart franchise, and they at least give it relevance otherwise, I mean, there's some tough ball to watch there in the USFL in terms of the, and Memphis and Houston teams, I like Michigan a lot. Maybe they're not the most prettiest to watch on tv, but they are a good team and they've been a better team the last two years. That first year was really rough when they were coming out of the gates in the hub model. But the USFL from a TV standpoint, I think has some interesting Playmakers. It's just there's two teams that are really strongly in Memphis and Houston. But yeah, Birmingham, Birmingham is compelling just based on what they've done. Again, this is a tremendous thing, and there's people, now, there's fans from opposing teams that want to see them lose. They're teams that are saying, okay, we want to give you our best shot and take you down. We want to be the ones that take down Birmingham. And it hasn't happened yet. And I don't know when it's going to happen. It really depends on Skip Holt stays around and continues to build on this dynasty. It'll be really interesting. Yeah, a couple things. Yeah. I mean, it feels a little bit like the CFL with Winnipeg. The last few years you're going to have, in these smaller leagues, you're going to have teams. There's going to be a talent gap there. I mean, there's just not the parody that they want. So yeah, I mean, it puts a bullet on the shoulders or a bullet on the whatever, target on the head, whatever you want you metaphor you want to call it. But yeah, it does feel like Skip entertaining the room last night. It feels like skip's in a good place right now. If I'm skip, I don't know. I mean, do I go anywhere else? I mean, I don't know if it gets, obviously you can go make money. You go more money doing whatever we were talking, okay, you go to college and you're dealing with NIL and all this here you work three, four months out of the year. You do some showcases during the summer. I don't think it's a bad gig. No. And if he wants to go call it maybe Coach College or somewhere else for maybe a season, that's fine too. But I mean, he does have the best gig in town. He really does this Birmingham franchise just absolutely adores him. His fans adore him. As you said, he'll never have to buy a drink in the state of Alabama maybe ever again. I just don't know going from here. The thing is with these franchises, what do you think of as the franchise that has to succeed in is better for the league? For example, one of the things I saw last night, Saskatchewan had another comeback victory you against see Hamilton. Sorry, Jason. But they came back and they won. And I saw a lot of comments saying, oh, it's good that Saskatchewan is good because this is good for the league. And I don't know really if this conference has that. Now. Maybe you could argue it's probably St. Louis because of the attendance that they get. Probably you want St. Louis to be successful because of how many people they get. But I don't know if that's necessarily the case for other franchises in this league. I don't know if they really have that, because there's a lot of leagues where they say the same thing. They say, oh, it's good that this team is good because it's good for numbers overall. And I am not sure if that's necessarily the case in this league yet, because I don't know if anybody has that wagon to hitch themselves too. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I mean, yeah, I don't know. And we've seen the ratings people, but Michigan draws more, Birmingham draws more whatever I maintain. It's a lot of the time slots and the networks and kind of what's going on with that. But I don't know, whatever the rating is. I don't know if you get a bigger TV rating yesterday, the Battle Hawk in there. I mean, obviously I think you get more people in the stands, but I'll be curious. I think that there's a four right now, four A four, a slightly higher ceiling for spring football. And I don't know if a different combination yesterday would've made that better. I think you would've had a better in-game experience. And maybe that translates to tv, but I don't know. I don't know if there's another half a million people that are tuning in because the battle hawks are in there. I don't know about that either. I mean, as far as being a fan that wants to go to the games, you want that team to be good and be able to have that energy. And the battle Hawks have always been good. They've always been a team that seems to always be above 500. So that bodes well for them, at least in terms of their reputation. So that's good for them. But as far as everybody else in the league, I mean, are people really going to care suddenly that the roughnecks become fantastic? I don't know. I don't know if that really draws the number. If Memphis suddenly becomes fantastic. I don't know. That's the thing. I don't have that answer. I'm not sure if that's the draw that everybody is expecting. I mean, we see Birmingham is obviously their dynasty and the numbers in their stadium haven't really changed. I mean, obviously their TV rating's very high. Their Birmingham TV rating is great. People watch them in the area. But as far as getting people into the stands, it hasn't really shifted the needle. So I don't know what that means. Just a couple of things here, Zach here. This seems to be a league of parity. Birmingham silly. No one can compete with them. I wonder what kind of Kool-Aid they're drinking. I want some. I like that, Zach. Yeah, we didn't run into Zach. I think Zach said he was in the suite yesterday. So we tried to see, I say what I say, I come to St. Louis. I can always see the people that want Zach Zach's highfalutin here in the suites. But I will just say, when you have these smaller leagues, and we're talking the eliteness of Birmingham, the CFL, it feels like there's six pretty decent teams, and then there's two or three kind of duty teams this year. It feels like, Hey, Edmonton's going to be asked. It feels like Ottawa, but six teams make the playoffs. And I feel like that kind is that way where I feel like in this league, there's one or two good teams, and then there's a lot of ask teams. It's kind of like, Birmingham, you need to flip that. I want to have five or six of nine good versus two or three of eight. Good. Well, it's just more can a team recover when things aren't going their way? And I do believe that St. Louis sometimes can do that. They don't always do it, but I believe they can. Birmingham, obviously, any turmoil they go through, they managed to figure it out. Unfortunately, we saw the Broin last night. That wasn't the case when their offense went, that was it. It was game over. That's kind of my biggest thing is can these teams have another way of adjusting or being able to figure out something that will help them win that game or be able able to join that upper echelon of teams? I mean, we saw that with the CFL last year. Even. We dog Montreal the entire season and said, well, they're kind of a mid team. They're not really fit to be a team like BC or Toronto or Winnipeg. And they went out and proved everybody wrong because they were able to ascend. And you could tell that there was at least competition there. And it was shocking, of course. But that competition reality of, oh, this upset could actually happen. The thing is, I don't always feel like that in spring football. Sometimes I just watch a game and it's almost a formality. I don't think I watch Birmingham games. I don't expect them to lose, even when they're trailing to a team like Michigan, I'm like, they're going to figure it out. There's no suspension of Belief, Belief that they're going to basically lose this game. That never comes into play. And I think as a sports fan, you want to at least have a little bit of doubt because it keeps you on edge and it keeps you interested because you think this may not work out for us, and you need to keep that in your head. A couple of things here, Denzel. I'm worried about the XFL side being able to keep coaches because the new pay structure, Denzel, I think we're going to talk with Mike about that this week. So I guess I get subscribed on that. I want to get Mike's thoughts. He was one that reported to Heinz Ward last year and that's how we got Wayne Phillips with spoiler alert. I don't think Hein Ward's bra is making to the championship. I don't think they fa any better against that. And Mark here, I don't want the UFL to become the stallions playing the role of Globetrotters versus generals every season para of these needed. I agree with that. Talking just real quick, adjustments, all that stuff. Are you surprised? Obviously we saw Dormy late in the game, but I mean it was halfway through the fourth quarter to me at halftime you make, what the hell are we? I mean, what are we waiting for here? And there's no even, oh, we don't want to offend anybody person. I mean it's spring football. These guys might not be back next year. I was just surprised it took that long. Garbers did not have a great game and the Dormy, are you surprised it took so long? It's always tough playing those politics, but yes, I do believe it was kind of surprised that Dormy didn't get a shot earlier. And look again, I don't think Chase Garber's was really the problem necessarily. I just think the game plan was not conducive to his strengths and really what they were trying to do, they needed to push the ball down, feel it a little bit more. And that's the thing Dormy is going to do that. It's going to take those risks and he is going to be able to take those high volume plays that are going to be very volatile. But maybe that's what you need. Maybe you need a little bit more gusto in what you need and look, coaches are not afraid to do this. We saw this last week with Skip Holtz Martinez was not playing well against Michigan. He said, I'm putting in Matt Corral and GR played well and I had that in the back of my head today. I thought Martinez doesn't play well, started playing better. There's parts in this first half where I starting to think, I don't know, car his way and get into this game. He never did. But you have to be prepared for that to happen because if things aren't going well at the end of the day, the coach wants to win. The coach wants to win the game. And that's what kind of again sort of shocked me about the bra is there was just such a lack of urgency. It's like they weren't even trying to hit the panic button. They just said No, we'll figure it out. It'll start to even out eventually. And it just never did. So I don't know. Again, the reticence to even try something with Dormy until it was far too late just was puzzling A couple comments here. Wade is gone. People talk about it's not good for, I mean this is just my whatever. I think you're going to see it. Exodus of the XFL side. The deal was they were on the contract for the two years, so all the XFL contracts are currently on a higher pay structure than the USFL contracts. That's why Heinz Ward left because they said, okay, year two this year you're going to get paid, but the next year you're going to get the drop. And for whatever reason, Heinz Ward, this is Mike Mitchell's reporting said, I don't want to do that. I'd rather leave. I said at the time, I would take the money right now and then figure out, you always take the money now and okay, I'll figure that out next year. But he said, no, that's why Wade's here. But if these coaches get dropped down to half of what they're getting paid or more, I think there's going to be a big drop. I'll be curious, do you still get a Bob Stoops doing this? Do you still get whatever? I'll be curious. I'm not saying Wade's gone, but I think that you're going to see a shift in at least on the XFL side because USFL coaches, I mean unless they get rid of Curtis Johnson because hey, you're not good at this or whatever. But I think from a pure merit of getting paid that, not morality but that feeling the self-worth of is Wade Phillips coming back for whatever the heck they're going to pay him next year? I hesitate to say yes, as he said, the pay scale is a really big factor. And again, I mean I do think the coaches love doing this. I think Bob Stoops likes having a short-term job here. I think Wade loves coaching. He's going to coach until the wheels falls off. And for me, I mean I hope that a lot of these coaches don't leave. I mean, you want to see somebody get their chance. A lot of people yesterday were asking like, well, AJ Smith might get a head coach job. Well, we're not sure now after Last. I know I Maybe not the best time to kind of bring that up, but the people want to see guys get their opportunities and be head coaches. Right? And I will say this about these leagues, the XFL, the USFL and the UFL, we've seen plenty of guys get their chances. Some have panned out, some haven't have been spec Catholic successes and others have been catastrophic failures. But you want to at least try that out. At least you want to be able to at least be able to beta test that and say, can this work? Can this guy get a program together and can they do something? I mean, again, skip holds is somebody that I paid a little bit of attention to in college and now I paid a lot more attention to because of what he did in this league because of this tremendous accomplishment. So you can really uplift the profile of somebody who even has been a head coach already, but maybe they just need that right opportunity to really shine and to show their assets and their acumen for the game. Chris here, Wade loves coaching. He'd do it for free. I bet you he wouldn't. I would bet you, I would bet you that he would not do it for free. You got to pay bills. You got to pay bills here. You can your wishes and butts and candy and nuts. It doesn't pay all that. We got about 10 minutes left on here and then we're going to pack up and head to the airport, make sure if you have any comments, questions, get him in here before we get out of here, make sure we do all that. And then like I said, Friday episode coming up with Mike hopefully and then we'll have hussy on tomorrow. We'll do CFL stuff. I got it. We have another game today or did they end yesterday? I got no you guys all yesterday. I'll catch up on all that stuff when I got home. General thoughts, anything else with the championship game you want to make sure we touch on and then we'll figure out what everybody else wants to talk about? Well, I just wanted to say first of all, like I said, the game didn't go according to the plane, but what did go beyond my expectations was the people I got to talk to on this entire trip and I just wanted to say and look, I know we get a lot of comments. Me and Ree both get a lot of comments about how we review things. I did get some comments including from a couple of league people yesterday about Andrew, you have some interesting perspectives. I don't always agree with you and your negativity, but I appreciate your perspective and you know what? To me that made it worth it because that's all I had cared for. Look, I'm just grateful that we have this and that's my biggest takeaway from this is just I'm grateful to be at a championship game. This is two years in a row that we've been able to do this and I've also been able to see another part of America that I didn't know when I was going to see it. I get to go to a city that I had on my bucket list for a long time, St. Louis, and really just kind of explore more of my country and more areas that I hadn't had a chance to go to. And so for me, I'm just thankful to be here and really be part of this and to really do this show again for an entire season. Again, just to make it by the end. But that's really my biggest takeaway and just to be around people who care. I mean, I ran into some DC Defender fans downstairs and their thing with me, they said like, we're just following the league. We want to go to the league ghost. We want to support this. And there are people like that in this space. I believe there are people like that in this space. I just want them to be given the opportunity and new people to be given the opportunity to be part of it. I really believe in that and I believe that energy is there. I want to see that taken care of and fostered. Yeah, no, I was just going to say, I got this up. Yeah, I got to see the arch. If you're not on Twitter, got to celebrate all that stuff, calling out whatever. I was cool. I don't know if I'll ever go come back to St. Louis. Maybe we'll come see Pat. Maybe we'll do a bar crawl with Pat, but I don't know. Back to Missouri. Well, I'm getting calls to come back if Birmingham comes back to St. Louis, so I might have to RI might have to come here in your stead. No, but it was fun. We will talk. I had another comment here that I flew out of my head here, but moving into, oh, and that's what I wanted to say. What I'll be curious now is kind of what happens in the off season. We talked with the Greg Parks yesterday on the show and he was saying he doesn't take expansion and they would announce that already. It kind of would've been this week, right? The same way, what was it the XFL announced their coaches the week the USFL kickoff was. We're trying to, I think there would've been some sort of buzz this week about all that. We'll see, Darryl said in the interview that in his interview, the newspaper a couple of weeks ago, the cities are set. That's the plan. We're working on expansion, but do we see a bunch of layoffs now seasonal and all that? Are we keeping people on? Does Corey have a job for the next six months trying to get people, I'll be curious what that looks like because this needs to be a 365 year, but a 365 a year league, but like we've said before with Fox and do they value that or are they just value it? This is products that we can put on and we're moving stuff next year already to make room for racing and that probably pays more money anyway. It's interesting to me that they're already relegating that stuff to Friday next year kind of shows the priority. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I'm curious to see what's going to happen with the schedule. I don't think there's going to be an expansion. Sorry guys. I don't believe that's going to happen this off season. We talked about it yesterday. What's going to happen with the investment firm, Redford Capital? What's going to happen there? What's going to happen with some of the assets going forward? Are we going to see any coaching movement? Are we going to see Again, one of the things that we don't want to see really so much is that this league just disappears for six months and then comes out of the dark. We want to see at least some attention. I know Fox has the NFL they have to worry about and there's obviously bigger things at play here, but I do want to see that they're at least keeping this in conscious and they're able to be able to get news out about it, be able to build on this and continue building towards it. Also, please hopefully try to get some of the tickets sold a little bit earlier for some of the teams next year. That would be I think a huge, tremendous thing that they could do and just again, just get more people involved. There's a lot of questions to be off season. I don't know if those questions are really going to be addressed for a while. I am a little bit worried about the timeliness of which some of the questions are going to be addressed, but look, that's just how it goes sometimes with these leagues. But I agree. I hope that there's more. I just wish there would be more people that were kept on whole time because there are people that want to be dedicated to this. There are people that want to do this for a living and I hope there's a way to make that a reality. A couple of comments here. Abdul says, you don't think St. Louis hosts next year's championship game? No, this was your shot. That's why I did all this stuff and yelling at the people and everyone got like, this was your shot. You don't get to sit out this year because you weren't in it and they expect them to bring it back next year. I mean, sorry, that's like you had the girl at the bar you were talking to and Hey, can I get your, that was your opportunity. I don't see them coming back. I want to get your thoughts on that. Vincent says, back to San Antonio, almo Dome is the best stadium of the league playing in Canton. Don't agree with Canton because as Mike Mitchell pointed out, the capacity of Canton is less than even the reported attendance yesterday for the St. Louis game. So that would not happen. But I think the Alamo Dome is probably the best option. It's close enough to Dallas that you can bust. They can bust the players there. They were on charters last night trying to get out. That was interesting. But it is central enough in that way. It's hard to get people to go to Missouri if you're like, I think San Antonio is central enough. You're able to get a lot of people into that. Curious your thoughts. I don't think St. Louis gets it again next year, I think Mr. Chance? No, I think, and I don't think, again, I'm sorry about the Hawks fans, but I don't think it showed well to the league that people didn't show up, and I think that's going to play a big long-term factor here in terms of if they even think about coming back here again, San Antonio. Well, here's the thing, Reid, so this is what I was bringing up earlier in the show. Do you look to have more neutral settings instead of trying to play in a stadium that's being played in already by one of these teams? You try to go to a different stadium and say, let's just be here. Let's just have a neutral spot. Do you play somewhere in Texas for example? Do you play somewhere in, I don't know, I guess Tennessee like national or something? Do you pick a neutral setting? You just pin on a map and say, let's just meet here and we're not going to worry about it if we're going to sell tickets or not because that team's not going to make it. I mean I know San Antonio did last year, but again, I just think the vibe of the XPO was so much more different Than it was different last year. It was Different. It was a little bit different and I really believe that people were just not worried about whether they weren't worried like, oh, my promise didn't make it. I'm not going to go to the game. People were worried about that. This was so much more of a bigger deal and I don't know if the league wants to run that risk again. I think they just want to be able to just have a nice neutral setting. So for me, I'm going to say this, I think they're going to seriously consider just not being in a stadium from one of these scenes. Again, I think they're going to just say, let's just do neutral sites from now on. It's so weird, and just to round this out again, that it was different last year and it would be different this year if it was, okay, this isn't even inner conference, right? We're booing the stallions, right? Hey, we're the ex, no, they were booing the bras. I mean, we are upset and I don't understand that because this is a play the win sport and you lost fair and square and that is what it is, but that is the difference. It wasn't even like XFL on USFL crime. It was like, no, we're mad at, we're just mad and totally different vibe. You're right, than last year. Totally different. I find that fascinating too. How many times have you heard the last two years about both of these leagues, both these conferences, people comparing themselves, X-F-L-U-S-F-L, which one's better, better players, better coaches, which one gets more fans, blah, blah, blah. TV ratings. There's been so much juxtaposition of which one is better and then here's the opportunity to support a team from your league. And that's just not how it went. The vibe was not there. I really find that fascinating because people have made such a big point about supporting Next Go conference and now I kind of saw a little bit of the division with that yesterday and said, and people just said, you know what? No, you're here. I'm mad. I don't even want to support the conference. I just want to be against you. And I don't know. That really surprised me considering some of the interactions and just so much of the grandstanding that people have done the last two years. I really was kind of almost confused By that. Well, just to be done with this here, we got to get off here. Just the grandstanding that the Battle Hawks fans and we're carrying all this stuff we're supporting. I was very shocked last week and my Twitter when I got a lot of negative and I've had a lot of battle hawks, people unfollow me and that's fine. You can't shout cock cough from the rooftops for the last three years and say that you're the cat's pajamas with all this stuff and then when it comes time to put up, you sit mad at home. I don't, and it's not, was it some weird fluke and a tiebreaker and it went down to the point score, the get you lost. Not even, I mean, you made the playoffs. It wasn't even, you guys didn't make it. I'll never, like I said, I don't think they'll do it here and it is shame on them. I mean, sorry. Wow. Anything else here we we're going to log off? Anything else for anything everyone, like I said for checking it out, congrats to the stallions. Congrats to everybody with the league and both conferences and all the execs and everything. I got a lot of that. Didn't even congratulate them whatever last couple years, so congratulations to everybody. Anything else, Andrew, before we get out of here? No, like I said, super happy I got to do this. I'm glad to do this again with you in person is always a treat. I, again, just really enjoyed my overall experience. Overall. I definitely want to try and come back here again for another game and be at a BAAs games when people show up to the stadium. I would like to actually experience that, but like I said, this stallions thing, who knows? I mean they're going to go for number four next year, man. I mean this is immense. I really felt like we were watching history last night, so congratulations to them again. We'll see what happens going forward, but always be just thankful to be part of this and be with you. Yeah, thanks for taking part. Thanks for making the time. Andy's on here. We'll there. That's good. Appreciate it. And thanks Anthony, who's I'm sure furiously riding the way right now, getting all his stuff up. Zach, Jeremy, everyone in the chat, we appreciate it. Like I said, check in Friday, we'll figure all that stuff out. We're going to get back on the plane here and we'll see you guys next time. Thanks again.

LIVE From the UFL 2024 Championship Game in St. Louis!!

Well here we are, live here from St. Louis across the street from the battle Ofdo. Getting a little bit of background light here, but I think that's okay. We are live here. We have the professor Andrew Murray here as always, and then Anthony Miller here credentialed covering the game today. If anything sounds weird, looks weird, let me know. I think we've done all the checks and everything. Just a reminder, if you like all the work we're doing here, we gave away two sets of tickets today to the UFL Championship game, making up for some of the cock cry babies that aren't going and then we gave away a bunch of jerseys too. Like this is a royal retros custom jersey, so if you like the work we're doing, like it subscribe, we get up to 4,000 subscribers. We're going to give away two season ticket sets to the UFL 2025 season. So be aboard with that. First Off, Anthony, How are you doing? We had fun last night. We went to Hooters, walked around to downtown St. Louis. How are you doing Anthony? I missed my shire, but that's okay. We still had a good time. It's weird to be here. It was kind of weird last year we made the same comments at San Antonio like, oh we actually got to a championship game. This is great. And now this year it's like wow, we have USFL and XFL going at it for the UFL championship. It just feels like a completely different world from what it was just a year ago, even just six months ago. I know we were, what was it? It was Anthony and Evan and I were at Arlington for the kickoff and now we are here 12 weeks later or whatever. Andy, how are you doing here? You missed last week. John Lewis filled in. John Lewis, we'll be on the show. Big guest list coming up today. I'll plug you that in a second by that. Andy, how are you doing sir? Well I have to tell you Reid, it is just as hot here as it was in Mexico. However, there is near a sea turtle or beach in sight so the climate could be a little bit different, but no, it's great to be back. I'm happy to see you. You and John did a great job last week. You absolutely punked John with that video of his predictions beginning so cool. Really just masterpiece work by you Reid. But no, it's fantastic to be here. I'm excited. St. Louis has been, actually, I know this sounds crazy but it actually has been a bucket list city of mine for a long time. I've heard a lot about the gateway. We saw it last night all lit up the arch. Hopefully we get a chance to go into it, but no, I'm very excited to be here and just be back state side. Yeah, everyone's checking in here a agenda is checking in a food as well, fan. Yes, we made it. Yeah, like I said, I think I fixed Anthony's mic. If there's any mic issues, just put it in the chat. I think I've got it, but rolling through here. So we'll be here live for the next 10, 12 minutes or so. Then we have a big guest list today. I've posted in the YouTube description here, but Pat Rafino is going to to be joining. We thought Pat was going to be here today. His work commitments did not allow him to be here. Emory Hunt, everyone loves Emory Max producer Max is going to be on the aforementioned John Lewis. We're going to have Greg Parks, Mike Mitchell, Evan Wills more rounding it out. So it should be fun here every 15 minutes or so. Yes, John says, excuse me, he is still hurting from that Punking. Yes, we got John punked on that. But anyway, big guest list like and subscribe. We're talking the game today. We're going to be talking kind of sight and sounds or lack thereof around the stadium. All the kind of stuff we do. Not trying to be overly critical, but trying to be optimistic about and realistic about everything. I go first is Andy, just because we were at coffee today looking at sight and sounds around here. What do you make of this today because we've had a lot of comments. Are there signage is or what's going on? What have you made of a lack thereof around the stadium? Yeah, not too many signs. I mean I saw more signs for the St. Louis Blues, their hockey team than I have really for the champion game. However, that has not stopped us from seeing a number of individuals who have worn colors from the league. A couple of Hawks fans obviously still maybe grumbling about last week, still floating around Plenty of Birmingham people coming around here. We've run into a number of individuals. Our hotel lobby I will say this is absolutely popping. I cannot believe How we are at, we are at the stallions headquarters. I posted, I said, Hey, I could have pulled the fire alarm last night, so be lucky there. But yes, we are in the stallions. They have vandalized their own media signage here and it's truly a Birmingham takeover here at the hotel. Yeah, it really is. But no, I mean obviously this is the thing that is important to see, especially when you have a game like this that's a neutral site game, A game that maybe out of towners or people that are in St. Louis or maybe not familiar with. Obviously during Hawk's season when it's going on, there's plenty of signage around the town as far as I know proclaiming that things are going on. I haven't really seen so much of that as far as this game goes, but maybe perhaps when we go around the stadium we'll see more of it. But we've been mostly in quarters, our hotel quarters so Far. Yeah, it's been fun. We were here last night, we saw Russ Brandon chit chatty and I saw a friend of the show Rus Gilio walking around. Just a lot of networking, nothing too crazy here. Moose was at Starbucks with us today for breakfast. That was exciting. I got a couple questions here, but first Anthony thoughts. Yeah, walking around the city, I mean I was telling Andy when we went to WrestleMania, the first WrestleMania I went to years ago, flying in and seeing signage around the convention center around the stadium, feeling like you were kind of in your own pocket in the city of anyone around here kind of knows. I really like that. We don't have any of that. I would like to see that in the future. We've kind of bemoaned this, but what's your thoughts on that? Yeah, so I'm actually seeing the hotel right next to you guys and there's actually a lot of Birmingham Stallion fans too there as well. So there's been a lot more stallion fans than I thought there was going to be. I've seen a couple of renegades, I have seen just UFL in general, but it seems like this is kind of the stallions headquarters, but I've seen more St. Louis Cardinals and like Andy said, blue stuff than I've really seen with any battle hogs or UFL stuff, so I didn't even see it. I drove around with the Uber driver around the Dome stadium and I honestly didn't see anything UFL related. I was looking to see if there was any signage or anything like that. I saw absolutely nothing for it. So I think if the Battle Hawks would've been here this weekend, I think there would be a lot more of it and they would've pushed it a lot more. But I think just because the battle hawks are not here, they probably don't want to do as much work with it or I don't know what the deal is with it, but I just haven't seen as much. I would like to see more though. I think that's something they can maybe improve upon in the future. A couple comments here and Pat Sandy by will bring Pat on here at 1215. I posted on Twitter and part of it was kind of a joke, but I do mean that we have the Rock with the Cody Cry babies in WrestleMania now. It does really feel like kind of the cock cry babies that we're not here. Our attendance hasn't been taken for granted all season and we don't appreciate it. I got a lot of those comments just really surprising. I mean on our Monday recap we pulled up the seating chart, saw a lot of resale tickets, which was surprising to me. So I do mean that I'm like, you're here, the tickets are bought, show up, show out. Janet has a comment post in the chat what you think, what's the first score? That's field goal. Let's get the algorithm working a little bit here and then football binge wants to know where'd you get the custom jersey? This is Royal Retros. He hooked me. Dustin hooked me up. It says Mark cast on the back. I wore this and when we were down here for Memorial Day at Choctaw, get on there. He'll do custom ones but we always include some in our giveaways so it subscribe, be a part of the thing, get this up to 4,000, but we always do a couple of giveaways. Dustin, I think we had four for the last one. I just mailed 'em all out last week. We had a Temu one and Brandon Silvers and C Turpen and PJ Walker. So that was all good. And then last comment here, UFL Isaac, thanks for putting me in the spinner wheel so if I can subscribe, get a part of that, we'll do the season tickets. I would like to get all that done before the season kicks off, but I don't know if we're going to hit, I don't know how hot the CFL content will be the summer, but we'll see. I guess football wise here and then like I said, we'll bring in Pat Anthony, we'll go first. Just general thoughts for the game and then I think we'll get more into the league and the season as we go on, but let's talk a little football at the start. Yeah, so I like, it's an interesting game because I think the bras have better individual talent than the Birmingham stallions do. I look at the roster for the bras and I'm thoroughly impressed with them and I think it was a crime that there was just two all UFL selections when there's so much talent on offense and defense. But I also understand Michigan had a lot of good talent. Birmingham had a lot of good talent, so I understand why that happened, but I love the mentality of this bra team and Wade Phillips and they're the younger dogs because being an Eagles band and we were the underdogs of every game when we won our Super Bowl back in 2018. So I think the problem is to have that same mentality, but to me it is just the way the stallions play overall as a team is just, look, they've lost four games in the last three years and there's a reason for it. They last week may not show because of the four turnovers, but this is a very disciplined team. They're very smart. They don't get crazed when they're down by a lot. They know how to win games. This team has a winning mentality. Skip Holds is a big reason for that. You see his demeanor on the sidelines, like when Adrian Martinez was making mistakes, skip was going up to him and he wasn't yelling at him, he was just coaching him through it. I do this thing when I'm a sales manager, when I do the compliment sandwich, you got compliment, then you get the criticism and then you compliment him at the end. Skip Holds does that a lot and it really resonates well with the players and they really seem to connect with him on that aspect. So I think from the football side, I love the individual talent for the promise, especially with guys like Anthony McFarland, Jr. Jte, Kirkland. Those guys have really made a difference in the offense but stallions, the one interesting thing I want to see today is the quarterback position. How's it going to work with Adrian Martinez and Matt? Because it sounds like both guys are going to play in some capacity unless Martinez absolutely kills it in his first couple of drives, but I'd like to see how the quarterback situation's going to be today. Yeah, Andy, I know you were out last week, you caught up, obviously saw the games, but yeah, this disrespect that the Brahmas felt, they're like, oh, we were in the all UFL, which I didn't believe and then Mike reported that and at least told us and then it certainly seems that way and Wade and the coach of the year, I mean it really feels like the Brahmas kind of like the Renegades last year playing with the chip on their shoulder. Look, this Brahmas team absolutely deserves to be here. They proved it thoroughly. They made basically everyone eat their own crow and I'm going to have to eat my own here on the show too, just like Mr. Lewis did last week on your show. Look, this team has been remarkably resilient given the circumstances, given the fact that most of this roster, these coaches were moved from the Houston market, obviously over to San Antonio, a lot of transition injuries, chase Garver was getting hurt. A man who, I'll be honest, before the season I did not have a lot of faith in as a passer or really as a commander of this offense. But he has been brilliant in the time that he has played with them. He's been methodical, accurate, smart. This whole team just plays with a lot of discipline. Similar to the stallions team I think we talked about as well, just a lot of even keel emotions. Anytime something gets out of hand, this team has really held firm in the face of a really lot of tough storms. I mean I go back to that week two when against Memphis, when they were down, they had absolutely zero reason coming back in that game. There was four and a half minutes left, yet they found a way to get two touchdown drives, garbage engineering those and I think that set the tone for the rest of the season. They knew that this they can win and they will win if everything goes right, but they are just remarkably resilient. This defense has been incredible. Wade Phillips has been just a master orchestrator of another fantastic unit. AJ Smith has really been coming into his zone really good. This offense to hum at times. I'm really just impressed and honestly, like I said, I was completely wrong about them before the season started. That's where a lot of people and they've been showing and they have one more chance to really prove it this afternoon. Let's do a couple comments. We'll bringing in pat standing by here, we asking Phillip think San Antonio with a Kirkland td. We had Zach here checking in St. Louis of Ax. Zach, you got to track us down today buddy. If you're at the game, first score will be a field goal by Birmingham calling it be the first game to go to overtime. San Antonio, win by touchdown, not rooting for anyone. Root for the mark Cast Zach Root for the mark cast. All right, football band. The defense is different from San Antonio. Philip checking in here should be the roughnecks plane today. And then we have the, here we go. Foosball fan. Anthony Milker is the definition of legit. So there you go. I liking that. Let's bring in, yes, we'll bring in Pat here, but yeah, let's bring in very happy BC Lions back to one and one here following 50 cent the Mariners be the Rangers. Really an all out night here, Anthony. But this was, and we're bringing it back just to set the stage we are in St. Louis. Everybody's like, Hey Reid, where are you guys? Are you coming out? We're doing karaoke all this. We sat at the bar, watched the CFL game on the Anthony's iPad, CFL, haters v Dan. That's what we were doing. I know Farham was at the game and then we watched the Mariners as well. So really doing all that. Let's bring in Patrick, sir, how are you doing? I'm doing well guys. I wish I was with you guys obviously, but duty calls as they say. Yeah, we're here with Pat. Let me see if I can bump your mic up a little bit. I think you're good on your end, pat. Yeah. Thoughts on the Cock cry? Babies here, you're the local St. Louis now, obviously not here right now, but what's your thoughts about Well, this league has never appreciated us. Now we've been taking for granted all season. I mean the fans don't play the game. The team has to win. And I know the league appreciates the St. Louis fans because they obviously did it in St. Louis. So it's like they were kind of banking on this that hopefully they were able to go, but in the end you have to win the football games. Last year, I don't know if I said it on the last time I was on your show Reed, but I think I was like, yeah, it sucks. They won seven games. But I remember there was a Mets team that won 90 games and didn't make the playoffs. Happens in baseball all the time where you have a 92 win team and they don't make the playoffs and it comes down to one or two games. It just happens. It's sports. Not everyone can get in. This isn't the NBA where half the league is getting in and then you have the play into tournament. So I think it, it's an eight team league with 10 games. Every game counts win the games. I mean it sucks, but Arlington kind of threw a shoot in there last year and won. So how could we be like they didn't deserve to get in. I mean they beat a good defender's team that 5, 6, 7 of those guys got NFL contracts and stuck and then they beat a good Houston team that if it wasn't for maybe an injury to Brandon Silvers last year, probably could have been in that championship game as well. So I mean I think you got to get over it. I think part of it is this isn't the St. Louis Louis Battle Hawks League, this is the UFL now. It's all one team technically. So if you're going to go to the game, go to the game and I mean it's not like we got the Rams to watch. So I mean this is it for football. Yeah, I know. It's funny, I was messaging with the league, one of the league officials last night and they were like, Hey, what do you think attendance is going to be? And I said, I think there's a lot of upset Hawks fans. And they're like, but they lost fair and square. There's still, well they did and they also lost last year too and that didn't prevent it as well. And these aren't controversial calls where it's like he's in, he's out. I mean when they lost to Seattle, I think they lost by 10 points and then they mismanaged the game last week and I think the offense is extremely effective in a four minute offense and whatnot. And I mean their clock management, the last minute and change was pretty abysmal where they couldn't, I mean I'm always in this league not to get sidetracked, but in this league with the onside kick being such a high percentage play with the fourth and 12th, I am of the mindset of go for the field goal with the more time because in the end you still need the nine or 10 points. So I mean as soon as I feel comfortable in field goal range, I'm going to kick it and then I'm going to go for that fourth and 12 and go to my play sheet and whatnot. So I felt, I know we're talking a lot about last week, but I mean just get over it. I mean one, it doesn't really affect your life. I mean I don't think these people bet enough income on these games to have life changing income being altered by it. So I mean, go to the game, enjoy the game. If you're that hard up on it, don't go to the game. How many times are you going to be able to go to a championship football game in St. Louis regardless. Yeah. Let's get attendance predictions in the chat. I know that was something people wanted to know. We have a question here, we'll circle around here and then we'll get back to Pat here on this, which I like doing the live shows for this. We can get some stuff by this hussy, my CFL co-host for the Monday shows. I think it'll be Tuesday this week wants to know, and I have thoughts we'll go around. Is this the most promising spring football has ever looked? We'll go first, Anthony. Yes. I think the talent level we've talked about, we'll Get to you Pat. The talent level is the best that we have seen in spring football, at least probably since the USFL back in the eighties. I think it is going to be interesting how they handle the next year or so when it comes down to marketing and getting out to these local markets and getting people excited about their coaches and players. And the one thing the XFL did well last year and even the US FL has done a lot back in 2022 was they did a great job of telling the story of these players and these coaches. The USFL had that documentary that they were shooting once a week that we got to watch behind the scenes stuff with the XFL last year. They had their own documentary with it. I would like to see more of that from the UFL next year is bring back a documentary where we can watch once a week for 30 minutes to an hour what's going on behind the scenes, tell us stories about the players, what it's all about. And I know this year was different just because there was a merger and it was a lot to put everything together last second, but I want to see more stuff like that next year so we can get connected to these players and coaches. I know there's a push for everyone to be like, well we don't want to make this a developmental league, we want to make this its own league to stand on during the spring. Well let's start acting like it and start getting these fans used to these players that are going to, you look at guys like Luis Perez, his story is great. I'd love her to be the NFL. I don't know if he's ever going to get into the NFL spring football is kind of his thing, so let's keep telling his story and stories that are similar to it. So yeah, this is the best I think we've had in spring football, but we're going to see in the next year or two, it's going to be make or break to see how this league is going to work out. Just a side note from that, I agree with you, the documentary player 54 you have about football, whatever, but providing more players to local media is a great, if you don't want to expand to doing a weekly, we're going to fly in because I was in DC with the player 54 crew for the playoffs last year for the XFL. I'm like, it's a huge undertaking it Cs I get and I would like to see that too and more support of the UFL today show and actually promoting that on social media and posting that, but just let's have more than two media availabilities for the Birmingham stallions going into the championship game. I don't think that's crazy. Andy, what's your thoughts on this? And we'll get to Pat because I think Pat's going to disagree. I have thoughts I want give a little bit of, I do think from a talent perspective in this century, I will say it's about as good as it's going to be. I really do believe that as far as whether it's being as recognized as it should be, obviously we have a lot of thoughts that I think it's getting better. I am very encouraged by the TV ratings last week. I think those were actually past my expectations to be honest. So from an exposure standpoint as far as TV goes, absolutely, I think it is probably about where you're going to have it, but as far as getting that message out further, there's a lot more work that needs to be done and I do believe that that's really the part of it. I do think, and maybe Jason can disagree with me, and I'm sure a lot of Canadians would disagree with me, but I do think it could be at a point where similar to the CFL where we know this product is great, we need to get the message out more, there needs to be more visibility. I mean people were debating about this last night, but I mean the Lions just hosted the BC Lions hosted over 53,000 people in their stadium last night. I mean you could debate whether or not they were there for a concert or a football game, but the fact of the matter is those people were in those seats in that stadium and a lot of people got exposed to that game and to not only the franchise but to CFL Canadian football in general for the first time in their lives. So that experience can also be had here in spring football. You can get someone to have their first game, their first experience, their first taste of this sort of experience. And I think that needs to be more addressed. But as far as, like I said, the talent level goes a lot of the coaching, I do think it's pretty exceptional. I really just want to see it more visible. As I said, that's really my biggest takeaway. Let's go Pat and then I'll give a little spiel. I mean I think as far as the marketing standpoint, I don't think anything tops in our lifetime the FL 2020, I just think it was so dynamic and I mean Vince is the greatest showman essentially. So I mean that's my opinion on it from a talent perspective, I definitely agree. Something that I always try to circle back with talent right now, and I think I've talked with John gel both on air and off about this is now that covid is kind of evening out, you're having this influx of players because you have these 24 to 26-year-old men who are shooting to the NFL right now because they've all had seven years of eligibility plus the covid year, plus an injury, plus their mom had a birthday. So they could, it's mildly ridiculous with the transfer portal and whatnot. So I do think now you're starting to get these influx of guys to where, yeah, are they NFL players, but NFL GMs are like, well, I need this guy to be my kickoff guy and there's a 22-year-old that I could pay the same. I don't really care about this 25-year-old, the Utah quarterback Cam rising is going to be 26 when he comes out. I'm pretty sure. I mean, does he get an NFL shot? Yeah, possibly. I don't know. That's a different show, but I do think that's the influx of talent that the UFL could benefit from and whatnot. And Reid, I know I wrote this article about it on thing is the QB purge and whatnot because there's this influx of guys, there was Chase Daniel and Brian Hoyer and Mike Glennon who were clogging roster spots and whatnot. Those guys are kind of purged getting purged out and I do believe part of it is because the UFL and just kind of this trickling of talent, and I know Emory's going to come on here and probably talk about that, but it's like what's going to be the kind of evening out of the AJ McCarran versus the Brian Smith from Delaware Valley State quarterback that would never get an opportunity. But talent level wise, yeah, 100% marketing level wise, it's the whole let's just get through this season. Yeah, I don't know. I'm really positive right now in the TV ratings. I'm really positive about how that all went. And I agree with what Andy said. I think the playoffs succeeded and we've seen the growth all year. I don't know if, and I've said this last week, I don't know if we see that 30 40% growth again next year because you can't give more time slots and we have the report out that it's going to be, and Mike was reporting that the Friday night UFL games potentially not expansion, right? We're just going to be moving expansion, but we're going to be movie games to Friday. So I think that's going to hurt. And then I always hear in the back of my head this Fox UFL divide, redbird kind of whatever, and I mean it's really outside of my purview that I don't know, that's more of a Mike thing, like hey, whatever. But I hear enough rumblings about that. I think that there's something going on there with Fox thinking, okay, well we know what we're doing and we don't need to spend as much and how much money we saved the first year and then the XFL and you guys lost all this money. So I don't know if that comes into a head. I don't know if you guys have any thoughts about that, but it still doesn't feel like it's from enough of what I hear. It's not like in simpatico, we're all in this together still. Does that make Sense? Yeah. I think this leak is just trying to find their identity right now. This merger was never going to be smooth from the get-go, and I think it's been as smooth as it can be under the circumstances. But yeah, I mean you got two different mentalities where the USFL, if they had their option, they would still have their four hub cities for this year and then if it was the XFL, they would probably be continuing playing in their home markets. There is a different mentality to it, but at the end of the day, I don't know if it's A-U-S-F-L side or whatnot, but this league has got to realize eventually you're going to have to spend money, you're going to have to get these players into their home markets, get these coaches in the home markets and get them connected with the people in their local markets. Because if you don't do that, then they're eventually not going to care. They have to be able to do that and you can play it conservatively and maybe it worked this year, but next year I want them to be more aggressive in marketing. I want to see them out in doing more local events. I don't want to see DC Defender players going to doing Salvation Army in Arlington. That's not going to help. DC fans don't care because you're not helping Washington, you're helping Arlington, Texas. This is not the Arlington defenders, these are the DC defenders. Get them in their cities. That's how you're going to make this thing better. I mean the ratings are encouraging. That's good. I think it will continue to slowly go up. I don't think, like you said, I don't think it'll go as much next year. But yeah, I think the big thing is just get in your home market and spend a little more on it and it's not going to kill you to do it. Let's go Andy and then Pat and then Emory standing by. We'll swap out here at the bottom of the hour. Andy thoughts? I think there's a difference between being frugal and protecting your treasure chest. And for me, I think there's a little bit of asset protection as opposed to asset spendage. And for me, the reason I think this is such a part of the discussion is because when you decide to be a little bit more conservative, if you're spending, you're going to hold back and not want to do some of the things that you want, which look, I understand. I'm not saying go out there and shoot off all the fireworks because it looks pretty. We've seen cases in the past with teams or sports leagues that tried something and it failed, but maybe it was memorable. I just got done reading Paul Woods's book about the rocket Rocket Ismail and the one year the Toronto or Argonauts won in 1991 when Bruce mc, Wayne Gretzky and John Candy all on the team and they all just basically went for broke and just did a bunch of crazy stuff. It was spectacular, it was messy. They won the title and then they basically went basically bankrupt after that. But it was extremely memorable. So that's the extreme level of it. I think you can have a happy medium where you can say, Hey, let's spend a little bit of money. Let's put in a little bit of capital. Let's at least start putting targeted marketing and trying to attack certain demographics. Again, I'm not saying that you have to go pouring all of your cash out the window. That's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is that there needs to be at least a little more forethought of, it's not just going to be status quo because status quo and writing the line isn't really going to push the envelope. It's just going to keep things even keel, which from a survivability standpoint I understand. But as far as getting new people and really thriving and trying to at least attempting to grow your asset, which I think is the ultimate goal, I would think from Fox and everyone involved here, you have to be able to push your chips a little bit more into the bill of table. I got a comment here from Logan, we'll touch on that. I think when Max comes on about expansion and after the season, pat, let's get to you here and then we'll swap out with Emery here in just a minute. Pat, thoughts on that? I mean, I think Andy's right. The only thing I'd like to hear more on is his targeted marketing and whatnot. I mean, I feel like something, I feel like something with St. Louis, you got to get 'em over the hump of the 40 5K and whatnot. I don't know what that is, but my targeted marketing would be more towards obviously the bottom half of the attendance list and whatnot. I think with St. Louis, you go with that to save funds, you go with that, it's not broke, what's not fixed or if it ain't broke, don't fix it type thing. And if we're talking about saving money, but I mean also I think it would help if they would make a championship game and win the games they're supposed to win on that front. Reid, obviously I know it's Emory's time to punch out or for me, I did want to add something that I wanted say in the beginning of the hour. Big shout out by the way, to a couple Missouri natives, Dan Isam, St. Louis Guy. His father used to be the police chief there. He's a defensive back for the Birmingham Stallion, so you should see a couple of those guys and then someone, and I'll call him out. Luke was like, oh, I'm seeing all these Nebraska guys there for Adrian Martinez. No, it's actually Carlos Davis who is a Kansas City native, which Kansas City Football probably one of the most underrated places in the United States from recruiting. That's a lot of his family is there. And then maybe we'll see some other KC natives there as well. So I mean overall I think this is going to be a good game, so I I'm excited for it. I think Birmingham wins throwing it in there. Sorry, I was trying to text my mom a link to watch the show on the ended up sending to hop on the show, so I don't know. I thought you were texting your mom to get another year of eligibility for the Mark has. Yeah, no, I don't know if we need Susan's thoughts here on the show. We'll get her on the watching and the YouTube comment. Alright Pat, I appreciate it. We wish you could have been here. Thanks Always guys. Thank you. Great stuff. So like I said here, we're bringing on Emory Hunt like get subscribed, give us 4,000 subscribers. Your big guest list here. Emory's just one of the many coming on, but Emory people love hearing from you on here. How are you doing sir? We did our big playoff preview show a couple weeks ago and now you're calling Elf Games. Anthony's involved that well busy guy. How are you doing? Doing fine man. Appreciate y'all bringing me on the show as always. Do you guys have questions for Emory? Think about that. I'll ask him one here and then maybe we can toss to the panel. Thoughts about the game today. I mean bras playing with a chip on their shoulder here. I can't remember if you had them winning against the Battle hawks, I would presume. Probably not. So what do you make of the championship game today? It is fun because I know we're going to get a competitive game. I know we're going to get a physical game and this one still has some more intrigue. As we know, the lone loss for Birmingham comes from San Antonio. So we know even though you can't really peg wood is San Antonio's offense even now as we're in the championship game, but they find ways to score enough to win games. We know their defense is good, their run game I think is better than their passing game, but their passing game for whatever reason, finds fire at some point in a game and we've seen Birmingham kind of get bored with their opponents at some point in time. Sometimes that has came back to haunt them as it has them when they lost that game. So this should be fun. Quarterback is going to be intriguing for Birmingham. We know we have the MVP at Birmingham with Adrian Martinez, but we saw how that was going for them last weekend and needed re, which just adds to all kinds of intrigue to this ball game. So I'm excited to see how it's going to play out. I know we're going to get a good game no matter what We got here. Jevon checking in here, the czar of the playbook. That's good. And then Pat here. Fun fact, Emory's the only person on the screen I've met in real life, so there you go. Yeah, pat, we tried Pat, we came to St. Louis. We can only do so much. It's like I get that a lot when I go tore like the CFL and then the people, they're like, oh, and then they don't. I'm like, I'm in Canada, I've done the hard work. You need to. I've had that where people are in other sections just of the stadium. I'm like, okay, I'm in the same province here. Thoughts on that? Let's get Anthony. Yeah, because the bras haven't been great all year. I mean they working with injuries and he said consistency and really it feels like a different vibe than Birmingham. What's your thoughts and memory's comments? I think with San Antonio, their defense has been consistent, right? They've been the best defense in the league this year. I think overall, I think it's just been their offenses. I don't know even last year when they were the Houston Roughnecks, there was just something weird about the offense. The first half of the season, the offense was spectacular and then Kirkland got hurt and then all of a sudden the wheels fell off the wagon for the offense and it was just really inconsistent. I think the difference between this San Antonio team this year from the Houston Roughnecks team last year is I think the running game was stronger I think when have Anthony McFarland Jr. You got John Lovett, you got Morgan Ellison. That backfield in San Antonio is ridiculous. And I think that was the big thing that what Houston was getting better at last year towards the end of the season was running the football with Max Bogie and them. But this running game has really made a difference. But there is some creativity in AJ's offense with San Antonio, but I don't know, it feels like they're a big play offense. And then the rest of the plays, it's very short yards situations. They don't bomb the ball down the field. Chase Garber doesn't have the strongest arm, but he's really accurate with the football, he's very precise with it. He knows where to put the football, where it needs to be. And I think that it's not the sexiest offense, but I think San Antonio's offense has been very efficient in how they're doing it. I think they're like fourth in the league in total offense, but they're one of the more efficient offenses. I think that's what makes them and Birmingham in this championship game right now is because both teams can run and pass ball, be efficient and protect the football. Yeah, that's a really good Andy. I mean this is obviously I have Anthony and Emery on here, really good comments around. Yeah, because I know AJ was hot last year and he was on the show and then I know he had, it feels like this year Della never got his groove going. I don't know, it just feels like a really weird, it doesn't feel like the same offense at least from, I don't know any of this, but it doesn't feel like the same kind of team. We watch it and I know obviously all those kinds of things, but the team on the field, I think it really boils down to injuries for him. I mean, as Anthony mentioned, John, Trey Kirkland, the second he went off the offense for Houston last year, things kind of fell apart. Also, Brandon Silvers was banged up last year and this year you kind of saw the same thing a little bit when Chase Garver was out the lineup and they had a bit of a rotation. Quin Dormy tried his best, but I've never seen a man have the propensity to throw into the fire more than Dormy does. There are times where he tries to fit it into the tightest window possible and sometimes it goes well and sometimes not so much. So I think having someone like Garber au even keel and be able to kind control the blow of the offense really helps AJ Smith kind of control that vision and really play out his game plan that he, obviously he does tremendous work every week. He just seems to always have an idea of what he wants to do. It doesn't always get executed, but I do think they've been a lot more even keel this year as far as executing their plan. But I actually wanted to turn a question over to Ry Emory. I'm sure you and I both are just a little bit bewildered that San Antonio even caught into this position in the first place. For you, what's been maybe the most standout or the most significant part of the San Antonio bras in kind of disturbing the established order here and being in the championship game? They've been winning with subpar quarterback play. If we are being completely honest and listen, I was early in the preseason telling folks that garbage can play a little bit garbage is not bad. But when you look at the U-F-L-C-F-L-E-L-F, all of these leagues, right, these secondary leagues to the NFL, it is very tough to find sustained success if you don't have a quarterback that is mobile. And we're not talking about someone that's out there running a four two, but you have to be able to evade pressure, create off script, get outside the pocket, do things above the Xs and Os, and those that tend to have those quarterbacks, IE Birmingham consistently have been able to win. And we saw that last night with the BC lines in Calgary St. Peters game. That's the difference between a Vernon Adams and a Jake Mayer. And in this game, it could be the difference between a win for Birmingham and a loss for San Antonio, but watching them play in spite of quarterback play. But it's because of you guys. What you guys touched on, the explosive element of the run game. I think it's funny when you talk about the backs, it is fascinating to watch how San Antonio leans into their talent and gets those guys the football on the other side. Birmingham, yes, they've had a two back tandem, but every year we've watched Birmingham, whether it's the two years in the USFL and this year in the ULF, the best back has always been CJ Maribel, yet he's the one that doesn't get the football enough and when they do give him the football, it gets to run game jumpstarted. The big plays start to pop. So that's going to be what I'm watching for is how quickly they go to Maribel in this game because we've seen them lose possessions by trying to run the football and they can't convert. But if they go to Maribel, Maribel will get it. But we've seen San Antonio just lean on the explosive plays of McFarlane, the consistency of love, and then Ellis in short yarders goal line situations, so that's been their calling card run game, good defense, timely special teams, if we're being completely honest, their receivers drop at least three or four passes a game that hit 'em in the face. And then in the crucial situations here comes a clutch reception and you're like, man, why you didn't catch that ball earlier in the ball game. But what has been consistent over the course of the season has been the run game has been their defense, their ability to blitz, their ability to get home, get off the field, and that's something that is going to bite Birmingham if they can't put this team away early and also lean on their better back in cj. Maribel. Thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean look, I think the way the WIN championships, we've seen it with so many teams is run the ball and have good defense. And that's something Birmingham's had over the last two to three years. That's what San Antonio's had this season. They're both ranked in the top three, top four in total defense. They're both the two of the best running teams in the league. So when you have that kind of power, you're able to do it. But I love Emory's comment on the quarterback position because look, the reality is when we've talked with the, I remember talking with the XFL last year in one of the, I don't know, the inside the football meetings or the insider leagues or whatever it is, Neil and them have talked, the XFL officials had talked about, it's really hard to find good offense alignment. There's just not enough offense alignment out there. So you need to have a quarterback who can move out of the pocket, can throw on the run, can run with the football, because if you've got a pocket quarterback, they're going to get killed back there because the development of the offensive lines are just, they're getting better, but they're not where any other position is in football. So you need to have quarterbacks that can move out of the pocket. That's what has made Birmingham so good is that Adrian Martinez is the leading rusher in the league and he's been able to make plays with his legs and I think that's what separates Chase Garber versus Quentin Dorm. Dorm does not mobile. He can't run Garber's. Garber's is not always going to run it, but he has the ability to move out of the pocket when he needs to because I remember AJ Smith at the beginning of the season said that he compared Chase Garber's to PJ Walker. He's got that type. I think PJ Walker's got a stronger arm, but they both can move out of the When they need to. They're both very precise, Accurate Quarterbacks, and that's What's made the Difference for San Antonio. We got a question here. We'll go with this to Andy and then we'll pass around to Emory and round here. This from Christopher. Christopher was one of the ones that gave away, we gave away his tickets to the UFL championship game, I think. And we have four different fans going to the game, courtesy of us, free of charge. So we trying to do our part here. We'll go first Andy, and then we'll get to Emory. Speaking of quarterbacks, which quarterbacks you see back next year, either championship quarterbacks and Matt Corral, George Luis Perez? Yeah, we talked about this a little bit. I think there's guys that we talked about earlier who are the spring football lifers. Perez, in my opinion, is one of those guys. I love him. He's a fantastic player, great story. I think he's really destined for these kinds of leagues, no fault of his own. It's just tough competition. I think his skillset really matches these kinds of leagues. Jordan Tommo another guy. I think he's a spring football lifer. I really believe that the guys are going to see move on. I mean, Adrian Martinez is going to get a chance. We'll see if he can stick in a camp. I mean, he's definitely developed quite a bit since he was at Camp State and Nebraska. I do believe that he's going to get a fair shot here. I mean, skip Foltz just finds a way to send these guys off eventually. Alex Magoo leaps and bounds better last year goes to Green Bay signs on with them. Martinez is one. I don't know anybody necessarily from San Antonio, Memphis. I think Case Cocus is still going to hang around. I mean, he's just, again, kind of a spring football lifer. If he can stay upright. I'm more worried about his long-term prospects in other ways, not just football wise, but I just don't really see a crop of guys moving on. AJ McCarran, McCarran iss really the wild card here. Does he want to continue doing this or does he just want to play as a backup, be on a practice squad, be with the Bengals? He seems to really relish the opportunity to play in front of his kids. He really, really, really appreciates that. I think it matters the most to him. I don't know if he's going to get another shot to play significant time in the NFL. I do see him personally. It's up to him, but I believe that he will stay around. So to answer your question, Martinez is the only one that I can really see moving on and getting a shot. But again, it comes down to relationships. Some of these guys get into camps that we don't expect to. I mean, Taylor Heineke is a perfect example, never played in XL 2020 starts games in the NFL. Well, no, and AJ wants to stick around and teaches Kim when he gets his knees. You got to get up to keep playing. Every last question for you, and I think it was at least at one point when we had you on talking about standouts and people, but obviously we relate this to quarterbacks. Has anyone played into or what do you make of this before we get you out of here? It's a great question, and I think you guys kind of know where I stand on it. Where, yes, you want to league where guys can have a career. So Luis Perez or Jordan Teo, you want to see those guys back as backups because you have to start creating new stars to get people to watch. IEA, Lindsey Scott probably should have been playing in Arlington over Luis Perez. I know people love Perez's story and him having all the passing yards and leading in this and this and this, but they were always losing, right? So imagine if they had someone that was exciting, the PJ Walker would've been the Lindsey Scott. The challenge for this league is to go out and find those guys that for a fact, and it is twofold. It's finding those guys that for a fact, they're going to get snubbed by the NFL and those guys that are going to be snubbed by the NFL to have the wherewithal to say, you know what, man, I'm going to go play here first because I'm not going to go get two reps of throwing a football in a 90 man rookie mini camp and not make the roster. Just go play some ball, get some pro tape, and then come back at it. And so it requires a little bit of self-reflection and humbleness from the prospect and a little bit of foresight from the league because you can always grab the Luis Perez and the Jordan tmu and the AJ McCarran, but you need to have those guys that are within that ripe age of 21 to 24 that still has a window of perhaps getting into the NFL, especially at that position. Every other position you're looking for guys that can kind of become UFL veterans. And in order for that to happen, and this is kind of tying all my points in together where yes, there is, there's more than enough talent to have, I wrote an article on this in 2016. There's more than enough talent for each NFL team to have its own minor league team. Fast forward to now, there's more than enough talent to have a 24 team UFL, but let's just say we branches out to 12 and keep it at 12. Or if they want to keep it at eight and develop that what Moose Johnson talked about, having guys that just want to play in this league, they know that NFL window is closed. Well, making the salary a hundred grand instead of 50 grand is the best way to do that. And that kind of keeps you in that eight to 12 team league. That's how you attract those guys. That may be a G five. Let's say a Grayson McCall who was at Coastal Carolina, who's now at NC State doesn't have the best NFL prospects, but the kid can play. It's kind of like Alex McGoo, man, once he's done at NC State this year. Tell him, come play for the New Jersey Generals or whatever and get him to play against pro competition. And then now you have, he's going to create those opportunities for himself. And then you're going to see other young quarterbacks going to see, okay, well he did it this way. I can go do it that way too. Because as much as we like Adrian Martinez and we like the fact that he got in this league and did some great things, it's hard to say the NFL, which has the luxury of scraping off the top. Yeah, okay. We found our franchise quarterback in Adrian Martinez, when in reality he's going to end up being a QB two. Yeah, he's going to make some money, but do you want play? And yes, you could make money, but you see what happened with AJ McCarry. He's like, man, I just want to play. I hate being a backup. I just want to play. And I think a lot of guys really just want to play ball. And if more guys can see the big picture, then we'll see the salaries increase. They'll be able to create a substantial living in the UFL and then we'll start to see this ecosystem just grow, develop, and become what we expect it to be. But don't get it twisted. There's room for more expansion financially. It doesn't make sense yet, but if they want to create that lead that they want, then the salary is going to have to increase Here before you go, I'll do it here. Here comes UFL expansion podcast episode in 3, 2, 1. Real quick, rapid fire Max is standing by Emory real quick to you. He does have a question. If Martinez was to get a shot off the top of your head. Any team that you think that would pop off for him? I mean that's a great one. The Ravens. You can even look at division, the Ravens, Steelers, Browns, they all fit that. Washington would be a good place to have a backup. Hell, Detroit, we don't know you have yet in he Hooker, they had Adrian Martinez in camp. Bring him back. You know what I'm saying? Because until we see what he hooker looks like playing pro football, he's still a relative unknown because he was coming off that injury. Well Emory, we appreciate it. Thank you for making the time as always. Check out Emory and he's doing Elf games and Anthony's doing Elf Emory exciting stuff here. So Emory, I appreciate you taking the time to today. Appreciate it. Next show we'll talk about U-F-L-E-L-F championship game. We'll get to that later. We'll get to that. I appreciate it, emer. Thank you so much. Let's get Emery out of here. We'll bring in Max. Max. First off here. Christmas time we were talking to quarterbacks and everything. Tulle talking live. He's up in Hamilton now, man. CFL just signed him last week, right? I mean now you're fighting against all that kind of stuff. Max, you're unmuted. How are we doing here, sir? I'm doing great. I'm excited to finally see whether that San Antonio regular season game, how much does that translate to this environment? It is going to be so totally different. You'd have to imagine Birmingham as a much more fleshed out complete game plan than a near end of regular season game that they kind of knew they were probably going to be able to clinch home field anyway. And then on top of that, even if they didn't, they might've gotten their home game anyway. So I'm feeling there's going to be completely different attitude today. Yeah, coach Craig here checking in. I missed when he was talking expansion there. So yeah, Craig, I missed when you were popping in the chat here. Appreci, we should have got Coach Craig on as well. I kind of just did a rapid fire here email list at the end of the week and then Tom here. I haven't been able to see UFL games in Canada that don't have cable hopefully yet. How do we not have A TSN or some partnership? I don't know. I mean the CFL plus concept is still wonderful, But don't you think that they would have a UFL? I'm surprised that they don't have. Isn't TS NA part of S espn? Isn't that Max? Can we fact check this for Tom? So because of Canadian laws, max Knows. Max knows, of course he Knows there are certain stipulations which require an American or other foreign entity cannot own more than 20% of these sorts of things. So TSN is 20% ESPN owned and 80% owned by Bell. So they have a lot of ESPN programming, but not all of it. They use a lot of ESPN ip, but not all of it. They do their own thing. They get to pick and choose what they want on their platforms. And last year the XFL, they launched a streaming service called TSN Plus or something and they had it for the XFL on there. I don't think the UFL made it on there this time. Yeah, I like that when it was on the ESPN and you can do kind of at least the games were on demand and we have the player 54 and kind of all that stuff. What do we want? I'm really loud here. What do we want to talk about here, max? What are you expecting on the game today? I'm expecting some more points for one with Garbers being ready to go with Birmingham, expecting to open up their offense a little bit. And then on top of that offensive outburst last week after, I mean there was what, 28 unanswered? I mean that was amazing. And on top of that, it completely shut me up because I was already starting to party. I'm like, what would happen if Michigan won? And then because I just thought it would be very funny and they were like, you think you get to have fun? No, no, no, this ain't a game. This is life. And they shut that down real quick. Yeah, the thought I was really getting excited about that, about Birmingham missing. Sorry, is that bad? I mean, I can be, I'm not the journalist. I can be anti Birmingham all I want here, but I mean it really did for a while there it looked like stallions might miss out. I mean, I picked Michigan to win last week just because I thought Michigan was just on a better roll than Birmingham was After that St. Louis Battle Hawks game for Birmingham. I just didn't think the stallions looked great to end the season. So I was concerned about how they were going to do into a playoffs game with Michigan, but it ended up Michigan just shot themselves in the foot with four turnovers, even though Birmingham also had four turnovers, but Birmingham took advantage of the turnovers versus Michigan. Michigan. I don't think they got any points off those turnovers and I think Birmingham got, they got two scores out of it, so that was the difference in the game. So yeah, look, we hate to be negative against Birmingham, but at the end we want the stallions to succeed. We love the stallions as a team, but I think we've already talked about how we just want the city to maybe do a little bit better in attendance even though they're not the worst. It's just add a little more people, just add a couple thousand more and We'll be good. Well, when you see that layout of in the bottom with it being Houston and Memphis and all that, I want to make sure we touch on it Andy and then Max, I'm sure I'll have thoughts, but we asked Wade again yesterday about the player that they were supposed to sign that they didn't sign and there was all the shenanigans about that and I know that I got dms from one of the individuals that was telling me about it, but then you saw a lot of other people trying to like, oh, well hey, yeah, I heard maybe something was going on with that. And Wade seems like he's trying to sweep it under the rug. We're all just trying to play by other little thoughts on that and I don't think it's anything nefarious. I mean I think it's just like we're trying to get by and make everybody play by the sin. Yeah, I think it was just sort of a technicality that maybe it wasn't read into correctly by either party. It does seem, I hate to use the word bias, but it does seem to have a little bit of that intrigue with it as far as the transaction not going through. But I do think, I don't think that's what the league is trying to do. They're not trying to undermine people and not try to let 'em sign certain blames that they can. It is unfortunate, especially considering San Antonio's angle, especially with the injuries that they've been endure, but I don't think there's anything nefarious at play either here. Going back to what Max was talking about a little bit, as far as more points being scored, it's interesting, I've been looking up at a lot of the betting odds, which actually Anthony Penn a great article this week about all the betting odds and some of the information going into this game. The over under is 42 points last time these teams met. It was a combined of 27. So if we are to believe that both these defenses are really good, I would have to say I'd probably go with the slide under there. I know there's probably going to be a little bit more offense in this game from both sides, but I don't think there's going to be too much more. I do believe these two teams are defensive minded teams from the outset and I do believe that they pride themselves on that. So for me, I'd have to say it's probably going to be a little bit less than that. That's kind of where I stand on the point spread or the over under, I should say Max thoughts on kind of the wade thing of it and then I have a follow up thoughts on that and I don't know, is that just Darryl kind overstepping? I dunno. Well, it's probably a league rule, but the enforcement mechanism makes no sense because if I recall they were allowed to sign a receiver instead, so they were still allowed to sign somebody, but just not that tight end that they wanted to sign. And the guy was literally, from my understanding, he was in meetings with the team. Oh yeah, he was through test. I mean he was all through everything, medicals and everything. So the tight end is not allowed, but then this random receiver, they're allowed to sign it instead in the last second. You're allowed them to get somebody but not the guy they want. What are we doing here? What's this enforcement mechanism? This makes no sense. So I don't want to say it's bias, but I do think that there's whatever the chain of command and the regulations, they don't make sense. It's improper and it should not be like this. They should have just been allowed to sign the tight end. Carry on. Yeah, I think it had something to do with them not having enough tape and being able to game plan and all that. I don't know. It's a weird thing with the league. It is kind of just existing in, it's on ether right now, but I think if you weren't good enough that you were on the team anyway, I don't know. Is it that big of a mind changing to bring on someone like that? Yeah, I mean I don't think it really would've. They just wanted a backup tight end man. They only have one on their roster today. They couldn't bring in a backup, so why would you not let them bring in a backup? You're not going to have film on any random backup they signed, but realistically, it's not like they're bringing in a ringer who is the very best player available and would actually be better than their starting tight end right now. I mean, it's just the guy who's going to come in and play some snaps and maybe take over if the starter gets injured. You're putting them in a vulnerable position all for what the sake of enforcing a rule. What is this? Why it doesn't make any sense. Follow up for Max and then we'll move on to something else. Thoughts? What is this game resonating online right now? I'm looking at, I've been tracking our viewership. It's fine. I mean we're kind of up and down. It's what, four o'clock central? I mean it's not really, I don't know. It's not really prime time. It doesn't really feel like it's, how is this game resonating today If you're looking online? I don't feel like there's much more hype for this game than there was for last year's XFL title game or the USFL title game. They both got about the same amount of viewership, about the same amount of interest as right now. I mean, I'm sure the fact that they're not going head to head with each other will help the ratings be a bit higher and the fact that there's barely any real competition going on for this game. So I mean maybe it's possible that it actually gets above that one and a half million number that we're all putting as a kind of expectation. But I mean if it hits 2 million, I think you said you would do some kind of crazy thing. If they hit 2 million, I will join you, whatever your plans are for that. I just think that's impossible. Yeah. Anthony, do you, I mean we missed the media day yesterday flying in, it doesn't sound like it was widely attended. I know part of that is obviously St. Louis not being in this, but you would think that the media, if I'm a St. Louis media, don't know what I mean. The Cardinals are out of town. I don't know what I'm covering. I always think about that. If I worked in local news, if I'm a local sports department, what am I covering today? But are you just surprised it, obviously it'd be different if the Hawks were in it, but it just kind of feels like out of the Z guys right now. I'm not surprised by it. I mean, again, everything that this league has been put together and the lack of marketing and stuff like that, I think this is just kind of what it is. I am not expecting it to be some kind of spectacular thing. I know Fox is really pushing on, Hey, we're going to do a lot of innovative stuff on the air today that's going to be different from any sports broadcast. So I guess we'll see how that is. I know they've been pushing on Tom Brady like, Hey, Tom Brady's going to be in the booth in the second quarter. He is going to be presenting the UFL championship MVP award and that's cool. I think that's all great stuff, but I think at the end of the day, yeah, if they do 2 million, that will just be a massive win. I have not expected. I expect it to be a lot like the numbers last year, 1.2, 1.3. I think if they can get over a million, I think it's a win. I'd be more concerned if it goes under, but I doubt it goes under. Let's do Andy and we'll get Max one more time and then John Lewis is logging in here. We'll bring him on. Yeah, what the hell is going, Tom? Okay, Brady's coming now. He's missing Father's Day even though he retired from football to be a father. He's going to be here for Father's Day, which I thought was really interesting, but then he's going to fake call the game in the booth just for practice, what is going on here? I think this is a case of your boss telling you what to do. This is what's happening. Fox is very much making it clear that you are going to be a part of our plans and this is what's going to happen from now on, buddy. So I think for Tom Brady, I mean, I don't know how much he's really watched at the league or these Teams. Not a second. Well, He was at the Michigan Panthers game a month ago. True. Wow. That doesn't mean Okay, Okay saying Yeah, no, I mean I don't know how much really game tape he's watched outside of that Michigan game, but do I think he has an enthusiasm for just football in general? Of course, Tom Brady dies with football. That's just his livelihood. It was his livelihood for a good majority of his life, and I can see him having enthusiasm for being able to analyze the game. I would love, I mean a dream scenario is that he would have a chance to be a color commentator in this league. I mean, look, we've seen Spring football have amazing commentators. We've seen guys like Kevin Burkhart and Greg Olson. Are you kidding me? That was an incredible matchup in 2020. Kevin Cougar's done a great job. Joel Plat, Kurt Menefee, a lot of these guys just doing outstanding work in this league. So we're not unknown to having great broadcasting people in this space, but I just don't know as far as Brady goes, it'll be interesting to see what his role is and how that plays into what he's doing into the future or if they get him involved next year, who knows? That remains to be seen. But it is kind of funny seeing him, I guess. I'm not sure if I'd say he's being strong armed into this, but obviously there's some things that he has to fill. Now he's Ashley, part of the Box corporation. Max, what is thoughts on this supposed to be? We'll get you out of here, but just like, okay, we do it. It's never with enough time to promote. It's like, Hey, we're doing this. It was the same thing. They emailed that afternoon like, Hey, we're doing media day tomorrow. I'm like, don't, I'm not flying in the time to do that. I don't know. Is the Brady thing, is it just getting him involved in this? Do they expect to pop a rating? I don't even think it's to pop a rating as much as it is to get some social media engagement. Tom, no one's going to watch the game. Tom Brady happens to be there for a little bit on television. That's not how this works, but let's be real. We've done so many rants on how the league's promotion strategy has been ineffective and we could do a whole other diatribe out of that way, but that's not what the show is about. So I'll just leave it at this. They at this point do whatever you want to add on. Flip on for the championship game. None of it's going to change anything. So just make it look however you want so you can say it's yours and then carry on. And let's try to do better this off season next season. Well, we got Marquette King, we got the blues. It's a national anthem singer. I mean Max, we're rolling here. I mean the CFL's got the Jonas Brothers for God's sake. So Max, I appreciate it. Stay safe, keep working all your other stuff here. I'm sure we'll figure out what's going on after all this. Thanks, See you. Let's bring in this gentleman and get ready for this. I heard a lot of slander on here before I got on. Hey, so John, what do you think about Birmingham being in the championship game? Finally, looking at the schedules, I predict both the Houston Roughnecks and Michigan Panthers to finish the season at two and eight and the San Antonio Brass, maybe just a single win with Wade Phillips and Company return. Good thing isn't mute to your mic when I play that video. John Lewis, how the heck are, I'm going to keep this in here forever, As you should. But I will say this, I've been kind of ride or die with the stallions in the USFL, but I did hedge my bet. If things start going poorly, I'm ready. So Yeah, I saw you pop on that. I'm going to get a jersey if the bras win today. If anyone's curious, and this is a blast from the past, Hey, what else does Reed have saved in the stream guard? Check this bad boy out. See if you remember this. Football is fueled by dreams to go further, get there faster. That was the old when they rebranded. I got the leaked rebrand video in here. Exciting stuff. John Stallion's running crazy. Would you guys say, have we seen more stallion fans here than Braas fans? For sure. Absolutely. John, are you surprised Stallion fans are showing up here? I don't know if the bra is expected to be here. Yeah, it's probably a little bit better. I guess it'd be easier to get there. I mean, I don't know what the drive time would be, but yeah, I think it's a bit of probably more of a known brand, although that didn't really seem to play out in Birmingham. Talking to some people down there, there were people that were still unaware and Reid, you and I talked about it. There were people that were unaware who the stallions were or that they were playing or that they were in the playoffs or even what the UFL was. So I mean I think that speaks to there's got to be some stronger marketing efforts going on, but there is a hardcore group of fans and I think that they probably made the trek up there. I know there were a lot of the people who do what we do here that are kind of more Birmingham stallions based that were on their way up there. We have here a couple of Vincent here, one to nine, Wade Phillips, LOL, Chris here. Santa Antonio beats Birmingham. You got to play that every time he comes on the show and show that picture of him. He is wearing stallion shirt right now and then Abdul here. We needs to make a screenshot of that, make a T-shirt, sends it to John that the Ram Went. I'll wear it every time. Classic. I was going to ask Emery about this. We'll go around the horn here and obviously Mike Mitchell's coming on later at UFL Insider. We're going to do a post recap, I think is the plan here once we get back in town and kind of the season as a whole. But say for it being the most incredible game today that we've ever seen and the bra is game winning comeback with grade the season, how do we feel like we've done here? Marketing aside just like football and the storylines, anything that way? I think I gave the X-F-L-A-B last year when you asked the same question. I think I'm going to give 'em the same grade and the reason I'm going to give 'em the same grade, I'm going to be more lenient on them than what I think they could do a lot. Obviously marketing, we've been talking about all the show, they have to do a better job of it, but I think under the circumstances, the talent level was fantastic. The teams are looking good. There's a lot of competitive games. Coaching was good for the most part, maybe outside of Houston, but for the most part the league did well. The presentations were good. I think ESPN needs to stop leaning so much on the betting. I'm so sick and tired of hearing about over under 500 times a game. I think Fox's presentation is fantastic. I will keep saying that Kurt Mefi and Joel Kla are fantastic in the booth. I think Fox's presentation on football is way better than a, B, C and ES, espn. I think ESPN has to work on that next year. I think marketing needs to improve, but I think overall the attendance numbers look to be decent. I think there's more that needs to be done on that front. Ratings were better than they were last year, so I think that's a positive. So I think there's a lot of positives you can take with it. I think there's a lot that they can work on in general, but overall, yeah, I'd give it a b. I think that the league has done a good job and I'm going to be much rougher on them next year. As someone for Sports Illustrated just posted the betting odds. I mean you're really like, I'm so tired of hearing about this. Well, I have to post something weekly on it, but I'm not throwing it at everyone's face 500 times a game on it within three hours. I don't need to hear five, six times an hour. Like, oh, the over under. Is it going to hit? I don't Care. It's the guy that does it with Luen Mill, and I love Tom Thomas' been on the show multiple times. I had all the ES ESPN people on last year and they didn't seem like we needed it this year. I don't know, I felt like we had guests plenty here where maybe a year ago I was like, okay, we got to get stormy on. We got coal on, we had Eric McLean on. But yeah, is the over going to the over is still in play, but Andy, thoughts on that And then I got a question for John. Yeah, a couple things. First of all, Anthony, you're telling me you're not excited when J Sternberger catches the go ahead touchdown and they're going to tell us how it hits the player prop. You're not psyched for that? No, not really. I'm good on not talking about that, of course. No, I think it's definitely worn out. It's welcome. The mat has not only been worn out, it's basically been burned. And I, for me, look, betting is part of the sports site guys. It's more now so than ever again, as I said, but you don't have to keep reminding people over and over again. I do think what Fox does, I think it's more subtle where they'll have a little popup where it'll bring up the pregame odds. Like last week they kept saying, well, not always announcing it, but just kind of that little marker saying, Hey, remember St. Louis was favored in this game and this is not going so well. That's kind of something that they remind their audience of, which I think makes a lot of sense. I think in terms of that engagement, that's fine, but I don't need to be hearing about every single yard that the player has and how much closer they are to their over under because people, as I said in kind of the re-imagining video that me and re did a few weeks ago, you can talk about that stuff in spurts, but the people who follow that stuff already know that information. And I don't think that the non betting public really needs to be inundated with all that information because at some point it just becomes overload and they really just want to focus on simple narratives or just who's winning the game. That's really the biggest thing that people look at. John, thoughts for you on that? And I got a couple comments. Yeah, I think a lot of that is probably kind of a brand push for the ESPN bet. I'm sure they're trying to sign up new people and they can say, well, there you go. So I think there's probably something to that where they're trying to push these odds and say, Hey, you can go on your phone right now and make this bet and make that bet and Christopher's right on. I think there's a lot of that. They're trying to drum up some new customers for that or to get people to continue engage with it, but it does. Let's get a little overwhelming. I'm with Anthony too on the grade as far as this year, I feel like we should grade on a curve because the way that this merger came together so late and then they were actually able to get it off the ground and it was a clunky rollout. There's no question. But the presentations have been good. I think the gameplay has been good. I think a solid B absolutely as we grade on a curve on anything but Reed, as you said, and Anthony brought up the local marketing and the marketing itself, that's going to need some work in 2025 and really later in 2024. But overall, I've certainly been as much criticism as we've talked about. I've been pleased with the product all year long. I have a lot of thoughts on it here. Let's first get to these comments here. Abdul was saying, is there going to be a UFL post game show today or are we just going to post the full game? We'll dispose the whole game. Yeah. Will's the guy, the PN guy. There's so much sports betting talk and obviously we talked about Christopher's thing. Christopher gave us a super chat. This hotel room isn't free. We're here across the street. Super chats are always nice. Join the channel. John's a member and 99 cents a month become a member. I go back and forth. Yeah, so Gameplay's good. It's exciting. I don't like that. It felt a lot of teams felt out of it, right? And I would rather have the Renegade sub 500 kind of making it versus, okay, well there was such a divide between the haves and the have nots and getting all that locked up. Darryl's obviously had comments, Dar Moose Johnson about being unhappy and okay, we want all this stuff. I like that. But I've talked with even my Ella buddies, Michael and Paul and stuff, and they're like, maybe Fox is just fine with this. And that's kind of my concern and that's why I feel like we need to keep saying things because I don't want Fox to be like, well, this is fine. It's cheaper than running all in the family reruns or whatever. The seventh heaven reruns and it's a Saturday afternoon. We're moving the games to Friday. That doesn't feel great for me. I guess we'll go around here. Them moving games. I don't like that. I don't like the Friday. Well, now we have something that's more high profile here. See, that's how it happens. They didn't have anything this year. Well, I guess, here you go first, Chuck. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I was just going to say, I think they can make this Friday night game a thing, but you worry about the demographics that you're trying to attract on a Friday. And also if you are still only going to have eight teams in this league, then what's this weekend slate going to look like? So that's my concern. I thought like, okay, well if there are 10 teams, you can make this a showcase Friday night kind of thing. But then when they say, well, it makes room for IndyCar and it's exactly, it's like what's weigh in one against the other. For sure. Let's go around here. Greg's standing by. I have a question from John. I hope someone can answer, but let's get thoughts on this and then we will bring Greg on here in a minute. Forgot The question. Oh, just about moving. We're ready now we have something more high profile. We're moving the games to Friday and we don't know they're talking expansion. I mean, we can make another video, expansion video about that, but It's not going to pull the ratings that WWE SmackDown did. And just because WWE is a much bigger product, there's just more name brand to it, more name recognition to it. I mean they tried XFL did this last year. They did it Friday night game. I was there for the Renegades game. They barely had 10, 11,000 fans, which would actually be really good this year, but last year it was not good. Well, that was the same weekend. Also, Taylor Swift was in town so completely killed the attendance numbers, but the ratings weren't good. I think they made what, four or 500,000 that night? It wasn't a lot. And yeah, that was probably on ESPN. So if they put on Fox, it could be better. But I guess it really just depends on how they're going to present this game. I anticipate this going to be six, 700,000 per game unless they really knock it out of the park with it. And I mean, could you imagine that they put the Houston roughnecks and the method of showboats on Friday night? Nobody's going to watch. That's the game that if you're going to put on Friday night and you're going to hype it up as the marque, you have to have the best team playing each other every week. It needs to be like the game of the week. It's going to be between these two teams. That's how This's going to work. It needs to be U l's Monday night football or Sunday night football. I like this coming here. Jack Hammers. I got to put it up here if I'm going to make fun of it, not make fun of it. Why does UFL go to insert my local obscure city? We've been totally supported. I like that. I like that. Andy, let's get your thoughts. We'll circle back to John because then I think we have someone standing by that knows all about Friday night sports competition here. So let's get Andy's thoughts and then we'll move on here. Yeah, my thoughts on that are be consistent, not convenient. And the reason I say that is don't do this change just because it's convenient for your broadcast schedule. Be consistent with it. If you want to commit to Friday night, commit to it. Do that fine. The CFL does that with Friday Night Lights. They love doing it. That's their thing. Obviously in this country, more people are familiar with watching high school football on Fridays in the fall and in spring. There's not really a concept of that. If you want to make that a thing, go for it, advertise it as Z. He said make it the game of the week. Make it really important, as John also alluded to as well. But I don't want 'em to just keep doing this because well, we have better programming. We're just going to shift this over because that tells me that shows, at least as a viewer, that tells me that you don't really care about that product nearly as much as you do other assets. And look, I know it may not be as much of a money maker, and I know Eric Shas was the one, obviously the one high end Fox executives will. He has a much bigger ulterior motive here at play than the league officials do because obviously he has to make sure that Fox Sports programming is optimal at all times. But this is something that I would like to see from the league is that you choose something, you stick with it, and if it works, great. If it's not working, how do we make it better? So for me, I just want it to be more of a plan as opposed to it just being convenience. Real quick here, we've had a bunch of these comments. John's checking in here and then we'll get to John. We'll get out of here. Other Canadian CFL experience in the, this is not the in the championship game today. End of last year we had Sanky and all that. No one off the top of my head. I've been trying to, but we've had three or four different people have asked about that. Maybe Andy will do some offsite research here. We'll look into that. John, we'll look into that. John Lewis, anything else from you? We'll bring in Greg. John, I appreciate it. Check out John's channel. John, I think I'm going to come on there soon. We're going to talk about some shenanigans. It won't be two hours. John does these short videos, but probably rank, we'll make it two hours. John, anything else from you? No, just looking forward to it. Again, as a lot of us who's followed spring football, I've said this before, we followed it over the years. When you get to a championship game and you've actually completed a season, let's call it a win and let's hope for a lot better. And I think the league will learn from some mistakes in 2024 as we move on to 2025. But looking forward to it today, John. Appreciate it. John, the philanthropy. Hey, we got John's thanking John's here. I appreciate it. Thank you John. John, don't make any more bad takes here before the championship game. Alright, well I want to make so many and I want you to record them all. I'll Send them to, you're going to. Alright, thanks John. Appreciate it. Thanks guys. Let's bring in here a gentlemen, Sandy by, I appreciate that. As someone that knows all about Friday destination programming with WWE and SmackDown, what do you make of this? Greg Parks UFL board. Appreciate it. Greg was on a couple of weeks ago. I like it subscriber. We've added a few subscribers today. The thoughts that maybe we aren't doing expansion, Greg, that we're just allocating games to Friday to make room for things that we care more about on Fox. Well, I don't know if I'd term it that way at least I hope not for the sake of the league, but this is something where obviously this has been Friday night SmackDown spot for a long time. And so what's interesting is by the time the UFL season comes around, whether it's February, whether it's March, whatever time they start next year, you are going to have that Friday spot already a destination for sports because you're going to have college football on Fridays, you're going to have college basketball on Fridays. I think there's going to be some other sports offerings perhaps that will be on Fridays as well. So the idea I think is to get fans used to Friday nights on Fox being a sports destination night and hopefully by the time the UFL rolls around when it kicks off, fans will be used to tuning in on Friday nights and this time they're just going to tune into UFL football instead of the Big 10 or instead of college basketball. So that's, I think in an ideal world that's what happens because I know SmackDown is leaving Fox this fall, so they're going to have to start replacing that programming in the fall. So by the time the winter rolls around, hopefully that's the spot for it. And again, I've made this point on social media before. I'd never understood the connection with expansion and moving to Friday nights. To me it's not difficult to find. I think it's maybe even less difficult for A, B, C and Fox to find three spots on the weekend for UFL games instead of four. So it might be actually easier on the networks, but hopefully if the league was planning on expanding for the second year, we would've heard about that by now because we're now into the time of the year where it's going to be less than a year until this league kicks off. And if you're talking expansion, there's been no city's name, there's not even been any rumors of the UFL reaching out to any cities. You'd have to hire head coaches, you'd have to design logos, you'd have to reveal all of this stuff. You'd have to have an expansion draft, all of this stuff in less than a year's time. And now we're talking again about fitting all of this stuff into a very short compacted time period, which as we know has bitten the UFL slash XFL slash USFL in the butt before. So it doesn't seem like it's in the cards for season two. I don't think it should be in the cards for season two, but if we have a successful season two, let's start talking about it for season three. Man, Greg is coming in fire. I appreciate it. We ready to go here? All right, let's do it. Let's go around the horn. We not talked to expansion yet. I just took Advil this morning to heal my headache and now I already have one back up because we're talking expansion. So thanks Greg. Appreciate it. Look, I agree with Greg. I know expansion is such a fun topic to have, but we have got to stop talking about it. The league has to be profitable. We need to see success, we need to see growth year in and year out before we even consider it. Yeah, I think 2026 is the earliest they should think about expansion, but I mean, where are you going to go? It just seems like they're just going to go with the assets that they have. So where do you go? You go to Oklahoma and bring back the outlaws, do you where back? The teams that you had in the past? I know they're very big on Ohio where I don't know what the next direction's going to be. I assume they're just going to go with former USFL teams and start with those first and maybe go to New Orleans or something like that. I know there's been a big push on that for me, I hate expansion. It's just like what's the point of talking about it? Let's try to make it work with the eighteens we got now because we've had so many leaks fail and we saw this with the USFL back in the eighties when they expanded so quickly and it fell apart so badly that everyone went bankrupt and they lost a ton of money out of it. So yeah, let's stick with the A teams, let's make it work in the markets first. Let's make it work. Houston needs a lot of work. Memphis needs a lot of work. Michigan needs a lot of work. Even Arlington needs a lot of work. Everyone you got to markets, You need to have every one of your teams averaging at least 10,000 fans a game next year or otherwise. You may have to consider relocation for those other teams and you may need to before you can. I don't think we should talk expansion first. I think the first conversation needs to be do we need to relocate teams after next year? I'm fine with everyone staying, but if we got to figure out if these markets going to work or not, if they're not going to work next year, let's get 'em in the right markets average to 10,000 fans a game. And then let's bring on two more teams, Andy thoughts and then I'll hop in here. It's the E word as I like to call it now, and it has been for some time. Look, people love talking about this in all leagues and all sports because everybody wanted wants to have a team, but as Anthony talked about, the reality is that's just not in the cards for the S league right now because they need to figure out what they're doing with their markets right now. You're telling me that you would be comfortable with expanding win. You have two teams, Memphis and Houston, who combined individually combined their attendance was out drawn by the battle hawks in the first game of their season completely. That means you have a lot of work to do. I cannot in good conscious recommend that they expand right now until they figure that out first. And look, if you want to take risks, that's fine. The XFL was going to move from Las Vegas that is well documented. They were going to move from Las Vegas. They tried, it failed. It didn't work for a litany of reasons, but there's no reason to think that this is going to really happen. There's going to be relocation before there's going to be expansion because the market needs to workforce. There needs to be foundations in place if you're not going to have individual owners that at least have successful teams and attendance first. This has to be a baby steps process as far as the teams be successful, as far as the marketing goes, we obviously want to see more done, but as far as just being successful and not expecting to have 30 teams, that's just a pipe dream and it has to be approached typically if they're even thinking about putting another team in another market and adding to the ones they already have. We got Mike Mitchell here logging in here. We'll get to him in a few minutes. Appreciate that. We'll get Mike to send him a private note here, Greg. And then I got a question for you, Greg. This is a good one. Yeah, I agree with you. Where we don't want to have this every year. We've had a truncated timeline. We dealt with the Vegas thing and we dealt with this year and okay, Michigan couldn't sell things in time and now we even talking, I mean they're complaining even about the championship game and we should have had the buy week and then last year we wanted the buy week. We didn't want the buy week. There's always all this kind of time said, but I agree with that. You need to be moving on this next week or the week in the next couple of weeks. You got to have these announcements and move on because you can't just sit idle all summer and then come around to that. Jack's got a question here, and this might be the title next week. If Greg, Mike and I do our post game, what is the U L's end game? I know the a f wanted to compete with the NFL, but the UL wants to be like Greg, what is the U NFL's end game Based on everything that ownership has talked about, they want to kind of be in their own ecosystem. I don't think it's necessarily a competition with the NFL. It's a competition with any sport in any entertainment entity, but really it's providing a place for these players to play that don't make it to the NFL, but also making money, obviously. How are they going to make money? That's a good question. Is it selling the franchises? Is it selling broadcast fees? Which you would think would be very difficult now because Fox and ABC slash ESPN both have an ownership stake. So the idea when Vince McMahon first relaunched it in 2020 was to get a piece of that broadcast pie where everybody, all these networks and all these cable stations saw that sports programming was the golden goose and they were going to pay billions of dollars. Vince saw that his own company, WE was getting a piece of that and that was his end game. He wanted to cash in on the rights fees bonanza that was going on. It's still going on for the larger organizations, your MBAs, your NHLs, your NFLs. We haven't really seen that trickle down to some of the lower levels that the UFL would be considered yet, but the fact that Fox owns it means, okay, are they going to sell games to a third party broadcast to kind of cash in on that? So I'm not as sure of the end game of the UFL today as I was when the XFL first relaunched, which takes me back to is it just selling franchises? Is it trying to make tens of millions of dollars selling these franchises and expanding the market for the UFL? That's what I see right now. Let's pop around here. I had a comment this out of my head now. I was making fun of Greg End game here. That's what it is, been mixed. You have moose saying on our show, well, we don't want it to be a developmental league, but then we talk about the players wanting it to develop. We talk about is it a sports, I don't see anyone in the world that say for St. Louis who the C Ffl fans want now to be a franchise. I don't see anyone paying money for any of these teams, but what's your thoughts? Yeah, I don't know what the end game is. I think right now survival just survive every year. If we can get through a whole season, I think it's a massive win. But yeah, in terms of end game, I have no idea how much does this league want to expand. I feel like they're so focused more on being a TV product versus a live sports product. That's the difference between them and the NBA and NHL. The leagues they have to compete within the off season is they want to be a TV product. That's just the most important thing. They want to be innovative, they want to add in different camera angles, they want to put cameras on rest and players and the viewer is a different Profession. The drone we, Yeah, that's so loud you can't hear anything else. But they want to have that innovation because the reality is they know they're not going to get the attendance number that these other sports are going to get. So if you're going to draw people that are at home, alright, let's make it a great experience for them so that maybe it draws fans away from going to the stadium. Maybe it becomes a TV product thing. You look at the fan control football league, that's a TV product in itself. They play one play sport in Atlanta, Georgia, but Bowman Yards. Yeah, But it, it's a lot of fun to watch on tv. I'm not going to lie. It's not great football, but it's like a Rita football, but it's still a lot of fun to watch and I feel like if that's the way the UFL wants to go about it, and I've always said the premier lacrosse league, they do the touring system. I really think the league should have done that in the first place. They're not interested in getting higher attendance and stuff like that. Then just go on tour around the country and play these teams everywhere because Premier Lacrosse league, they can do it looks good on tv. It's not a big audience obviously they only maybe do two 3000 fans in the seats, but at least it looks good on TV and not compared to watching a Houston Memphis home game where nobody shows up to it. But I don't know what the end game is for this league. At the end of the day, I think they just want to survive and maybe it's a tax write off for Fox, I don't know, but I think they just want to survive right Now. It makes me think about Greg at Taz Survive. If I let you Jerry, yeah, let's get Andy. We'll toss Patrick Greg and then we'll bring our mike here. End game here. Kind that process. Well first of all, I want to see this league celebrate its accomplishments a little bit more. I think that's one of the things that these leagues don't do enough of. Go back to Anthony's point about FCI actually talked about with you guys last night if the SCF was still around, I know they kind of still are, but they haven't had a season right? In the last year, in my opinion, if I was running that league, I would be trumpeting from the top of the mountains about Quantas stickers. That guy started playing in their league, had never played football before, organized professional football or high school or anything, goes into their league, starts playing, goes to the CFL and gets drafted by the Jets. Are you kidding me? That's such an incredible story. I would be trumpeting that from the first moment that he got any sort of NFL attention and I really want these leagues to continue to celebrate themselves and their accomplishments. I think that's one of the biggest things As far as the end goal. I mean I think one of the things we keep tossing around is the MLS model. Being able to build your assets, be able to slowly but surely get more teams across the nation and then as notoriety is built, being able to sell them off for franchise fees or being able to have entry fees. I mean San Diego, I know I talked about my city too much. San Diego's about to get an MLS team next year. It costs 400 million for Mohammad Mansour to start that team. I mean that is an incredible rights fee to be able to just start a soccer team in that part of the United States or anywhere. And so that has been built through years and years and years of slow buildup from the MLS. You can just debate about the competition level. I know I have a lot of people I talk to, especially people watch European soccer or soccer across the world and say, well it's not good enough. Or all the retired players go there. But you know what the fact of the matter is they make money and they're making moves. I mean Leon L is playing in Miami. I don't think that could have happened 10 years ago. Now it's a reality. Those are the kinds of things that you have to think about as a league like this and you have to have that slow buildup. So if you want to go to that model, I think that's notable, that's fine. But I don't know if that's their plan. That's the thing. I think that should be their plan, at least part of the plan. I don't know if that's what their end goal is. It really just again, just seems like You got to have patience and you got to have a willingness to spend a lot of money for a long time to reach that point. I mean, think about how long the MLS has been around before they were able to turn that stuff into profit. So that remains to be seen how willing Fox and Redbird are to continue to split the costs of a pro football league, whether it's eight franchises or 10 or whatever the case may be. Greg, anything else you want to plug? And I'm sure you're going to have you post stuff coming out. Is Mark here? Is Mark covering for board? Anything else you want to talk about before we get you out? We'll bring Mike on. Yeah, UFL board editor. Mark Nelson is in St. Louis so he's got some coverage on media and on ufl board.com. I tweeted out at Greg m Parks a couple of my preview articles that I posted this week leading up to the game and I'll have some thoughts certainly after the game next week as well. And then we kind of turn the page to the off season and this is the interesting time of the year for me where we start looking ahead to the draft and other player acquisition processes through the off season. So I'll have a lot about that. And looking back on last year's rookie draft for the XFL, I'll have some articles looking at the upcoming summer showcases that the UFL will be holding. So a lot of interesting stuff still coming up in the off season. So the NFL, they don't have much of an off season and I like to think I don't have much of an off season for the UFL in terms of coverage either. So you can stay tuned to ufl board.com for that. Well Greg, I appreciate it as always. I was checking out a lot of CM punk here with Drew. There's a lot. I like that it was hot wwe. I don't know if I ever wanted to see that Drew McIntyre CM punk match, but it certainly looks exciting now They're working hard to make you want to see it, Reid. That's what you can say. They really are. It's like, okay, I've seen this now for a year. I really want to see this. Yep, Greg, I appreciate it. Chris said apologies. There we go. We appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks Craig. We will bring in the UFL insider here, our own Mike Mitchell. Mike, I think we're going to schedule willing, God willing, we'll figure out a time to do kind of a mid postseason highlight recap here this week. Like to subscribe for that. Mike is the UFL two focus on being the TV product. That's such a multilayered, it's going to take a long time to get into that. No, I'll say they want to get to the point where they have revenue streams in every aspect of the league. We will probably talk about it as after the championship game. But I have to wonder sometimes how committed Redbird is to this long term. Their kind of deal with me is I feel like they're used to getting into something and then getting out and maximizing their investment. And I think this merger happened because they didn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think Fox was having that same kind of viewpoint and they wanted to see if they can hit a home run with this thing. So I think I've said this a million different places. Your show included podcast included. I think this bought this entity two more years and then we'll see what for Fox. I get it right. Instead of paying a rights fee for a league, you control costs. You don't have to pay a rights fee. You own the league, you get to pocket whatever you pocket and the ratings are respectable. They're on par or better than a lot of these other leagues that have been around for a while and that's not an easy thing to do. So whether or not they can grow, they've developed a nice floor whether or not there is a ceiling. It makes me wonder whether or not Redbird sees that ceiling. And I'm not saying this is going to happen in this off season, but what if all of a sudden we get a news alert that they've kind of gracefully bowed out. I'm not saying that's coming, but it's just something to think of down the line. So end game. I heard you guys talking about it. Tough act to follow with Greg Parks on here. He always does a tremendous job. They want to be a standalone league MLS esque and have that type of success. Whether or not they can get there remains to be seen. I got a comment if you guys have questions for Greg or excuse me for Michael, let me know too many. It's also hard with the Anthony and Andy. It's really just hard for my life here. All that stuff, Mike. That's what, and I was saying before you got on here, I'm not nearly obviously as into all this as you are with the weeds and all that stuff you would've liked sitting with the bar with us last night. A lot of different kind of looking at the different XFL exec or UFL execs, really just tremendous people watching for about an hour there. We got back and had a nightcap at the hotel, but I would not be surprised in the next six months there's an article like Redbird sells off UFL, steak to Fox or whatever, I dunno, over under. I mean is that close to, would that be something that could happen in the next six months? You got to wonder with them, when do they get out? They usually get out. I'm not saying they're getting out of Liverpool and all that stuff, but a lot of these things they do, a lot of these investments they make, they're thinking about long-term gains and then selling it off and they get people to invest and so I think that's the end game goal for the UFL is to eventually get to the point where the property is so hot that they can sell it off like MLS franchises and all that, but that takes a lot of time. Pro football is very expensive. You need a lot of patience to pull that off. So it's just something I thought of when you guys were talking about end game, wondering about what Red Bird's end game is. We look at Fox, Fox has been a constant in this space, right? If you look at the 2020 with the XFL 2021 TSL, then of course the USFL onto the UFL, they seem pretty invested in this thing. Now of course we just saw what they did. I wrote about this, everybody knows about it. The UFL took a backseat, opened up the door, took one for the team for lack of a better term to create an opening there for the IndyCar series, their IndyCar jump ship from NBC to Fox because they have all those nice broadcast windows. How did those broadcast windows become available? UFL was moved to Friday nights. It doesn't speak to me as a commitment for that. Any thoughts, questions, anything we're testing into here? I mean, so I guess my follow up would be what was the point of BRE bur getting into it in the first place? I mean, do they actually think they're going to be able to sell their portion of the league off more than what they got at the beginning? I mean I just don't feel like this league is making the type of revenue that would make it enough For record to be like, oh, we're going to sell it off and make more money off of It. I think they saw the success of the XFL in 2020. The Danny Garcia, Dwayne Johnson element, they thought this could be a home run. I mean so many people over the years I've been following these leagues my whole life, they see the potential of what a pro football league in the NFL off season, how popular it could potentially be. And so they're used to betting on winners so they bet on the Yankees and all this stuff and Liverpool, all these things are winners. These entities are winners. These are championship models with leagues like the UFL. Let's face it, we don't know that these are forever leagues. We don't know if these are four year leagues with M-L-B-N-H, LNFL, those are forever leagues. They're going to be around forever. So we don't know that about this league. So I mean this is a long conversation. Like I said, there's so many different layers to this thing. I'd rather talk about the championship game, but Okay, we'll do that before you, we'll do that. But I hear you, but I hear you guys definitely. This is something I thought I'd be delving in with Reed next week, but as when the smoke clears, because there's going to be league meetings after all this after the smoke clears from the championship game and they're going to reassess and then look at what they have a two year plan in place. They got government approval, they're supposed to implement a lot of the things that they want. They have more time now. So let's see, Danny Garcia talking about having a more strategic schedule next year. We'll see how they implement it, what they do when the schedule is. There's a lot of questions for after the season, which is I guess around 8:00 PM tonight, maybe eight 30 ish eastern time. I got one more question for Mike. We'll you talk about the game here. Let's get Andy here real quick. Pat saying DJ and Danny have to do more. I'm kind of underwhelmed by that all this season. I just dunno how much their involvement has been here. To be honest, we've barely seen Dwayne or Danny evolve with this really. I know they've been co-owners, but a lot of people have pointed this out this year and I feel the same way. This felt like an acquisition, not a merger. I mean this is really a Fox product and even though ESPN is involved, even though ABC's involved from the out outside, it really has felt like it's Fox's product. So for Danny and Dwayne, I don't know what their skin in the game of this either. I mean Dwayne obviously put out a tweet yesterday about how the game's coming. I don't know if he's actually, where's he going to be watching it from? I don't know. Like it is Jim somewhere and Honolulu, I have no idea. But there's so many mitigating factors here. How much, like you said, how much stake is there really in this league? How much can they really sell off? How much equity is built into this league? Especially when it's changed hands so many different times. I mean that's not really a thing that you can really trace most of the time and I mean it's not a publicly traded entity, it's not the stock market, nothing like that. So it's kind of hard to really trace that through. So for me, I mean I wouldn't be surprised if Red Bird just decided to pack up and sail off after this year because I don't know. Again, we talked about what's the long-term plan here and if we are not sure what the long-term plan is, I don't know what Fox is thinking either. I don't know if bird sees it that way too. So for me it is a bit strange and I don't know, it may have just been a weird two year experiment for Redbird overall. Mike, I got a follow up for you and then I promise then we'll talk game here guys because I'm going to do a follow up and I'm going to follow that up with a game question. We see a lot even in the comments here, okay, they want to do the MLS thing, they want to do the MLS thing and like okay, they're dry more. If you look at hockey or you look at this or WNBA, I remember having Ben Fisher on last year talking with the USFL. Like this isn't the same to equate because even if a soccer game you're out drawing, there's more of those games. The fans are more invested monetarily wise. They've had season tickets for 20 years, they're buying merch. There's all these other intangibles when it comes to selling that. But how do you view that with the UFL, with the teams in terms of like, yeah, I mean they rank better than some soccer games. Did they rank better than whatever? But that doesn't mean that they're equal in value by any means. No, it takes time. None of these leagues were home runs. Even the NFL wasn't a home run in the early going, so there was struggles there. There was talk about canceling the Super Bowl in the early stages of it. It was like one conferences, one side, the NFL Strong, the AFL's kind of a gimmicky league. This is just like an exhibition game. The early stages in the media. They were talking about it just being some crazy exhibition gimmick game and now here we are. So it takes time with all these leagues, MLS, all of them. I think they have a nice respectable floor in terms of ratings. Fox has cut out the middleman Fox and Disney. This is a modest investment for them and they're not going crazy with spending obviously. And so that's why Fox has been into this since till 2020 with the XFL. It's low cost. The question has always been with these leagues, with these entities, with the people who run these leagues is whether or not they want to take the risk and take the chance if you see the possibility that hey, we might close up shop here in a year or two time to swing for the fences, right? That's my take on it. I think, like I said, this merger was done to buy the league more time to see if the product and the viability of it can grow and I think it's a very good product. It's just a question of whether or not it catches on what the mainstream. That's kind of the issue right now to get sponsors to get more people into the leagues, you have to prove your worth over time. It takes time. Okay Mike, here we go. You got two minutes. Let's talk the game Birmingham, I don't know thoughts. We talked game before you come up and I want to make sure you get your talk about, so talk about the game. What do you think here? Obviously I think the stallion's going to win today. Anthony did a very good job of writing a preview before the season. I predicted the stallions would win the championship. This would be their third straight. Obviously they're the first pro football team outdoor that would've accomplished that winning three straight championships. Maybe the chiefs do it in the NFL next year, but we haven't seen it since the Eskimos. Maybe I get in trouble for saying that and the Packers in the sixties. So it's a fascinating rematch the way these two teams stack up against one another. It also could be the swan song for Wade Phillips. The crazy thing about Wade Phillips and San Antonio bras is Wade Phillips was not supposed to be a part of this league if it wasn't for a Heinz Ward balking and not signing the new seasonal contract paperwork for coaches, Wade Phillips would've been at home right now like eating Cheetos or whatever he does in his spare time. So this could be the end of the run for Wade. There's no guarantee that even if he comes back next year that he's going to get to another championship. I think it's pretty cool that this is his first time ever in 55 years of coaching, leading a team to a title game, so as a head coach, so I think there are a lot of very cool storylines. Tonight's championship, I think it's going to be a very good, I think these are the two best teams. I think San Antonio overall was better than St. Louis. I know a lot of people favored St Louis to win last week, but how could you with the way AJ McCarran is hobbling around on one leg? The bras is pretty awesome story. They're not really the bras from last year they had over 40 new players. They benefited a lot from the merger. They adopted a lot of Houston roughnecks from last year's seven win team and they got a bunch of NFL draft picks on their team. Recent NFL draft picks, Anthony McFarland, mark was Stevenson, et cetera. So I think these are in fact the two best teams in the league and I think we're going to have a heck of a game, but I favor Birmingham doing something that no outdoor pro football team has done in over four decades. I got one quick follow up for Mike and then we'll bring on Evan. I got a follow up for Evan about Wade, so that'll be a good transition here. Darren wants to know real quick, do you think they go back to the XFL kickoff next year? We talked a lot about that remember during the pre-season. Show thoughts on that here as we get out of the season? I think it's going to be fun to watch what happens in the NFL. Some people are not taking into account that it could be a disaster. I'm not saying the XFL kickoff is a disaster, but the way the NFL teams approach it, how it's implemented, remember they only have a one year buy-in basically in the NFL. So if for whatever reason I know they've tweaked it to kind fit whatever they think will be best and enhance the kickoff, the U NFL's leadership is very with moose on top, I think they want to stick with the current kickoff. It was funny up until Chris Roland the final game weekend of the season, we didn't have any kickoff turns for touchdowns. Although we've had a lot of great field position because of the way the kick is designed. I don't know, I don't have the injury data in front of me. If it's a smashing success in the NFL, the XFL kickoff, I think the UFL will have no choice but to consider using it. If for whatever reason the NF L'S not enamored with it at the end of the season it's like let's do something else here. All options are on the table. The XFL kickoff would have to take off. It has in the ELF and other places it would have to take off in the NFL and be a success for the UFL is going to be forced to implement the same exact kickoff, which is a little bit different than the XFL kickoff that Sam Schwartzstein and his team designed. Last comment here all around hustle. They might as well fold this season. How are you all talking? Honestly, I thought we've been pretty positive today. I mean all around he's a fan I thought. I don't think we've been that bad. Mike, anything else we'll bring on Evan here. Anything else from you? No, that's basically it. Thank you very much for having me on. You guys have done a great job. Shout out to Anthony there. Oh, one thing I wanted to shout out to this guy, so many super fans out there. Ken Gill, he's out there. Oh, Ken Was trying to give us last night, we were, Yeah, shout out to him. He's funny. You see him all over XI guess you don't call it Twitter anymore, but he's always plugging the UFL stuff, the championship game. I don't care if it's like a thread on X about salad, he'll put in a reply there. That's about the UFL championship game. So there's so many super fans out there who are in St. Louis right now. I appreciate all you guys because I love this concept and I want it to stick around forever and I think it's a quality and it should. It's great for the football landscape. So excited about today's game and thanks again for having me on. Well, we appreciate it. Like I said, let's get Mike, we'll try to do recap this week, like it subscribe if you want to hear from more from Mike or UFL inside here, so I appreciate it, Mike. Thank you and I appreciate making time today. I know it's busy. Hope you guys have a good Father's day. Thank you. Happy Father's Day to you guys. All right, let's bring on here Evan Willmore. Evan, last guest today we had Evan for our kickoff show. Couple questions first off, how does it feel seeing the Brahmas, basically the roughnecks more or less kind of in the championship game today as someone that covered the team last year? Yeah, it's great. Really happy for Wade Phillips, mark Lilybridge, AJ Smith, all the players that were carried over from Houston, but it's bittersweet overall because you look at what happened to Houston and that market and they had the worst team in the league this year. So I feel bad for those fans. Again, I'm happy for everybody that was directly involved with the roughnecks last year who carried over into San Antonio, but it's tough. You got to think about the people in Houston who were stripped of that success this year. So mixed feelings, but I'm excited to see the product tomorrow, what they put together on both sides of the ball and I think it's safe to say that Wade Phillips absolutely deserves to be in this position. He's been I guess a championship winning coach before, not as a head coach obviously, but his time with the Broncos and with the Rams as well. So again, really happy for him and we'll see how it plays out. Well yeah, that's my follow up and then we'll go around here. What does that do to Wade's legacy? I thought it was cool that they really kind of celebrated that him being here as his first. What do you think that does for his legacy Evan and then we'll go around. Yeah, I mean I think it does a lot for his legacy. The guy is, I think he's 76 now and this is really his first chance at being a head coach I believe, or well, I might have to double check that because he is been in so many places, but the idea is he's going to a pro football championship at 76 years old and it's his first time doing so as a head coach. Like I said, all the other places where he is done it, he's been an assistant defensive coordinator, whatever, I think it does a lot for his legacy. I remember when they first announced that Wade Phillips will be a coach in this league, which was like two years ago for the XFL and that was easily the biggest name that they could have brought on board I think for the coaching for all the coaches that they had rather, and if he wins this, I think it does a lot. It's not going to feel maybe tremendous. Again, he has so much experience and he's been in the Super Bowl type of position before at the NFL level, but he wins this one. It's maybe a nice sendoff because it's 76 years old again, I'm assuming he's 76 I think is what I read. Assuming he's 76, that's pretty old to be a head coach and if I were in his position, maybe win the championship and ride off into the sunset and retire. I know he seems to love doing this and all my interactions with him have been positive even if they've been few and far between even when I was in Houston. But no, it does a lot. Absolutely The same question for you guys. I mean like I said, I enjoy, you should celebrate this, you should hear this. Mike's talking like, hey Birmingham wins or the first outdoor football team. I like feeling that you make yourself part of the zeitgeist of all these other leagues. What do you think this does for Wade? Yeah, I think it's going to do the same thing he did for Bob Stoops when he won the championship last year for Arlington. I mean you look at Stoops his first two seasons in the regular season with the Renegades. He went two and three in 2020. He went four and six in 2023 and I don't know if a lot of people really believe that he could be a professional head coach and then he went in and made that incredible postseason run to win the championship last year. I think he's going to do the same thing for Wade Phillips. I think it's going to, he's already done a tremendous amount since being in this league going seven and three last year taking Houston in the playoffs. He went seven and three again this year. This time he was able to get to the championship game. So I think in terms of what he's done legacy wise, I know at the end of the day the UFL is not going to be on the same level as the NFL, so people may not think it's a big deal, but the impact that Wade Philip is going to have on all these players. I mean how many of these players are going to get onto NFL rosters during training camp? I think a lot of people are looking at the San Antonio Brass, especially on defense and they have some really good skill players on offense that I think can get signed by the NFL and start going into training camp if he ends up and I went to, well I was listening to one of his press conferences this week. It sounds like he wants to keep coaching if he has the opportunity to, he's going to say he's going to keep coaching. So I think for the legacy that he's starting to build right now is that he can develop guys to get into the NFL, which I know the league doesn't want to push on, but I think that's a big, big deal for players that maybe are on the fence that come out of college and maybe they didn't get drafted or former veteran NFL players who get kicked out, they lose their job in the league and if they want to look at a team to play for it, they want to play under Wake Phillips. He knows he can develop 'em and get 'em ready for the NFL. We'll go to Andy here. Any class questions we're going to be done here at the top of the hour and get ready Anthony. Well, Andy and I going to get to the media, but you got to be there. You have real work to do. I just sit on my phone and tweet funny stuff during the game, but Andy and I'll walk over there. Andy's good to meet our giveaway guest today. You got, I don't know John, I think it's John, his wife or John, his son, but yeah, he's excited for that. Anyway, any last questions here? Make sure you comment because then we'll get out of here. Any you have thoughts on this because that's actually really good kind him developing and getting known for that. Let's get more of those coaches in there. What do you think about Wade than anything else? I mean one better way for Wade to really honor not only his legacy but his father's legacy and win on Father's Day, the late great Bum Phillips, obviously a renowned figure in the state of Texas with the Houston Oilers that franchise, those fans just absolutely loved his father. A lot of people love Wade. I mean that would be just a tremendous storyline for him if he was able to win on Father's Day and get his real first championship for him and his father, his father not able to bring that to Houston but was just like I said, a beloved figure. I think that would be immense. I mean Wade is 76 years young. He loves doing this. I still can recall in my youth watching him coach the defense for the San Diego Chargers being able to just bring ferocity on defense and just really making the careers of guys like Sean Merriman, Sean Phillips, and just outstanding players on that defense. I always remember Wade, his accomplishments are few and far between 'em and there's so many of them. There's just such a wide breadth of them and yet I just wonder if that's going to come to fruition today for his sake. I mean that would be absolutely wonderful. I did want to turn it over to Evan really quick. There's a quick question. Evan, obviously you spent an extensive amount of time with the Houston optics last year. A lot of this coaching staff, some of these players, I know you haven't been around them obviously as much this year, but do you sense there's a difference in mentality with this coaching staff and this team than last year? Because obviously the end of the season not in the greatest ways. I know you were standing next to Anthony when the shocking upset at the hands of the Arlington ADEs happened. Do you feel like there's a different sense with this team this year? You mean the roughnecks? Well, with the bro artist formerly known as the Roughnecks, Right? Right. I mean I feel like it's a bit different just because again, and it's been brought up a couple times, while there are some key pieces from the Roughnecks team last year, it's still a pretty different team. And again, I give a lot of credit to Mark Lily Bridge. Mike was talking about how they had 40 new players or something and just to be in the position where you have an opportunity to now win the championship with so much turnover and different faces, whether they're considered to be maybe better or highly qualified than the previous people, it's really just an incredible effort. So is there a different vibe around it? A little bit. I'd say I went to a game in San Antonio and I felt like maybe the culture down there was a bit different. The way that they kind of sell themselves. It's still a Texas team and I think that's good for a guy like Wade Phillips and that was especially important when he was in Houston with the lineage there with his father and it just made a lot of sense. San Antonio, again, it's a bit different. They've incorporated some other elements, in particular a Latin American element that I felt very strongly when I was there. So again, that's obviously a bit different than Houston, but the idea is it's still Texas and they still have a lot of guys there that seem to have pretty deep roots within the state. So that's probably the best way I can put it. It's kind of hard to gauge just because again, there is so many different faces. But when I was there I did talk to everybody that had been in Houston and that did feel very familiar. A couple comments here and then we'll go around the harm. We'll get final predictions, we'll get out. I am about ready to use the facilities here as we get done here today. Abdulah says if the championship game gets 2 million viewers, I need you two. That's fine. I have no problem doing that. Yeah, I'll do two shots of remona. Robert here says today is today to celebrate the UFL. I think he's mad. He says here, if you guys are so smart, why are you not working for the league? I thought about that last spring my, because I do primarily weddings during the summer and I thought, man, I really actually could take a couple months to go to Texas. A lot of corporate stuff right now for me. And honestly the league can't afford me if I don't want to be rude about it, but that's kind of where I'm at. But I did think about that last year with our wedding business. Completely took a tank in the off season like hey, I could go live in Texas for a couple months. That would be fun. But Evan, let's get final predictions here. We'll go around state your claim here, bras and stallions. Yeah, I'm going to take the stallions in this game. I'm going to be cheering really hard for San Antonio and boy if they win, I'm going to be so happy because again, of how many people I know on that staff and it's going to be incredible. But I really have a gut feeling that Birmingham is going to be a three time champ, which I think Mike was saying hasn't been done in four decades in pro football. They're just so complete. And I know they've struggled. And I know the last playoff game against Michigan, maybe there were a few concerns. Martinez had to be benched and Corral came in and we'll see how everything plays out today, but they have so many weapons and Skip Holz just comes across as a guy that really knows what he's doing and I think that they're in a really good position. But I'm picking them more than anything because San Antonio has already beat him. And I wonder if Birmingham is going to roll out a completely different game plan. And I think San Antonio is maybe more capable of pulling out some more interesting cards. We've seen what AJ Smith can do on the offensive side of the football and how again creative he is. So I do think that maybe the Brahmas can produce some more exciting plays, but I feel like Birmingham just they have too much and I'm going to take them to win this game. Alright, tell us to Anthony, Andy, and then we'll get out there. Yeah, I'm going to take the stallions too. I had 'em in my prediction article at 26 24. Look, I think San Antonio, like Evan said, San Antonio is very capable of coming up a big place and I think they're going to have a couple of really big plays today. But I think overall, look Birmingham knows how to win. They just have a winning mentality. They've only lost four games of three years for a reason. This is a very disciplined team. They protect the football well. They're very smart with what they do. I think Skip Holts knows exactly when to lead with Adrian Martinez versus throwing in Matt Carrell. He's very smart, he's very strategic. He knows his players better than they know themselves. So I think at the end of the day it all comes down to coaching. I think Wade is a great coach and nothing against that coaching staff, but I think Skip Holtz just he knows exactly what it takes to win in spring football and I trust him a little bit more and I trust this team a little bit more. Especially I think the big thing we haven't been talking about is San Antonio's offensive line versus Birmingham's defensive line. And I think Birmingham's defensive line with Carl Davis and Taco Charlton are so good and I think they're going to be able to get pressure on Chase Garber's and that bras offense. So I like the best stallions to win. Andy for you, In the words of pinball Clemens who said on your show two years ago at the Great Cup when no one gave the Argos a chance, he said it's going to take a miracle. But I believe in miracles and I believe in the Braas. I am taking the Braas to win this game. Defense I think is going to play out of their minds. I believe in their system, they've played with a chip on their shoulder this entire year. I think they're ready to do it one more time. Listen, this entire hotel might chase me out into the street and out of town, but if that's how it's going to be, so be it. I believe the Bravos are going to win. I take them to win 2217. My MVP is Chase garber's defensive. MVPI think is going to be Devonte Beckett. And my last bold prediction, Josh j Kirkland throws a touchdown Pass. I like it. Like I said, who was I with last year? Evan Jason. We were at the Gray Cup when K Podo led the Montreal outlets down the field beat the win pick Blue Bombers. I've seen miracles happen. I agree with, I agree. I said I'll buy a Bromage jersey if they win. I will be excited for that. Evan, I appreciate it. Taking time. Evan, assistant director point personnel over with the Vegas Nighthawks, we appreciate that everybody for coming on like and subscribe. Join the channel, give a thumbs up if nothing else doesn't cost anything, we will be back. Jason and I are going to be back Tuesday to do our CFL recap Andy and I'll figure out when the heck Andy and I will do a recap at some point this week when we get back in town. And I think Mike and I are going to do a full deep dive at some point probably Thursday for the Friday episode. I know Anthony's going to have a lot of stuff out on Sports Illustrated. Check out Greg's stuff on UFL board. Anything else? I forgot anything. I think we're great. Let's rock and roll. Alright, appreciate it guys. Thanks Evan. Appreciate Anthony and Andy being here the whole time. Thanks everyone for watching. We're going to head over to the game and we'll see you next time. Thanks. As I do this.

UFL Playoffs Results + Reactions! Winners and Losers From the UFL Playoffs!!

Well here we are. Happy Tuesday everybody of Markcast recap here, the professor Andrew Murray who is presumably watching this or checking in from a beach in Mexico. Here we have John Lewis filling in today. John, I think this might be the most just controversial weekend here. Lots going on. I feel like I've taken a heel turn. I'm a marked man going into St. Louis. What the heck is going on here, John? Well, I think you've got a lot of Battle Hawks fans out there who are heartbroken and I think some of them feel like, well, this would be like going to my ex-girlfriend's wedding. I can't show up for this thing because I knew that my team, we were supposed to be there and we're not there. Now let me give credit here. There are going to be a lot of Battle Hawks fans who will be in St. Louis at this game and good for them, but the ones who are just going to sit on their tickets, I mean, I think, I don't know why, because I understand that you're heartbroken and maybe you don't want to see them, but at least, and I've seen a lot of people selling tickets right now on social media and that's fine, but you've got to back this league. Don't just back your team. You got to back this league if we want some viability here for a while. Yes. So set the stage here today while people are joining here, lots to get into. We will be talking TV ratings, attendance game. You have both of the playoff games. I got a lot of thoughts about the Battle Hawks game. We will be talking to championship preview. Keep in mind here I like and subscribe. So we have been trying to give away our tickets to the our 3,500 subscriber giveaway. I did another drawing on Monday. The first winners we're out of town going to be now I think the other people, no response. If you are on this stream today and you want to win tickets to the championship game, we are going to do it at the end of the show. I got to give these tickets away. You're going to sit with Andrew Murray. Maybe you're a Brams fan wanting to make this at this point. I don't know, but I need to get these tickets off my hands. So stay tuned, be subscribed, be on here at the end of the stream, we will do our wheel of names and we will give that away. Quick plug. We will be live in St. Louis on Sunday. I think it's going to be noon, the local time, noon to two and then Anthony's going to get over. He's credentialed. He'll get in the box, I'll be in the box and all that stuff, but he wants to get over and do all his reporter stuff. So 12 to two we'll do that. I think John Lewis is going to call in. Andy's going to be there in person. Anthony's going to be there. I think Mike Mitchell's going to call in Greg Parks. We got to figure all this out. Father's Day weekend, the wonderful timing of all that. But so like and subscribe, be a part of that. And then I want to make sure that we give away the ticket. So if you are, it could only be one person, but you could be one of one on here, but I got to give these tickets away. John, what do you think about that? I think that is really cool and we have talked about this before. It feels like why they scheduled this for Sunday Father's Day. I mean I'm sure there was a lot. It wasn't just some random, they weren't throwing a dart and say let's do it at this time, but this really should be a Saturday game. Again, we've complained about a lot of things all season long. But listen, here's the thing. You and I have been around the spring football thing long enough to know if you've made it to a championship game, that's success. So let's look positively at this and we've got a championship game Sunday night. Yeah, it's a weird, it's always interesting and I read a lot of the comments and the Twitter and I got a lot of stuff muted, but when I kind of go through all the comments and everything and Facebook and there's a lot of, I think it's like a heel term for me now with the Battle Hawks Andres so negative because the sea drag, I purposely wore this today. This is my brand new Jane Daniels jersey. I live thousands of miles from Washington DC I have no care or concern. The comments that I would have about St. Louis and not showing up as it's windy here, as you can tell, would be the same comments whether the Sea Dragons existed or not. So it's really hard. I get a lot of that. But John, before we get too deep into this today, because we need to crown the San Antonio Brass as the XFL champions here. We've had, we've commented privately, publicly, a lot of other YouTube content creators using copywritten material. So I have a clip today. I hope we don't get in trouble for this, but I got to play this and then hopefully we don't get copywritten struck here talking about the San Antonio Braa season. Finally, looking at the schedules, I predict both the Houston Roughnecks and Michigan Panthers to finish the season at two and eight and the San Antonio bras maybe just a single win with Wade Phillips and company returning to Houston to get a victory in week seven. That's how I see the inaugural year of the United Football League shaking out, what do you think? I'm sure you will let me know down in the comments and tell me your predictions down there as well. John, remember at the end of, I don't know if you've ever seen my favorite movie in the world, there will be Blood Daniel Plainview at the end of the movie there. He's sitting there. You sniveling ass, you John, answer for yourself here. Promise XFL champions here. We have people already asking for it. Would you like some salt and pepper for that crow you are eating. David Kromer wants to know, Oh yeah, and Panthers. I was sew down on the Panthers and I'm here to take my whooping. So I get it. I 100% underestimated how good that I thought San Antonio was going to be and I should have known better because I know Wade Phillips is a great coach. AJ Smith is such a good offensive coordinator. Chase I always thought was just an absolute like who is this guy and maybe Quentin dormant is going to be the guy. And I just remember, yeah, that is a freezing cold take for sure. Abdu, there was no question about that. And I said before, it was a fool's errand to do that and I did it anyway and here we are. But you're right. Listen, San Antonio, I think they have certainly proven a lot of people wrong, especially me. Not that that's very hard to do, but what Wade Phillips has done and what's really cool is at 76 years old, he's going to be in really his first championship game as a head coach. But I'm telling you, who's really mad about this might be some San Antonio fans who didn't like my prediction, who's really mad about this Houston Roughnecks fan. And they should absolutely be angry because not they got hosed in one of the worst ways possible other than your Sea Dragons who got hosed. They don't even exist anymore. But it's like Houston, they had Wade Phillips, they had AJ Smith, they had a good team, which I think would've been a good team this year and then handed them the gamblers basically and they handed them one of the worst teams in the league. So I feel bad for them. I really do. Yeah, I can only imagine what's getting ready to pop up Here. And the only Washington Commanders fan would do that to John. Thank you. We getting another flight? He goes fly. So the BC Lions lost the kickoff weekend game against Toronto Argonaut, so it wasn't all rosy colored here for the mark cast, but we'll get into all of that here. So first off, news coming out today because I think attendance and then we have a question already from Philip talking future attendance. We won't do all attendance. We'll talk the games I watched, spoiler alert, we were at my brother's from my mother's birthday on Sunday and I had the game on in the corner. I was watching the game, watching the game the whole time here. So we'll get to all that. But talking here, playoffs, the FL game 1.274 million on Fox later game on Sunday, 1.1 million for the US NL conference game on a B, C. That was the earlier game on Saturday, right? That was at noon Pacific. So three Eastern I tweeted out, well first off, congrats to both games over a million. I want to get your thoughts. I want to get people's thoughts in the chat about what is the championship game, what do we think that TV rating's going to be? But I was told the Birmingham stallions and Panthers got all the ratings. No, it's time slots and networks has nothing to do with the game. It has nothing to do with the teams. It has to do with the Sunday night game on Fox, better window, better ratings. I mean you can glow one way or another, but that's how I view it. I'll agree with that to a point. But I'll also say that these are is A, B, C and Fox. There's no question about that. I do wonder if you, attendance wise, if you had flipped these around, you probably would've gotten more than 30,000 alleged people in St. Louis and maybe more than 10,000 in Birmingham. But what's really great about this, James Larson pointed this out in his article on Pro Football Newsroom, is that this is the first time that two spring conference championship games have gotten more than a million viewers. And Skip Holtz had his availability today and I was on it and I asked him, I said, when you see, I said, I know that you're probably more focused on trying to beat San Antonio, but I told him about the TV ratings and he had a great answer about this is proving that this is something that is viable and that people are interested in. And Reid, you're right. I mean it was on a, B, C and Fox, there's no question. But I still think that when you get that many viewers to watch spring football, it says something and I think it says something positive about spring football and about the UFL and the presentation, It doesn't hurt. I thought both games were really competitive and interesting for different reasons. I mean just the other collapse of the Panthers to allow however many unanswered points there to lose that game. And then I mean what really fell, and Mike had said in our chat and we had seen online, the brass felt disrespected and Wade felt disrespected not getting or they felt disrespected for Wade not getting the coach of the year, not from the league. And then I think there was only two players for the Brahmas and the Audience was it? I thought it might've even only been one. And then they wanted to say that Mike Nolan got the coaching thing because he had had to deal with multiple quarterbacks and injuries. Spoiler alert, the Bromus had to do the same thing, which is Normandy and all that stuff. So a lot of interesting things with that, but whatever it was, we will get into the games. But yeah, I mean I thought both games were great, improved dividends for that. I am saying over under 1.5 million for the championship game next week, next Sunday, what do you think? That might be a push because that's about what I was thinking of about 1.5. Again, I wonder if this had been a Saturday game, if you might've had a little more or even a but Sunday at five o'clock Eastern. Yeah, I don't know. And by the way, let me tell you how much that I love my father-in-Law. He wants to go out for Father's Day for dinner at five o'clock and okay, we're going to go. So I'm, I'm DVRing. I'm going to try to avoid and then try to catch up on the game, but I will watch the game obviously. But yeah, I think 1.5 would be really good for a Sunday afternoon game. I mean if it's more than that, I think it's gravy, but I think 1.5, absolutely. That would be a great championship rating to me. Anyway, A couple of things here and then we get into more attendance. I got to post your comments here, I'll pull 'em up here in a second. I see a lot of people posting what they're thinking of the ratings. I don't understand the Sunday of it all. It's certainly easier for me to fly out on a Saturday, get in there late, do the Sunday game, but then flying back Monday. I think Dorothy, maybe we could have done that pulling back Sunday. That to me is odd. The Sunday in general with the Father's Day also is odd. I do not, I know historically in the Gray Cup does that on Sundays. I'm not a fan of that. I think that you do the Saturday, give people the day off the next day, be able to travel back, whatever also, and we'll get into the St. Louis kind of with are they going to sit on their season tickets or whatever. But if you remember last year they had the bye week in between. So you had two full weeks of ticket sales going into the championship game, which you will not get now. Which I think is also very interesting where if you're, let's say you were a Braas fan and you're like, okay, you win the game. Well now I got to figure out here Monday, Tuesday, am I really flying to St. Louis this weekend versus I don't know, I didn't like the bye week last year. I thought it did a lot to kind of hurt the momentum because what the hell do you talk about for two weeks was spring football with a 10 week season? But in terms of getting those, because it was about 22,000. So that's kind of the floor here that we need to hope that the battle hawks and we'll get to that. But I think that's an interesting thing as well here with that wrinkle to not have the extra week to sell tickets And the Sunday too on top of that. I agree because if this game had been on Saturday, no matter who was in it, I probably would've gone or certainly would've considered it a lot more strongly had it not been on a Sunday. And I probably not the only one. But yeah, with that, having that buy week, you're right. But you also, when I see numbers like that when we were talking about the one over a million viewers, I don't know that you want to lose that kind of momentum because really this is a TV product. We've talked about that a long time. I think this is more of a TV product and when you have momentum and you had almost two and a half million people tuning in to sample this product and if they like what they saw, would they remember it two weeks later? Maybe not. So why not just go ahead and have it the next weekend? So I mean I see where you're coming from on that as far as fan travel and trying to plan for it, but also I see it from a network perspective. Why not go ahead and try to ride that wave and just go ahead and have that next week and also it gives them an extra week in the off season to get ready to try to get this together the right way for 2024 or 25. Well no, and I agree with you a hundred percent. I mean I do think it's kind of, there's pros and cons to both and all of these, whether you start the league in February or start the league in March or start the league in, there's pros and cons to all that and that's why I think these discussions and or realistic about a lot of this I think proves if you just sit there all day, this is great, this is great. That doesn't do anything but sitting there. Well yeah, should they have the bi week in there, should they not? What is the benefit? I think that there's just value to that and where this is where they're still at the point where they can be nimble and change things. I just think it's worth brainstorming all that stuff. Abdul here 1.8 million for the championship game. Christopher's checking in. He was the one that gave away the other UFL championship tickets that we gave away. 1.5 million Darren TV raid we're fantastic attendance. Meh. Mike here above 1.5. I agree. I think 1.5 is the floor. Philip thinks you are on fire. He liked the Houston roughnecks thing. Yeah, here 2 million. I would do backflips in the Battle Hawks press box if we get to my, and then Max first Sunday was the day they chose because there's damn near zero competition. Probably something to that I don't know about what's the NBA finals looking like or obviously I don't follow the NBA, I don't even know what would be happening on that Sunday. Yeah, and you got NHL stuff and I don't know what the Stanley Cup playoffs is as well. I mean you're going to have, we're against the playoffs. The last thing, I mean, I'm just thinking, I always view the, and again they don't, obviously they view it more as the TV product. I view the championship game, the CFL in terms of like this is a traveling thing we do every year. It's a neutral site. You get people to come out that's a boon that helps the league people travel out, spend money, all that stuff. It doesn't have to be that. They could say we don't care, but obviously they chose St. Louis because they wanted the most people there. So I don't think that this was as big of a conversation point last year when it was San Antonio, they had had about 15,000 all season where we're putting it in St. Louis. We want the most people there, so therefore we are talking about attendance because it is in St. Louis. Yeah, there's something to that. I also think that the UFL probably thought that St. Louis might go there and break another modern spring football record for a game. So I mean get it. It is a football crazy town, but what we need to talk about and what we need to think about is it a football crazy town or is it a battle hawks crazy town. So that's what we're going to find out on Sunday when we see the actual attendance there. I know I've seen, we just talked about it. I've seen so many people that are selling six eight tickets because they just knew the battle locks were going to be there and now they don't want to go, so at least they're selling their tickets I guess. But you've got to have people show up for these games because even, I mean John DeFilippo has even talked about it. He talked about it when it was in the US in the USFL and he kind of talked about it as the Memphis head coach that it might not make a huge difference to the players, although if you have 10 to 15,000 or whatever, but when you've only got four to 6,000 people showing up for the game, not only is it bad there, but on television, the casual viewer is going to look at that and say, well, I don't think this is very important. I think Dan Kaplan pointed out something in your show, and this was interesting that the NFL actually took a ratings hit during covid because people didn't want to watch football in empty stadiums and this is the NFL, this is the juggernaut. So yeah, I mean I think if in St. Louis, if you're a Battle Hawks fan and you had tickets, if you didn't sell 'em, don't sit on, I mean go out there and put butts in the seats and make this thing look good and make this league viable. Say here we're talking US golf open's going to be on Sunday rock and roll here without bye week, everything's rushed again. I get it both ways. I get it. You don't need the media week. The Super Bowl does. There's only so much on all this stuff, but I get wanting to give people kind of a chance to rally here robber here. I need to change my format. I'm a UFL hater. I don't know if changing the format would change. I don't think We changed The format of it. I was called an FL hater when I said the season wasn't going to start on time. It didn't. I was A-U-S-F-L hater when I said dah. I was been a CFL hater. I've been an everything hater. You hate Every football league. I don't even know why you do this, Reid. Well now I'm a Battle Hawks hater. Even though always I've never liked the battle hawks. I thought that this has been known forever. This isn't a new thing. I'm a Sea Dragons fan or especially now Brahm is like, yeah, you're a conference rival. I hate Anthony Miller because he likes the Eagles, right? That doesn't mean why would I like anything about that? It is just, let's see here. Yeah, foosball here. Constructive criticism. Mark cast Jared here reads a UFL lover. He attends many games. Games. We're talking here. Yeah, Yankees, red talk, any that stuff. Alright, let's get to, let me hide this comment. Yeah, and to be fair, they've like, no, the Sea Dragons. I've been to more renegades games and probably DC Defenders games than I did. I did. I think I only made it to two Sea Dragons games last year. I've seen the renegades three or four times. I've flown to DC twice for that stupid team. Read here. Face of hating seeing football. Yes. There we go. Alright, so let's talk here real quick. I mean this has been beating a nauseum now, but this, oh boy. So this attendance here, the Birmingham attendance and so full disclosure, I caught up on this game. I watched the first half and then I had a dance. I was filming dance recitals on Saturday and then I had to catch the rest of it when I got done. It was kind of right during that window. But I went on and I saw Mike's tweet and then I tweeted my quote tweet to this, not the reply, and then I came back about two hours later to sheer chaos, but I was told whole time, okay, the game last week doesn't matter when it really matters and if it's under 12,000 and then we'll talk and all this kind of stuff. I know you have a lot to talk about this. I've kind of said my piece, and I'm sure everyone on here knows what I want to talk about with this, but I was told under 12,000 it was 10,287. What say you John that Mr. Birmingham stallion super fan? Well, I can tell you I was at the game the week before that. They allegedly had 7,000 people and it was probably more like three to 4,000. So when I see official attendance at 10,000, I think we all know that it was less than that and I don't understand it for a few reasons. Birmingham, it's a known brand, but I'll say this, I think I sent you a picture as well, Reed, when I was down there, I got there the day before the game. There is nothing on the outside. You saw this in Arlington. There's nothing outside to say. There's a UFL game that's going to be played here tomorrow. It's a nice area down there where they've got what's called uptown. They've got restaurants and bars and things just literally across the street, which they block off during game day. Those places had Birmingham stallions banners out. There was nothing on the stadium except for a place that said UFL season tickets and UFL season credential media credentials pick up here and talking to some people down in Birmingham too. They didn't even know when the team played. And frankly, some of them didn't even know who the stallions were, which is surprising to me on a lot of levels because it's a brand that was popular in the eighties and I understand that was a long time ago, but even now, are the marketing efforts just not working that in Birmingham of all places, which is allegedly the football capital of the world and why is this not happening and why are people not showing up? And you've heard all the excuses to read. Oh John, I've heard in, I've heard it's Thunderstorms. It's too hot. I heard they got to be here more than five years. I said, is there a clock somewhere at the city? The city hall have a clock, a countdown clock when this I had, well, it's even though it's $10 tickets, but then they got to spend merch. I said, well, why do you have to? I go to the Mariners, I go to every day game here that the Mariners play that I'm off, I go to, we buy a $10 ticket, I eat lunch at home, I drive down there, I bring a bottle of empty bottle of water and I fill it. I see a game for $10. Well no Reed, they got to buy all this. I go, you don't have to go spend $50 on food and a hundred dollars on merchandise. Go eat across the street, go eat in your car. If it's that big, yeah, it was too wet then it's too hot. Okay, it's too late on the day. Okay, there's this going on and you don't see that. I mean as much as we've poo-pooed on the St. Louis here, I mean they show up except when it's too late on a Sunday I guess, and they have school the next day. But the excuses I saw on this from this weekend was just absolutely astounding to me. And this is A-U-S-F-L conference championship game, which means that you go to the league championship and you've won back to back titles already. Why even if you're the most casual of casual fans, you have to know that this game was being played. Why would you not go to an afternoon game in Birmingham? Who cares? How hot did they not play in hot weather in the original USFL when they were drawing tens of thousands of people to these games? I mean, I guess maybe there's a climate change debate going to happen here that it was hotter now than it was then. But I mean, I don't understand why this is happening and maybe we need to start asking these fans or lack thereof. And is there a marketing effort issue? Are you not interested in spring football? Is it a foreign concept to you because it's only been around for three years? I'd love to know the answer. Yeah, I got comments here and I echo my comments last week again this week going into the championship game, two media availabilities for the Birmingham Stallions. There were skip holds today that you were on. I was recording another podcast here for my actual work. And then there's I think a safety player tomorrow I think I saw on there. So again, it's fine. This is, we're going into the championship game. Why is there not media call every, that's the thing as well is how do you expect the media in Birmingham to care about this when you don't take it? Anthony said today that there was 16 or whatever people on the Skip Holtz call, which at least shows that there's people interested in covering this league when you give them the opportunity to Skip Holtz pointed it out. He said, it's great to see all these people on here that are, you're interested in the league, you're reporting on the league. He appreciated it. And I always appreciate Skip Holtz on these weekly calls because he will. He gives you thoughtful answers. He gives you long answers. You could ask him the dumbest question in the world and he'll answer it for you. I mean, I asked a stupid question about TV ratings and he gave me an incredible answer. But wouldn't it be nice to maybe hear from the, I don't know, the league MVP, who's getting ready to play in the championship game, seems like that would be an availability that you might want to have The league MVP that was benched and then still won. That's a story. Let's talk a story to him. Let's figure out what's going on with that. Let's talk to the new defensive coordinator. There's been a lot of changes there on that end. Let's talk about that. There's lots of things to talk about. And as much as we privately bemoaned the brass, and there are things all year, they have plenty of availability this weekend or this week. You have all the coordinators, everyone set up players, you have open request interviews. That's what you want when you're based in Texas. You need to give people the opportunity to cover this. I just don't understand that. And I mean, if they want to be pissy, pissy about it in the Birmingham, then do better set up another call. It's not hard, Especially these days because like you said, it's all remote. You're not asking a player or a coach to show up to do a one-on-one with a reporter and a camera crew or to go to a TV studio. You sit in front of a computer just like we are and talk about the game. I do wish that there were more availabilities for this because selfishly for us, I mean we would certainly use it, but I would think that, and that's some of these local affiliates who are, frankly, as you know, when you worked in local tv and I did too, this is a great time to find any kind of content to put on your newscast or your sportscast. And to me, it seems like in some of these markets that might actually be interested in Birmingham and in San Antonio and even St. Louis, I mean, it's like, let's try to build this up a little bit. And I don't think it would be that hard to do. Now I don't have those. I don't have that job. They may be dealing with a lot of things that I don't know about or we don't know about, but it just seems to me, hey, hey, Adrian Martinez, who is an incredible interview by the way. Talk about a guy who gives you some thoughtful answers. Put him in front of a camera right now and say, man, you've talked already about, this is frankly not where you thought you would be, but what a great step it is to get back to where you want to be. And now you're the MVP of this league. I mean, what a great story. Well, and especially when in all due respect, and we've heard this, I mean, this isn't just my saying this, but we've heard the announcers don't necessarily always do the greatest job. I think that some are, brother, I don't want to paint everybody with a broad stroke, but we've heard this all the time with the broadcast and all they're doing is talking about the over under and they're talking about getting back to you. They have all these kinds of things. If they're not going to be telling the stories, then that's fine. I get, and they're trying to, not trying. That might not always be the place right in the middle of the UFL broadcast. Let's talk about, we're trying to paint the narrative. And you don't want, do you want to talk about Adrian Martinez being disrespected during the broadcast having the play? I think it's fine. I think you can. But even if you don't want to, then send them up, whatever. Let Anthony write a deep dive for it for Sports Illustrated. Put it up on there. I mean, that's the kind of thing that's going to get these players known. It's free. We talked with Tom Meco about this before. That's the kind of stuff that doesn't cost a penny putting these players out when you're already all there. I mean, this isn't in bc and the guys living in the other side of the whatever and we're trying to get CFL people and they're driving. You're all living in camp. Anyway, I digress with all that. Anything else we want to touch on St. Louis and then we'll get to the other stuff here. But on a positive note here, give me Kevin Coogler and give me Joel Klatt. And not just a single those guys out, but I just did. But those guys don't parachute into these cities and just say, Hey, somebody hand me a roster. Let's call a game. They know these players and they know the story. And Joel clad, he was one of the best analysts that there is out there. I would love to see that kind of broadcast crew do these games. And maybe that'll change a little bit. I mean, there were some very good crews that called these games this past year. I think I said something snarky on your show before it started about ESPN play Byplay guy, I think it was Drew Carter and I said I had socks. I think they were older than Drew Carter. He, he's really good. He has done some really good work there on ESPN, but I think there are some good crews. And then there are others who will give you 15 mispronunciations in the 11th game of the season. It's like, guys, what are you doing the rest of the week? And it's a disservice, not just to us diehards. It's a disservice to those players and to the casual fans who are watching. Appreciate it. Chris, where is it? Go? Chris here gave us a super chat. Again, if you want to be a part of the giveaway here at the end, give two tickets to the UFL Championship game. Well, I can subscribe, be subscribed. You do a super chat that'll get you an extra entry. Or if you join the channel from 99 cents a month, give you another entry. But we'll give you the instructions how to do that, make sure you're subscribed on there and get all that last thing here. And I do want to get to the games. Robert's screaming at us in the chat that we don't even talk about football on here, which even though we do the same format every week and we talk about TV and attendance and then we do, the rally gets the same. I've been here this entire, my life is all this. You wouldn't believe it. I really live my life just wanting to get by day to day and just not, I just really try to live and just be happy. And As Charlie Steiner said about when he says, players are day to day, but we all just want to be happy and get, you want to talk about the Birmingham Stallion's Tea formation? Is that what you're wanting to get into? Well, Yeah. We'll get to that last thing here because this is, and I put a poll out about this. This to me, this was surprising to me from Sunday night into today now, and especially following what I've seen with the TV ratings and stuff today, and comments on my things. So St. Louis here at 30,000 lowest or one of the lowest of the season, certainly lower compared to the playoff game. And I know that they did a lot of promotion behind that and the first playoff game in St. Louis in 20 years and all that stuff, surprising to me. But then what came out of it was after the, because I tweeted of course, when the Brams won, like, well, this is a disaster for the league, obviously, why you wouldn't put the game in St. Louis, all this kind of stuff. And I had a ton of Hawk fans and the comments of that like, well, we don't owe it to the league to show up. Why should we show up next week? Our attendance has been taken for granted all year. I'm sitting out because of the season. I got our season tickets or we're going to be sitting at home. It really took me by surprise because here all year it's been cheering champion supporting St. Louis. This is the flagship of everything that you want to football fan base to be. And then now that they're team side in it, it's like, well, you've just used us the whole season. You don't even care. Really. I was very surprised. I don't understand that attitude from a couple of points. First of all, you were given the championship game there in St. Louis. Now I understand that you are, if you're a diehard Battle Hawks fan and it was just going to break your heart, you couldn't go back to the dome and not see your team play for a championship, that's fine. But for anyone to say that the attendance was taken for granted, that doesn't make any sense to me because anyone who has watched UFL broadcast from St. Louis, what's the first thing they say? Reed? Oh, look at the fans. A lot of fans, we love St. Louis. Look at the fans. This place is crazy. And listen, I've gone to a couple of St. Louis games and it is an awesome atmosphere. It is awesome. When they had a noon Eastern Time kickoff, I was out in the parking lot at like seven 30 or eight o'clock in the morning, Eastern time, seven central. They're out there getting things ready. I mean, double fist and Maker's Mark and Bud Lights, and they're having a good time, the Breakfast of Champions. But for St. Louis fans to say that they're owed something, I don't understand that. Listen, kudos because you supported that team. Now is the time to support the league that your team is in, because if you don't, you're not going to have a league. And what's going to happen if you don't have a league? You're not going to have a team. So I get it to a point, but I also have to say, go out and support the league that your team is in, or at least sell those tickets to somebody because you want this to look good and you want this league to stick around because you're football crazy. It's a football crazy town. And I think there will be a lot of battle locks fans there. Hopefully. It's weird to me, and I want to see if I can pull up this real quick. I do want to talk on the games here because we have fun doing all this stuff, but I do want to do all that. We talked about this before we got on here that, yeah, this is a good map to show up here in just a second. When the CFL does this every year where you have a rotating championship game, and so there's not, yeah, this year BC is hosting and the presumption is okay, BC is going to do everything they can to be in the game. Now, I do not think the BC is going to be in the game. That was my hot take. I think that they don't have the grit to kind of make it the whole way through, whatever. But there's no expectation that your team, your city's rewarded the game. So you go to the game and support the game, like the Super Bowl. You go to the Super Bowl, not necessarily, well, it's because I want the Rams or the Chiefs, or what was it, the Rams Bengals. I want to go be a part of it. And so it is weird to me to see that now because that's always how it's been with the rotating championship game. And we saw this two years ago in Saskatchewan where they were so upset that their rival Winnipeg was in the gray cup, that all the people that had bought tickets, they just sat at home. They didn't even sell the tickets. They just sat at home and kept it empty. And if you look on here right now, that is a ton of resale tickets. That's secondary market right there. Well, the pink is, is all secondary on this man. Remarkable. And Reed, you have to wonder, are these going to get sold? I mean, Who's going to buy these? I can't even give away tickets to the Game, John. That's a good point. Yeah. Who's going to buy these tickets and what is this going to look like? I mean, are you going to have to have another Birmingham? Well, no. I mean, you're buying these tickets, so you have to sit in your seat. It's like are they going to start moving people over on one side so it doesn't look terrible? That's incredible. Wow. Yeah, I mean, that's what WWE used to do is they would sell, we went to one to the Tacoma dump, and as they had, they had an earmarked certain, and then if you got your ticket and went in, they would have a table there. They're like, oh, no, actually we're going to relocate you. I don't know. Well, I mean, you'll have to see. I wouldn't put it past them. I mean, they've certainly done that at a lot of 'em, but yeah, scary, scary stuff here. So let's talk about this. I want to, because I'm sure we will touch more on all of this kind of stuff, but stallions did what Stallions did. Here I am sitting, I'm like, man, Michigan's going to pull this off. I mean, this is going to Be crazy after that first quarter especially. Yeah, Birmingham came back here, scored, what was it, 2020, whatever unanswered points. You're the stallions guy here. What'd you think of this? Was this the stallion's taking care of business or was this the Michigan collapsing? Some people might want to call it the Michigan collapse, but I thought this was more of a testament to what Skip Holtz can do and what he had to do with, for instance, I mean, we got some, you could hear him up trying to coach up Adrian Martinez and making some really good points. He gives clinics when he has that mic on, probably when he doesn't either, but we get to hear some of this stuff. And there was one point where it was like, it's going to be third and 30, and Adrian Martinez throws this hot route, and he comes to him. He was like, listen, I don't have a third and 30 here. So you can't just get rid of the ball that quickly and hope for something to happen. So he had to make a pretty, what might've been a tough decision for him, and put Matt Corral in, and Matt Corral came in and saved the day. Now he had one interception that really wasn't on him. It came off the receiver's hands. But to me, this was more of to answer your, I thought this was more of the Birmingham stallions really kind of figuring it out, especially after halftime with Skip Holtz. And then you saw what Matt Carrell was able to do when he came in. And I don't think Adrian Martinez, I don't know that he was pouting on the sideline or anything like that. Skip Holtz says he's not that kind of guy. So I think this was more of a testament to me, to Birmingham. But maybe as you said, I'm a Birmingham guy and maybe I'm more biased than that. Well, no, and we had a comment here before Danny Etling collapsed. I can't even find it on here now. We have too many different, I think it was David Calmer or Cromer or whatever had said it. But yeah, I mean, the weird thing, yeah, Adrian Martinez bench was he hurt all that coming back with Corral. And now Martinez is the MVP of the league. And I know Pat's taking umbridge of that, where it should have been Adrian McCarran because you saw what the battle hawks were without him. Do you think that's weird now with the Battle hawks, or excuse me, with the stallions, like been Carl Fisher Media going into this championship game. I mean, does that make issues there? Is that more intriguing for you on that side of the ball now? Not particularly, because I mean, quarterbacks just sometimes they have bad games. I mean, he didn't forget how to play football. He just was having a bad game. And it happens. And the question was asked to skip Holtz. I think it was from Scott Adamson. It's like, how confident are you that you can pull another quarterback off the bench or two and you, or even start one, two, or three and not make a bad decision. So we talked about that during the season or before the season. It's like, I mean, that quarterback room is something else. So I don't know that it really, I don't think it's a huge deal. I mean, sometimes quarterbacks get benched. They're not seeing the field. They're just have a bad gamers, you said could have been hurt and not saying anything. They still finish with 365 total yards. That'll beat a lot of teams. So I don't know that some people might talk about it. It might be something to talk about as the game starts, as the broadcast starts. But Skip Holt said today that Adrian Martinez is his starter. Now, he also said, who knows what might happen in the third or fourth series, so there could be some gamesmanship there. But it sounds like he's not lost any confidence in him Abdulah here. Yeah. Question how sure of a leash Martinez has in the championship game? Thoughts on that? I think he's got a pretty long leash. I don't know. I don't think Skip Holtz would want, I mean, unless he's just having, again, throwing hot routes on second and 30 or third and 30. I don't think he's going to do that again. I think he's got a pretty long leash. You don't want to break someone's confidence. I mean, even though this is the championship game, but what happens if you, oh, he had a couple bad passes. I'm going to put in Matt Corral here, and then Matt Corral, God forbid, gets hurt. What happens then? You put a guy that you've just ruined confidence in. I think he's going to have a longer leash maybe than some people might think. I mean, skip Holt has coached a lot of football. He'll know the right length of the leash. Yeah, I was going to say, how did, he has been in this before and obviously gone through all of this, but how did Skip seem in the media call today? Just kind happy to be back. I know he's been super gracious and have, I mean, he is, as much as I want to reg on the stallions talk about the poster for what you want a coach and anybody on that side of the ball could not have asked for a better representative than the first coach with the stallions that they announced back from the beginning. He's been the perfect fit there. And as he said, he had the initial meeting, I think with Brian Woods, and he told his wife, he's like, well, I'm just going to go talk to him. And then he came back and said, well, I took it. And she said, took what? He goes, I don't know. I just took a coaching job. I don't even know where it's going to be. So it did end up being Birmingham and how lucky were they? But you'll have no bigger advocate for spring football than Skip Holtz. And you'll have no bigger advocate for players than Skip Holtz. I mean, he's there to teach. You would think that, and we've talked about what's going to happen with Bob Stoops, what's going to happen with Reggie Barlow? What's going to happen with Curtis Johnson, a lot of these guys. But to me, it feels to me like Skip Holtz has probably had some opportunities, and I'm sure some colleges have probably called after he had back to back championships. And I even thought after 2023, I'm like, skip Holtz is not coming back to this. But I think he's in the right place. I think he's enjoying what he's doing. I don't know that if he would enjoy it more, if he were actually in Birmingham, but there's no bigger advocate for spring football. And to answer your question, he was just like, it was week one or whatever. He's selling the game, but not in a car salesman way. He was selling the game and reasons why people should be interested in this and how good some of these other teams are. And he certainly was talking up San Antonio. I mean, he knows 'em. It's the one team that beat him this year. So he was great. And as you said, he was gracious. I mean, he talked to us for, I mean, I didn't time it out, but probably it was well over 30 minutes, might even been 45 minutes. And we will talk braas here, but does it change better, worse stakes with ever Braas were the ones that gave the stallions, is that, do the stallions know what to look for with the promise here coming up at the championship game, is it better or worse that that's their loss was to the promise? You can't tell me that there's not going to be some offensive wrinkles from both of these teams coming up. So now they certainly couldn't play vanilla. They had championship games last week. So I don't think there's that, but you've got to think that. And that's another thing about having that bi-week. You can work in some different kind of wrinkles in your offense when you have a bi-week before a championship game, because you had to show probably quite a bit when you have these close games in the conference championships. But I still have a feeling that I don't know how much of a takeaway that is. And especially on a neutral field, it might help that they've played each other and they might know some tendencies here and there. And I'm sure they've scouted them for quite a bit here and watched a lot of film, but I don't know how much that you take away from, what was that, a week nine game, and then you had a season finale and then your conference championship. And there's a lot of things to work on between now and then To wrap it up here, we'll get to the Promise Panthers successful season. I mean, I think exceeded expectations. I don't know. I put a pin in the Panthers for right now. You saw my preseason expectations of a lot of teams that didn't come to fruition. But yeah, I mean, I thought if Mike Nolan was going to have any kind of success, he was going to have to win games like six to three. But what he did with it seemed like 17 different quarterbacks. I thought he deserved Coach of the Year, not just because of the way that he worked the quarterbacks, but because of the offense that he had, the defense certainly that he had, and the way that he coached some of these teams to win. I really liked what he did. And to go to a conference championship, I mean, I can't say that that's anything but a success. Alright, let's flip the page here. Let's get over to the Bram is here, battle Hawks. And again, I didn't laugh at it, but I always like, because Mike was talking, Wade, they're upset. I know we talked about this and the voting, and they felt, we saw that this last year with the Renegades and no one thought they were going to do it, and they kind of wore that as a ship going in. And I never don't know. I always have a hard time with that of like, oh, we weren't on the All UFL team really looks like that was the case. And they showed up really ready to play. And I think the Battle Hawks felt a little bit of like, well, we're here. We deserve to be here. I don't doubt. I don't doubt Coach Beck. Right? And it's the same. I feel similarly about the Lions with the CFL and anyone that follows any of that stuff. But we saw this last year with the Battle Hawks at home against the Sea Dragons opportunity to go to the playoffs fail. And we saw it again this year, and we saw it again this year and then come up short. And I don't know if that is a coaching thing, if that's a personnel thing, if it's a mindset thing, if it's a culture thing. I've lamented this with the Kraken the entire season this year. We don't have that killer urge, and I don't think the lions have that, but this is twice now, obviously the week before, not the playoffs, but they missed the playoffs and all this. But basically same situation, back to back seasons winner go home with the battle they lose both times. What do you make of that? Well, I'm not going to be a battle Hawks apologist here, but let me say, we all know how AJ McCarran felt. He made it pretty clear on the broadcast that he did not feel very good. But don't take anything away from Chase Garbers now, because here's the thing, he threw for almost 200 yards in this game, and that was against the St. Louis passing defense during the regular season, I believe was number one in past defense for the year. So they did a lot of things to try to work around that defense, which I thought before the season, they just kept the battle Hawks just kept adding these defensive players like, oh my God, I mean, these guys are going to be great. And they were really good. I don't know what happened with Hakeem Butler. He is such a good player, but there just seemed to be just a few times that either I never played the position, so I'm not going to say that I know, but it just seemed like the ball was right there and he couldn't make the grab. And there were a few receivers that happened with, and I know again, AJ didn't have a great base to throw from because of that ankle, but he was doing a lot. Now that stupid play where they had to throwback a Philly special to him. I mean, I think that was on a conversion. On a conversion. Yeah. Why would you do that? Also, why were you just take a knee before halftime too and you saw what happened? So yeah, I think there were some coaching calls there that didn't make any sense and didn't help 'em out, but don't take anything away from the bras offensively and defensively. And Anthony McFarland, I mean, my goodness, that guy. I mean, that whole offensive, those skill position players are just incredible. And again, I had thought nothing of Chase Garbers, and that guy was playing with a wrist injury and still threw for almost 200 yards against one of the best past defenses in the league. So yeah, the Battle Hawks, I think there were a few calls there. They didn't help themselves, but San Antonio was for real In terms of, yeah, the AJ McCarran thing. I saw the clip. I had it on mute because again, we were celebrating my mother's birthday. But It's good your mother didn't need to hear that language. Yeah. Well, and I love Brock. I'll email Brock and he's been on the show and I listen to him. Yeah, he's great with, he does our Seattle sports here, but it was, yeah, he gets it. So aj, how do you feel like, I feel like, well, okay, so talk me through this, Brock, because I had it on mute, but it looked like Brock walked up to AJ Smith at one point, and AJ Smith just said no and walked away. I was trying to go back and watch it on my phone I had it on mute, but it looked like he was like, Hey, AJ and I talked to you and AJ just like, nevermind. They just walked away. So the sideline things is one thing, but you're in the middle of a playoff game here. I think that maybe that's not the case. The and place for that. Yeah, maybe not, but I mean that's what you've done all season and that's your brand. So I mean, keep to that brand because again, more than a million people were watching this, so I know the game's the thing and that's fine, but man, that million that we're watching both of these games, the over 2 million, this might be the first time they've ever seen any of this. And when they see things like that, and yeah, God bless AJ McCarran. I mean, that was great television. And I guess there was no seven second delay button at Fox and just, I mean, we've heard a few, there's, there were several FCC violations during that game, but man, I mean, if that's your brand, yes, stay with it. I really liked it. Sometimes you get those sideline interviews where the guy just had a 50 yard interception for a touchdown. He's not going to give you a whole lot because he's sucking wind. But those kinds of interviews, I thought it's good. It helps the brand and it helps the people that we talk about a lot. The casual viewer, Jared here says, I like the player interviews. We had another comment, someone sad that we didn't get to see Brandon Silvers play this season. I will just give you a spoiler every here, spoiler. We might have a really good interview coming up with Brandon Silvers at some point. He's been on the show before. We'll see, I don't want to over promise anything, but my dms were a flood this week and could be interesting. So that's my quarterback back all the way back to 1990, or was it 2019 here with going into the XFL dragons and all that kind of stuff. But Oh, We have AJ Ryen. Come on, man. See, that's worse than anything I've said about the battle Hawks. You're right about that. That post game man was emotional. I thought that that was great. I don't, oh, and he Play for his kids and all that. I saw my kid skins his knee when he's playing baseball and I want him to give up and it's okay. I thought, listen, I'm old and sentimental. I thought it was good. Were you surprised that we didn't see Brandon Silvers or see him in a bigger role this year? No, because I think he was in the perfect position last year with aj, and AJ knew exactly what to do with that. I think he fills a really similar road to aj, right? Where he is not super mobile and he's certainly older. I don't know how old Brandon is at this point, but I think he was coming in to just kind of help the room. He was part of it, take a paycheck. And I don't know how all that worked with him being inactive or the backup quarterback all the different times and all the amalgamations of that, but I don't know. I mean, to me it is one A and one B, right? And AJ clearly is a better quarterback, at least at this point, Right? Yeah. I just thought that there might've been a place for him somewhere that he would have a larger role just from what little I saw of him in previous spring football incarnations We have here. Christopher Kleenex is a really good meme going around right now. I like that AJ Fitz fry in with all this creative crybaby Mohawk fans. So we, we'll go hear the hour, we're going to start winding down. But again, in or out, I got to give away these tickets today. So if it's only one person in the chat, we're giving away the UFL championship game tickets, their 50 yard line, they're row M, they're right behind. It'll be the Brams bench. You'll be with the professor Andrew Murray. I'll e transfer them to you. But if you want two free tickets to the UFL championship game, comment tickets in the video, please. At least one person. I have to get rid of these. I've been talking about this for a year now. It feels like. Comment tickets, super chat, give you an extra chance, join the channel, give you, but I got to have someone here today, John. We got to have someone that wants these tickets. I'm not even trying to offload them on that. Make a profit on these. I'm trying to get rid of 'em. Trying to give tickets away to a championship game. The first ever UFL champion. Well, this UFL championship. Good. We got one jaw so far. We got one here. You got five minutes? We'll do the wheel at the end, but if no one else, okay, we got two. So we got at least two. You got a 50 50, but and give the video a thumbs up for God. We got people just a lot of work and I'm getting he, like I said, John, all I want to do is get off this and go watch the Mariners win. Brian w heard our picture. I have other concerns, right? This is like people think I had someone today. Well, your job with, I'm like, this is not making a living. My 99 cent membership is not making it. John, I can't handle this. I donate 99 cents every month and I'm happy to do it. And I thought that was like your retirement fund. It is my retirement. That's the only reason that John was on that. That's Right. I pay to play Tickets. Okay, Christopher's going to try to win and give him away as well. That's fine. Jared, I tickets for $7 is my, I got lots of jobs. I got many hats on here. But anyway, I think we got three people. I keep doing that here. John, let's start previewing here and I'll start putting together this wheel here, but championship game, right? I don't know if this is, and I, believe me, I want the promise to be there. I don't dunno if this is what we want in terms of the braas here with the stallions thoughts on the championship game. I know we're going to do our live show next Sunday, but initial thoughts on that? Well, it's funny, I had a Braas fan on my channel respond. I'm a Brahmas fan, but I would really like to see St. Louis in the championship game just because it would look great on TV and it would help the league. Those people do exist. They're out there. I think this is a great rematch. Skip Holt said today. He goes, it happened. It was right. They got the best two teams, so he felt like San Antonio was the best team out of the XFL. Look, he's super generous with all this. Yeah, yeah, it's good. But Philip's Super chatting here. We got, I don't even think Philip wants tickets, but again, comment tickets. I got to give these away, But I think this is going to be a great matchup. And in the last one, I think it was 18 to nine, and San Antonio's defense is really good. And actually Adrian Martinez had a pretty good game, even though they only got into the red zone a couple of different times and that was really the issue. They were like one for two in the red zone because of San Antonio's defense. So I think this could be a great matchup. I don't want to see an 18 to nine game. I mean, I think it would be better for the league to see something that'd be a little more exciting. I mean, there are good defensive games. There's no question. I remember there was a Seahawk, this was a long time ago. There was a Seahawks Cowboys game that ended, I believe it was 14 to seven. It was one of the best games that I'd seen in a long time. So it can happen, but I don't think that's what people will tune in to see. They want to see some offense. And I think those are two, hopefully with Adrian Martinez and or Matt Corral. It's going to be Adrian Martinez to start. That's the plan right now. And then hopefully Chase Garber's is at least, I don't know about the wrist injury, but let's hope he's healthy enough to have another kind of gain like he had against St. Louis. And I think this is a really good matchup. I mean, I made my pick on a video that I posted today, so if anybody wants to go see that, and as you can see, my prognostication skills are not very good, but we'll see what happens. That's okay. Here. We have a couple comments here. I can say comment tickets if you want. We're going to do the drawing here in just a minute, adding a couple more viewers on here. We talked about this off the top. What's the bar? Attendance out of? The hawks aren't at the big game. Well, it's 22,000 and change, right? That's what the San Antonio had last year. Do you agree, disagree? I would disagree a little bit. I think it's got to be more than that. I think that's a good question for Mike if you're going to get 30,000 when your team is in there, but this is a championship game and I'm hoping to see some fans will travel there that can get there. I mean, you got to have 30,000 people there for a championship game. You just have to. But man, when you showed me that Ticketmaster map of the resales, I mean, that makes me wonder, and I think there's probably some nervous people in the UFL HQ right now. Yeah, I comment that. Zach's checking in here. Zach's joining late. Zach, if you comment tickets, maybe, I know Zach's got his tickets because he's a St. Louis Guy, but maybe Zach's got friends that want free tickets. Zach, be a hero, but win the tickets for your friend. Let's get on Hero ball. Let's go. And then a couple more comments we're going to get out of here. St. Louis is going to get smoked. Now, this isn't even, I mean, this isn't even nice at this point. Jerry Broms for 13 to one underdogs doing the EL championship game. I should bet on it. Was it like Plus 1500 or something like that? Or was it plus 1300? Is that what that was? Is that the 13 to one? I was told there'd be no math. Yeah, I don't. The betting odds are above me here. Yeah, I mean, I know early on the betting odds there, it might've been. That might be what that is. Plus 1300. So if you would bet a hundred dollars, you get what? 1300 back? That'd been pretty good. We got a trickster here. Ticks jk. It's your wife Dorothy. I'm a little concerned that Dorothy is not a member of the channel. Dorothy. Well, I guess she's not. Well, she's, it's five o'clock now. I guess she's off of work now here. But we'll get all that stuff. All right. Yeah. Zach, I don't even know how to spell the word tickets. I worked on that joke all day. Alright, so we're going to do, alright, this is it. We only got four people on here. We're going to give them away and then John's going to get out of here. We're going to shuffle that. Okay? We're going to shuffle the names. We're going to hide this. Chris has got a 50 50 and then we got John. We got to get rid of these. So here we go. The winner, email me the mark has podcast@gmail.com. We're going to etransfer these over and I'm going to be off the Scotts forsaken. There you go, Christopher. We're going right back At yards Baby. So Christopher, we'll just transfer 'em back and forth and give them to someone. We'll get out of here. Christopher gave the other ones or going back the other way. We got to move on here. Like I said, get subscribed to the channel. Season tickets. Two packs going in. Yeah, sorry J Hey J. Hey Christopher. Let's give 'em to J. Can we give 'em to J Chris? We will give 'em to J j's Sad. J came apart with all that. Let's give 'em to Jah J. I'm overriding Christopher J. Send me an email. The mark has podcast@gmail.com. Here we go there. We're going to take care of everybody today. Send me an email, let's get all of that. But two season tickets next year, UFL game. If you're a CFL listener, we'll do jerseys and all that stuff. John, anything else from you? I know you got your video up on your channel. Anything else that you want to touch on? No, I mean you always ask that and people say no and then they continue to talk for like 15 minutes. So I won't do that. But I will say I appreciate you having me on. I think we talked about how last year I thought was the golden age of spring football where we had two leagues and they went all the way to a championship and now those two leagues emerge. We got some really good football, there was some bad football, but we got some really good football and I think we should all be positive about that. And what I think is a great championship matchup coming up Sunday night. I'm looking forward to it and looking forward to getting on here and talking more with you and having you on my channel and we can complain some more about things that have happened. But people do say we're negative. We're negative on a lot of things because we care about the league. There are some rah rah people who want to say, you guys complain too much or whatever. But we complain about things because we care and we want this league to succeed. And I thought my mindset has changed. I told you as the season went along, it was a little clunky on a rollout, but right now we are in a championship game and I think things are even going to be better next year. Yeah, we're getting a lot of jaws. Okay. Yeah, send me the email. There you go buddy. Sit with Andrew Paul Murray who is on the beach right now in Mexico enjoying a much deserved vacation here. Yeah, I will just, my last comment on here, and I'm sure this is all people that are part of all this stuff now, but for people that come on every week and talk about the league, we get more views than anybody candidly. I appreciate that both on Twitter and John gets videos that blow up. John does a very good job of that. But just in terms of these long form, like who the hell is listening to these idiots talk for an hour and a half? So I take that as a sign that we are doing a good thing. So I appreciate that and I understand and we want more football talk at times. We want more, whatever. Sometimes I think we do a good job balancing with that. We had Pat on last week, we did the whole 45 minute segment about the UFO playoffs. I think we do a good balance. But yeah, I'll just say if people weren't watching then I would change what we do, but I can't help it. This is what I am. I was born and this is what I went to school for and I've tried to be honest this and I tried to be objective and John's in the same thing and all that stuff. Okay, this is the last comment we're going to get out of here. Final predictions you guys. Now we're going to do our big show here Sunday so we can subject to change. But I mean want the Brahmas a hundred percent I will buy, if the Brahmas win the championship game, I will buy a Brahmas jersey. I have an all season. I have, I think I just have my dragons ones. I returned my Sea Dragons one. I have the Big Sea Dragons. I returned that one. But I will buy Abras. I want the yellow Jersey. John, are you sticking with your Birmingham Pony boys or what do you say here? It's very hard for me to pick against Skip Holtz and what he has done with Birmingham. So yeah, I really think that Birmingham, yes, to answer your question, yes, I think Birmingham is going to beat San Antonio. Would I be surprised if San Antonio won? Absolutely not. Here's the thing. I'm hoping for a good game and read. Let's just hope they all have fun And let's all have fun. And just in case anyone's curious about John Lewis's prediction, Finally looking at the schedules, I predict both the Houston Roughnecks and Michigan Panthers to finish the season at two and eight. And the San Antonio bras maybe just a single win with Wade Phillips. So there you go. They go with a grain of salt. John, I appreciate it, j. I've already got your email. I'll send those over to you when you get off here. Appreciate it. Like and subscribe, share the video. It doesn't cost you a penny. Give a thumbs up, all that stuff. We'll see you next time. Go Mar. There's next.

CFL Week 1 Results + Reactions! Winners and Losers From CFL 2024 Week 1!!

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast Reid here. Here we are back again, another CFL season here. Week one in the booked here. It's Monday afternoon here, four o'clock Pacific Hussy is getting home from work. We are standing by for him. He'll be joining in a few moments, so why don't you go ahead and give me some comments, things we can run through while we wait for Hussy. I have some announcements to make as well. We could look through the week ahead, do some recap stuff. I have thoughts for all four games. Really excited to talk about that and then we will get Jason on here as soon as he can. I think we had dog issues chewing on microphone cables or something we'll get Jason on, but give me your thoughts, what'd you think of the week? Surprises, winners, losers here, BC Lions, what the heck is going on? We will talk about that for sure. Tro Ettes. That looks like the best team, best team in the sport right now. Very excited for that as we get everyone on here. Thanks so much for joining CFL. Recap today. Week one, like I said, recap Jason Hussey tomorrow. Same time John Lewis. John Lewis Sports will be joining A very, very crazy UFL playoffs. Crazy I'm not expected here. St. Louis Battle Hawk fans. Revolting. We're going to sit on our season tickets. We're not going to the playoff game. Really wild there. John Lewis has some bad takes to amend for. We will get to all of that and then no regular Friday episode this week. We will take that off. We will be live on Sunday for the UFL championship game. We will be there. Andy, the professor Andrew Murray will be there. He's on vacation right now at Mexico. Maybe he's watching this from the beach. I know he was reading Paul Woods's book about the Argonauts here yesterday in between at the UFL playoff game and the CFL game. Maybe the professor is checking in but we will be there live on Sunday with Professor Andrew Murray, Anthony Miller. I think Pat Rafino is going to call in Mike Mitchell. All of that. So lots of UFL stuff talking CFL today. Yes, baseball fan Battle Hawks went from, they've really become the heels of the league here at this point. The Battle Hawk fans of like, well we don't need to support this league. Our attendance has been taken for granted all season. I'm really excited to get to all of that with John like and subscribe here. We just crossed 3,500 subscribers. If you're new to the mix, we gave two free tickets to the UFL championship game. We're going to give away some season tickets next year. If you are feeling out of the loop, you're a Canadian listener or you do not watch the UFL, don't worry. We always tend to get and I can collect some more really nice jerseys from Royal retros we can give away. I think we got a Doug Flutie one before. I know we've had a couple of different CFL ones. We can get some of those vintage from Royal Retros so if you feel like we'll read, I don't care about the UFL season tickets or championship tickets, all that, we'll hook you up so like and subscribe doesn't cost you a penny. You can join the channel 99 cents gives you a fun little seal. You can be like foosball fan here. Get the fun little and next to your name but we will do all of that. But yeah, do you join the channel 99 cents a month or else like and subscribe, share the video, give it a thumbs up. Doesn't cost a penny. Really appreciate that. Yeah, Tim Capper token in here I will say, and we did our pregame show ahead of the kickoff game. I thought it would be a coin flip, a really, really I guess not surprised with how well the ettes looked but I guess just surprised with how poor the blue bombers looked really wasn't close. I know we had chip gate, we had the chip dilemma. We lived through all that USFL fans, so all about the weight of the chip and the ball. They released the statement, I think it was Friday in between. So I think some of the games got to use the non chipped kicking balls for the special teams plays. Some didn't. I know Sergio Castillo friend of the program had complaints about that for the Blue Bombers game. I think it was the blue bombers ball spotters said no that wasn't the case. That there they had the chip ball that they were keeping track of all that. I'm curious about all of that. We did get a statement about that came out like I said, I think Friday, so I guess if you're the blue bombers it's just cry foul at this point. I don't think it would've made that big of a difference to the final score if we look at that, but I did have that here. How can we present that on here? Really just interesting because just as someone that's kind of lived through all of this, so let's get rid of Tim stuff here as we lived through all this with the USFL, really just surprised that through all the preseason and using the microchip balls and all of that, that they didn't, I guess foresee that being an issue. Look around, I know that was a pretty public thing with the USFL. They had the chip balls. I had very many friends that were special teams players with the USFL back two seasons ago that complained about the chips in the balls. I saw many photos of bruised feet, really bloodied feet, toes kind of from kicking the ball with the chip and the complaints with all that. So just really surprised but obviously the CFL coming out am Rosie here with the statement kind of figuring all of that out. But if you're the blue bombers, if you're suer Geo Castillo, I think you have a vow complaint there. I wouldn't necessarily put an asterisk next to the game against the owlettes. I don't know if it would've made that big of a difference, but certainly glad to see but I don't know. I really thought we would've seen that ahead of time. But hey, welcome to the CFL using it. We got the true, was it the true line TrueView? Whatever that the UFL has now with ball spotting and it's a 0.5 inches or whatever to the first down marker was so good to see that but really interesting. A little bit of controversy here coming out of week one, but it is what it is here. Jenna is checking in. Let's go. Red Blacks really curious to see what the Red Blacks look like this weekend. They were obviously on their buy coming in, they will be playing on Thursday here, opening up Winnipeg at the Red Blacks. Not always the best home record the Red Blacks have, so we'll be curious for that. And obviously Winnipeg looking in here to avenge what I would say is a pretty embarrassing loss. I'm curious in the chat if anyone has any thoughts about the blue bombers. I thought they came out really slow. I thought there was all this talk. Okay, did they play enough players in the preseason? Did they not? Okay, were they saving too much? And I know it's a marathon and I know it's just one game but it is something to keep in mind. Slow start. I think Calero always starts slow so I dunno if I would get that wound up about it, but certainly exciting here. I'm an Owlettes fan, I don't want to jump on that. Tim and Cliffy is a bandwagon too much, but if we have to have a team of the east, I'll take the mantra Alouettes for that. Really, really excited for them and like I said, really just excited for Cody and all the guys there and the outlets have always been really great media wise getting players on the program so I certainly appreciate that and it just makes it really easy to cheer for a team like that. I think the UFL would behoove much more to do that and start to kind of get players more out if they're not going to be in the communities doing a lot more remote interviews and things that help. I think it helps the players or the fans get to know the players and kind of put their name out there and their stories and all of that. Allier says, I think it's just kicker's crime over a 13 grand chip laces would affect the fly the bar. I'll just say from having lived real time through the SFL season where they had the chipped balls, it very much is an issue. I did see photos and players going to the doctor and having that looked at and there was a lot of, I'm very much afraid of getting cut from the USFL so I don't want to say too much during the season that I think was very prevalent during that, but I do know just having seen firsthand photos spoken to players firsthand that it very much was an issue with the USFL. So I get it and I get that it certainly didn't seem to affect the ettes kicker and then the math of okay, did it affect the game the next day that were they able to pull the balls because that would've been the Calgary game and Renee looked really good. I think he was five for five, whatever with the field goals. Did that affect all of that? We don't know but no, I think it's a valid issue. I think it's a valid issue. Hussy is getting on here. We'll get him on here. One more comment while he gets logged in. Benjamin Cameron, Dukes looked good. Cameron Dukes looked phenomenal. All Chad Kelly who I have to say here. Let's bring in Jason. Jason, I got a lot of thoughts about all this as he dug into this Dr. Pepper whatever here. Jason, did you get your room all cleaned up from the dog attack? Kind of but the show must go on. Well I appreciate it Jason. Really, really exciting here. Kind of setting the stage for all this today. Jason and I will do our best week by week on here. Do our CFL recaps. Summer gets really busy for me. I know Jason's busy with work stuff as well. We will do our best. We'll try to get some special guests. I think maybe we could coordinate with Anthony Miller at some point before it's illustrated. I know Mike Mitchell's always Jones in to hop on all these, so we'll figure all that out. I prefer the later time slots on Monday and I know you can get home from work, but sometimes I work a lot of weekends. I worked all day Saturday with the dance performance that I had to film but I was able to catch up all day today so it almost works out better for me than the 8:00 AM start where I'm like, okay, I'm trying to do my best here to catch up. So I've watched all the highlights, I've watched all the recaps. I'm fully invested in this. Ready to go. Jason, what'd you think of week one? Four really good games as far as I can tell. Yeah, absolutely. I thought that the thing that stood out for me in comparison to the recent years in particular is the quarterback play. I thought that pretty much every quarterback except for maybe Zach Callis played pretty decently I thought. And I think that's a great sign for this 2024 CFL season. Yeah, I know there was a lot of talk obviously with Chad Kelly and all of that. Cameron Dukes is running around the field like crazy. I saw that. I want to know what the hell happened to our bc, my BC lions and everything. We also have news here. I just before, where did I got it saved here somewhere. It's going to be the last one I opened. I want to get your thoughts kind of breaking news before we get into all this. Your Thai Kats here signing to his brother here to Aya tga. What do you think about this? You got Bo, I mean what's going on here? What's the strategy? Well I think that anytime a rookie comes up to the CFL at quarterback that usually you're never really expecting them to play year one. I think that the idea is to let them learn the game and unless you're put into a Taylor Powell situation last year, you don't want them to play. So I think I'm tempering my expectations for it. Obviously I'm excited. Obviously he has the big name from his brother playing in the NFL, but I think that at the end of the day he's going to have to wait his turn here in Hamilton and I think if he can just establish themself in year one, being humble coming into the league, I think that's the biggest thing that some of these bigger name players face when they come up with the CFL is that they're not really prepared for the challenge and I think that the league can really humble you if you're not prepared like that. So I think that's something I'm looking forward to and I think my expectations are very high. Like I said. Yeah, I think it's the player being unknowing coming up to the league and I also think it was Naylor two years ago we were talking when the USFL was getting off and he's like, it's a three to four year learning process to be a part of the league. You're like, okay, I get it. But then I also think were we doing off season stuff with quarterback clinics to try to get these players that was that a fever dream? I think it's okay to not have it be. I think quarterback is the hardest thing in the world anyway and quarterback and the CFL let's not this b, DE of our league is so much harder. I think let's get some of this going to get these players up here because like you said, all these leagues thrive off quarterback played, but especially the CFL and getting the ball down the field, I think it would behoove to not have it be like, well you got to go through a four year training camp to get to the point. Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with just the scarcity of starting spots. You only have nine of them in the league and you look at the guys that are in there, most of these guys have waited a long time before they even got a chance to be starters in this league. Guys like Trevor Harris, McLeod, Bethel Thompson were Cody Vado were backups for years in the CFL before they got a chance to start. So I mean I think that's a big part of it but I'm with you that I don't think it should take that long for guys to get a shot. I think that the Chad Kelly model, not to use him in a positive sense, but the fact that he sat on the bench for one year and then was able to be a starter in year two, I think that's a more realistic model going forward and I think the league just wants you to, they want you to believe that you're in it for the long run and not just thinking that you're going to take the league by storm in year one. So Yeah, I think it's as simple as gone through this quite personally with Paul and I getting involved in all this. Yeah, I do think there's just like CFL on both sides. I'm like this is our thing and don't be coming in here thinking there was that Johnny Menzel stuff, was it last week or the week before where he was like, well the CL used me and I'm like, I think the CFL probably would've been fine. I think it was definitely a mutually beneficial at that point of Johnny Menzel, Hey let me go up here and kind of try to jumpstart all of this and also the CFL, God forbid, hey this would be a good signing to do. I do think it was mutually beneficial to both. I don't think it was the CFL leaching off of Johnny Menzel. A hundred percent. Yeah, every league uses its players. I mean that's really the only thing I think. I don't really get what he was saying there. That was just a crazy time. It's amazing how many Johnny Manzel jerseys you still see at Tigercat games how many years later A lot of people fell for the hype and this is what I'm talking about with these big name players coming up here. They don't necessarily always work out Johnny, at least he was on the roster. He actually made the roster because there's a lot of guys that came up here and they don't even make it through their first training camp in the league. Yeah. Chris here at Johnny Manzel clan, we got Mike here, our usual UFL commentator, great to see Cleod, Bethel Thompson wondering where he went. We will talk about McLeod with the Elks man. They almost had that. We will get to all that mod here. I love the CFL. CFO doesn't groom, they're in quarterbacks very well. I would agree with that. Like I said, I think it's like it's more cut through iron kind of philosophy of that makes sense back in the medieval like well sharpen through iron, right? We're going to get you through all this. I don't know if you're a new viewer on here, like I said, make sure you subscribe. We'll be live here every week and then we will do as always our big breakup show this year in Vancouver I assume. I hope pussy's coming out later. We'll get remote but hussy be there. We are going to have a big we coast contingent. I think Pat Rafino wants to be there. I know Andy wants to be there. Obviously my wife's going to be there. Well it's going to be a big shebang. So anyway, subscribe, be a part of all of that and just join the family. It makes me feel really good. It's a lot of work here to do these every week and I certainly appreciate Jason doing this and saying that Andy is done with all the UFL stuff. It's really hard to, I just watched the games and come on and started the thing. Jason has to have really smart things to say so I appreciate all of that. Jason, let's get into, so we did our pre-game show and I will give credit to Cliffy of the outlet slide deck podcast. We did our hot takes and I don't know if you Canadians necessarily know what a hot take is. I think you guys are all too nice. I think the tie cuts are going to look really good this year. Hot Takes is like Chad Hill's going to flame out and be out, whatever, but Cliffy said hey keep an eye out for Tyson Phil Pot and holy god, at least in this first game, Tyson Phil Pot looks really good. Like I said, checkout Tim and Cliffy over the outlets Fight Tech podcast and full credit for that. I mean the Ettes looked phenomenal in this game, right? Yeah, they look great. They looked like a great cup champion. I think that they're a team that is very complimentary on both sides of the ball. I think the big question I had for their offense coming into the year was Austin Mack going on to the NFL. I think that they really needed someone to step up in that receiving core and that very well meet maybe Tyson Philpot. Yeah, Tyson Philpot looks great here. Obviously two tds ton of targets here, 10 of 11 on that was really cool. The symmetry where they're like the first touchdown of the season was the last touchdown of the season with Cody and him and connecting and obviously we were there in Hamilton and that was a huge shebang. Yeah, I dunno, I think people were worried if that was a fluke last year, can Montreal do it again? And I know and new listeners and most of the viewers here probably watch the C ffo more than I have, but it is a marathon. You can't read too much into week one. But I mean Ettes look like the real deal here and this was a really good team they played and I want to get to the blue Bombers kind of faults here, but how impressed I guess just for you that they were able to run it back out here. I do think there was a lot of going into the off season, we were underestimated. We had the thing on our shoulders and all of that, but then to come out and look just as good as they did at the end of last season. Well I think when you look back to the recaps that we did last year, what was the thing that we always said about the ettes? They were like 11 and oh against all the bad teams in the league and and seven against all the good teams in the league. And obviously that changed in the playoffs, but this is more impressive of a win than they had all of regular season last year and I'm ready to really crown them as the best team in the CFL right now because of this performance. They really showed out on both sides of the ball. Like I said, that defense looked just as good as they did at the end of last year and I think a big part of that is keeping a lot of those players intact and I think you're also starting to see a little more of creativeness from the offense for the ettes. I think Jason Moss and Cody Fido in year two, they're willing to take a little more deep shots down the field and I think you saw that in this game with that flee flicker touchdown to Tyson Philpot late. Well and that was the thing that I thought Cody looked phenomenal. I know he had the one pick, it was kind of went through the guy. It is one of those, it went through the hands and the guy got it. I know it's an interception but it's one of those, it wasn't like he threw it in the open coverage or whatever, but I thought he looked, yeah, that flee flicker. We had done the show, I kind of posted everything. I brought my laptop inside, we were watching it having dinner and I'm like, I just see Cody just absolutely go. I mean it was a pretty impressive throw I thought from Cody on that. I thought he looked great and I saw him going into the stands after the game and kind of celebrating and all that. I mean for them to come into, what is it now, princess Automotive Stadium or whatever. I'm going to always call it IG Field, all I know it has, but Princess Automotive to go in there and I know it's not like the Baron Tundra of November whatever, but to go in there and win I think is pretty impressive. And to shut the Blue Bomber fans up I think is pretty remarkable. Well, weren't they like 37 and three in the last four years or something like that at home? Really, really impressive records. So I think Gallos actually have two of those wins now because think a couple of years ago Blue Bombers were nine and oh going into that game when they played the ettes and then they upset them in overtime. So yeah, it was a really impressive game this week from the Ettes and I think that it can only get better going forward for them And I knew Andy was checking in here at the beach, Andy's in Mexico with this girl. I shot CL flag that big year for Tyson pop fill pot off to a tremendous story. I knew that I knew Andy. Andy can't escape from the CFL talk here in terms of, I like what you said about the creativity, letting Cody maybe have a little bit more freedom out there. I thought he scrambled really well. I want to talk about that later when we get to Veon Adams and kind of him getting beat up. But it felt like Cody kind knew when to run, was able felt aware enough and be able mobile enough in that way. I just think Cody has looked phenomenal since I know he had that dip last year being hurt and then he came, I think he was on the show and he was coming back from injury and then really was lights out the rest of the season and really great for that. I think Cody like Vernon kind of feeds off the confidence a little bit, right? If I'm doing well Vernon, as we saw last year with the Argonauts falls apart, I think if it gets a little too heavy on him, I think Cody's a little bit emotional like that as well. But as long as you can protect him and give him the weapons, I just think Cody looks phenomenal. I couldn't be happier for the man. Yeah, completely agree. In terms of the excuse Blue Bombers here, Zach had the interception, right end zone interception. They're like what they call it like, oh save some points for, I'm like, that's a big deal here. Save the touchdown on that. There was a lot made, he played a little bit of preseason but the guys didn't, not all the offense was out there. What do you make of that ball? Didn't Zach start slow last season as well? I'm trying to think how we started last year. I mean, yeah, I would have to look back at that, but yeah, no, I think that he looked extremely off in this game. I thought his accuracy was terrible. He had very many chances to hit his receivers for big plays and he just certainly just did not take advantage of those opportunities and I think we will talk about this as well, but Kenny Lawler's injury going forward, that's going to be huge for this team. I don't think this team has as big of a margin of air that they've had in years past because their defense is not as good. Their offensive line looked a lot weaker in this game. I think a lot of that has to do with JaMarcus. Hardrick being gone to Saskatchewan now. So I think there's some problem signs here for the blue bombers, but again it's just one week so we don't want to overreact. We saw Reer come in, he had a couple of runs, he had the one where there was the angle twist from the defense. I saw him, he was really upset about that. How did Reer look? I mean just kind same as always. We're not going to expect too much from him. Just the short yardage guy. Yeah, I don't think this is a guy that even when he was starting in the CFL before, he was never really a bonafide number one starting quarterback. So I don't think this is a guy that you can really expect to take the reins for more than a handful of weeks or so if Claris goes down to have any kind of success. So I think this is kind of the perfect role for him in the CFL. We still have Drew, what's his, the backup last year? Is he moved on now the Drew, drew Brown. Is it Drew Brown? Oh, drew Brown. Yeah, he's with Ottawa. He's going to be their starting quarterback starting this week against the Blue Bombers. Okay, without Mazzoli. So I'm coming off of UFL coverage here. So is Mazzoli still, what's his timetable? I believe Mazzoli is in training camp. I haven't been following the Red Blacks camp too closely, but I do know that Drew Brown is the starting quarterback for the opening of the season and Dustin Crom is still there. So you got quite the crowded quarterback room there in Ottawa And yeah, forgive me, people coming off of UFL coverage for the last whole week getting my feet wet against CFL who are working through all this. I liked when I Ted Wyman on and shout out Ted Wyman who is undergoing chemotherapy, really scary. He was on, didn't know what was going on, got diagnosed. Hopefully he's in recover but he's like re I don't even know how you remember what you're talking about today. I'm like, well at least I appreciate that Ted. At least Ted has sympathizes with all that stuff. Yeah, Maji here has, yeah, with Lala being out, we saw that the mis catch in the end zone kind of came down flat on his back with that, presumably that or one of the other. You think that's a major issue here? I mean obviously you saw have Dalton show in the world, tar ski demsky, we have a lot of weapons there, but you think he's that big, big of a miss there? Well I think Kenny Lawler, when he's playing his best, he's arguably still the best receiver in this league. I think for the last, especially if you look at the sample size the last three years, I think that he's right up there in terms of being at least a top five receiver in this league. So anytime you miss that and his field stretching ability because he's a guy that can affect you at all levels of the defense. He can create big plays for you but also big catches over the middle. So I think that he is a really important aspect of this Blue bombers offense. And obviously they got other guys like Sean and Berra, but I think a big part of that offense is just what they have in Kenny Lawler In terms of Vera here, a lot was made and right. Was it? I know it was BC was in the mix and was it Hamilton? I can't believe there was another team in the mix in the east for Vera. He's back here, 11 carries for 38 yards. It didn't do a lot. Is that more him falling off? Is that just the Ettes D, which I thought looked really good and kind of like almost a bend don't break, they got in field goal position. I want to talk about your thoughts on the chip ball. I talked about that off the top, but they wouldn't let them hit the end zone, if that makes sense. I thought the ettes, but what did you make of all's performance? Well it was certainly underwhelming from a guy that a lot of people thought was the MOP last season, but I think it's far too early to just judge a running back specifically on one game because like you said, they're going up against a great Montreal Alouettes defense and the fact that they were able to get up on the on blue bombers early, it really took out the running game a lot of the time from the factoring into the game. Yeah, I just was just surprised here and we will touch it and move on to the other games here. It just really wasn't even close. They got a little bit of points here at the end, but just really surprised just I thought it would be a little bit more 50 50 on that. What's your thoughts on the chip ball? Because Sergio talked about that. I talked and we read the statement and the USFL stuff and I know they switched it then. So was it switched by the Calgary game in terms of preis not having to deal with it? So I mean really weird that then to me I would keep all week one the same and then switch. It seems really weird to me to switch the rule between games one and two. What did you make of that? Yeah, I thought that was a very, it was a needed switch I think from the CFL given that basically all kickers around the league were complaining about this, but it was little unanimous. But I think that I'll defend the league from their perspective of the fact that we are in an age of wanting to acquire all kinds of data from tracking plays and everything like that. We're in a very analytical age and I think it is useful to get numbers from any aspect of the league, but I think when it affects the ball that much, maybe Castillo is just using it as an excuse, but I really don't think so. I think that the chip ball can play a factor even though it's just, I don't even know how it's very light, it's very small percentage of the ball. But I think at the end of the day it definitely can throw an athlete off and I think that's a big part when you're putting in these crackers, these sensors into the ball. I think that you have to make sure it's okay with the athletes that are using it and doesn't affect them more than it normally would. It's weird because the USFL used it more as a first down marker and now that's what they use. There's no even chain gang anymore with the CFL as far as I pay attention is still using that and like you said, using it more for the analytics. But yeah, I saw photos of players with very, very damaged and bruise feet from kicking those balls last year or two years ago. So I would trust them. And like you said, I think special teams players are players of habit anyway and they're very used to all of that stuff and the laces and the snap and all that, but it's a large amount of force going into the bladder of a football kind of sailing. And I think when there's a immovable hard object in there of any size, I think it's, like I said, I talked and saw, showed I have the photo. If I showed the photos on here, it'd be like, ooh, that's kind of gross. So it didn't seem to affect the ettes kickers at all, but obviously Sergio was kicking from a further distance I think as well. I think the ettes, the ones that I saw at least were closer on anything else from the ettes blue bombers before we move on? Well I wanted to point out one specific moment earlier in this game, Derek Wiggin, who's a longtime Calgary stamp, Peter who surprisingly left the team this off season, signed with the Alouettes. He had a sack early in this game and TSN wasn't very careful with the Mike placement on the sideline and kind picked up an F bomb there. I heard that and said they didn't F and want me. So I thought that was great for him, great moment for him and he's a long time veteran in this league. I think he's played about 10 years, a Canadian guy and it was a long time starter for the stamp. So I mean it's always good to see players have that moment. I want to shout out as well, and I'm glad that I remembered the look at this before we got into lets, I want to shout out James Ery Jr here, a friend of the show, couple big, nothing crazy, but a couple of big punt returns. It really has ever since he came on the program last year, if you were a quarterback, avoid the show like the plague. Ben Holmes Great Cup Champion after a no show in the show, Macco Bethel Thompson. They were undefeated until he was on the show with USL. But if you are a special teams player, come on the program here, James Letcher is really, really phenomenal I think in terms of the outlets for their return game here. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and it's worth mentioning that they had Chandler worthy who was outstanding a return man and they decided to keep Letcher over him. So All right, let's get on here to the Bose. This was the Bose big homecoming in Calgary here. Calgary Mayor looked really good. Like I said, I caught up on the highlights today with this. I thought Bo looked fine as well. Jim Butler was looking good for the Calgary side, Dietrich Mills really, really having a day all across the field. What was your takeaway with this one? Well, I thought both quarterbacks played very well. Actually. I thought that Bo, this was probably the best I've seen from him since he's come to Hamilton. One thing that stood out for me with him is that he was moving around very well. I thought he was using his feet, which is something you definitely don't see regularly with Bull Levi Mitchell. So that's a promising sign for the tie cats. And I think that if the Tie Kat receivers could catch the damn ball, I think they had at least five drops in this game and including a huge drop that would've been a touchdown to Tim White. And that was a beautiful throw. So Bull Levi Mitchell would've easily been over 350 passing yards if the Tyca receivers could catch the ball that game. And I think it's an encouraging performance for him. And then I think that Tim White had a very poor game, like I said, the drop, but he also had a couple of other drops as well. He had a bunch of targets, but he just wasn't able to come down with a lot of 'em. And I think that's a guy that they really need to count on going forward because I mean this is a guy that led the league in receiving last year and then, oh Sorry. Yeah, I was just going to say, yeah, Tim White's normally automatic, so that's just really surprising. Sorry, I just wanted to interject that. No, that's okay. And I would actually say he's not automatic because I think he's just a very hot and cold player. He goes through these very cold stretches, but then he can get hot and become the best receiver in the league for a handful of weeks. And we saw that in the playoffs last year against Montreal held to zero catches. James Butler here, 119 yards looks really good in terms two of the Levi's of it all, like you said, really kind of seeking contact, a couple really hard runs, felt like he really still is very invested in all of this. And I think there was a lot of, okay, he came in and didn't he restructure his contract now to stay another year, but he was in the boot watching the game because there could be a lot of, I think he could just kind of sail off or mail it in or do, I mean Beau seems like I am still very much want to prove that and like you said, even taking long shots down the field, we didn't see necessarily all that arm strength last season as well. Yeah, you can't question his Levi Mitchell's dedication to the game and I think he clearly loves this league and wants to be a part of it long-term, even beyond his playing career I think. And I think that he says with his effort in this game, like you said, I think it shows that he's not done playing. He wants to really give it his all for at least this last year here in Hamilton. And I think that we really saw that in the game this week. Whenever I think of Bo, there was a WWE wrestler that was Bo Dallas and he said, I want you to bo leave. And that's how I always think about Bow. And he would come out and he'd do the thumbs up, you got the bow leave here, Tim White might've been playing injured was the game time decision. Chris, we've got a lot of Tim White stance, Tim might be good. Get that rest, shake it off next week. I want to talk Calgary here, but Hamilton obviously you're the Thai cats, you got the jersey, all that. Toronto looked really good, right? We will see Ottawa here over the weekend. Are the tie cats equipped here? I mean, you got Butler, you got a couple good targets here for Bo. Do they have enough to make a run here? I think offensively they have the Playmakers to potentially go on a run here and if looks like he did this week, I think that they could have the quarterback play in order to compete with those teams. But I'm more concerned with the defense based on what I saw this week. I think that there's a lot of change that defense underwent this off season. Obviously the retirements of Simone Lawrence and Ted Laurent, their two longest tenured players, that's huge. But they also lost guys in the secondary lost other guys in the line backing Core as well, Jamir Thurman. So they're starting a bunch of new guys out there and they didn't have Jamal Peters who was their big off season signing from Toronto at corner in this game and his replacement kind of got cooked in this game. So we'll have to see how the defense looks when he's back in there. But I was not impressed by the TCATs defense whatsoever in this one. I thought they didn't really generate much pressure on Jake Mayer in this game. And that's something you have to do in order to throw Mayer off his game. Calgary here on the other side. Jake Mayer looking pretty good here. We talked a lot of the Jake Mayer game, 40 of 45 completions 115 yards or whatever the hell his stat line used to be here. A little bit more respectable. 2 52 on this playing good moving there. Like I said, Dietrich Mills having a good day all over the highlight reel for all of that stuff. But what did you make of Calgary here? Who, and I talked with Ryan Valentine ahead of the season, they made the playoffs, but is it enough to make the playoffs is the six win team and then get kicked? I don't like that. It's like well that's fine. The we playoffs. Okay, everyone has a safe seat for the next season here. So what did you make of Calgary? Well, I thought Jake Mayer looked like a brand new guy. This guy looked like he did his 2022 version of himself, not 2023. And I think that this is a guy before last season, I had pegged as the second best quarterback in the CFL. I had that much confidence in him and that is what we saw in this game. I thought that he was just incredibly efficient and one thing that stood out to me, and this is same for Bo Levi Mitchell was the mobility I thought that Ma looks like he's in tremendous shape. He looks like he's moving around a lot. He's never going to be a tremendous athlete or anything, but he's a guy that can run some bootlegs now and he made several throws rolling to his right or left. And I think that is a new element to this Calgary offense that we didn't see last year. Yeah, foosball fan here. Who's a big UFL? Excuse me, that pops up here. CFL quarterback Scott. Good sense. Yeah, I mean I feel like we're getting back to this. We got into the CFL kind of in the pittance and following the covid year and kind of all this stuff. You said quarterback play looks good across the league thus far. I mean it's one week of many, many, many. But yeah, we're we're pushing the ball down the field, we're making movement. It felt like these games had a little bit of momentum where sometimes in the past it's like, all right, three, two and out, two and out. It felt like gameplay felt a little more refresher. Sure. Maybe it's just I've been desensitized watching UFL stuff for the last 10, 12 weeks, but if you're okay with that, I think this is a good football as well. Yeah, for sure. I think this is, like I said, the best opening week of quarterback play that I've seen since the CFL returned in 2021. And what's cool too, and we've gotten into a lot of the UFL and the attendance and the ratings and all that, there's just so much history in the game here with the CFL and even I'm so glad we did the Gray Cup rematch for week one and we didn't get that last year, or it wasn't until week 18, it was whatever, right? Toronto was resting at that point. It didn't mean anything. And I like that week one we're able to reflex like, man, the last time these teams met and think about that and it was the winner and we had all this stuff and Cody and then they come back out. I thought that was really cool. We're doing good on time here. Anything else with this game? I agree with you Jake Mayer looked really well, looked really good. Renee Perez obviously kicking the ball fine without a lot of field goals in this one, but anything else to take away? Well, I think for Calgary, one thing I wanted to point out was the returns of Clark Barnes and Jalen Philpot to the fold. Both those guys in the case of Philpot, he missed all of last year with injury. He's a guy that they were really counting on to be a star player, at least a starting Canadian player in that receiving corps last year. And he missed the entire season. Barnes was, I believe he was still named their most outstanding rookie despite only playing half the season and they both had very good games in this one. So maybe a nice little one two Canadian punch there at receiver for Calgary and I think that's huge with that Malik Henry injury that he suffered in the preseason. Yeah, just a couple comments here, Chris. A great rematch with Quin. Yeah, I think it is a no-brainer. It's the same with last season where we beau and never went back to college. There was just really weird stuff last year and I know that, okay, then maybe wait an extra two weeks to make the schedule. We can kind of figure this stuff out and I know we're dealing with availability and all that and then here at Maji Clark Barn taking this game to the next level. Exciting stuff there. Let's get to, let's see if my tabs will open here. Well let's start talking. I got to pull it up here. Let's talk about Edmonton, Saskatchewan here while I get that pulled up here. I thought Edmonton had it for a long time. Saskatchewan came back. What did you make of that one and what'd you make of a cloud be Thompson? Yeah, so I was watching this game with my brother and we were both pulling for the Elks. We were like, they've been through so much these last few years and getting a win at home to start the season would be such a big deal for this team. And it looked like they had it. Like I said, like you said, for the longest time I thought that the offense was moving the ball pretty well through three quarters of this game. And I think that they clearly have some talent on that side of the ball, but this defense in the second half in particular looks just as bad as I expected them to be this year. I thought that they just completely whipped on a bunch of coverages late in this game. Trevor Harris made one particularly great throw where it was a pretty good coverage on the play to Sean Bain. But other than that, I thought that the Elks made a lot of mistakes defensively and then ultimately they had a chance to win it at the end, or at least tied up at the end. And McLeod, Bethel Thompson, that's where he turned the ball over twice. So I think otherwise it was a very good game for McLeod, but I think at the end you got to come clutch and make the plays when it matters the most. Yeah, I thought this game really came down to the wire was far more exciting than I think it had any right to be here in the last, because you think in there the last two minutes, this is kind of over and then it really did. They had that last RAs going in. I know he threw the pick there. He had the drop kind of fumble handoff earlier in the game with McLeod. I don't know, you'll never convince me that putting your time and energy behind Trey Ford wouldn't prove more sustainable in the long run. I don't know. I've dealt with this with the WWE for years and okay, we've dump money behind Roman reigns for 10 years, but if you had taken that same time and energy and split it up over two or three guys in the same time period, would you get all of the, I don't know. I think I would rather see Tre forward here. I mean, I dunno if Reforward wins the game at this point, but I think at least you're setting yourself up for more than if you said that the Elk defense isn't doing enough right now. They're probably not in contention anyway. So what are we doing? Pam McCleod, Bethel Thompson, all this money. Yeah, I think, like I said on the kickoff show, I thought that this was a very win now move by the Elks. And I think if it was a team in a different situation, say it was a brand new coaching staff coming in and they saw what Trey Ford did last year, they very well may have ran with him as their starting quarterback. But I think the fact that Chris Jones and then that staff are under so much pressure to win this year, I think it's kind of a desperation move. But I kind of get it from that perspective. And I think you saw some of the benefits of bringing in McLeod Bethel Thompson earlier in this game. I thought that he got the ball out quick and that's kind of his trademark. Get the ball out in three or four seconds. And that's something that Trey Ford really struggles with. But I think that in the long run, I absolutely agree with you that straightforward will be a more, he'll be a very good quarterback in this league, but I don't think Edmonton's staff and their management there has the benefit of waiting it out five, six weeks. So they lost the game anyway. I think their defense is just so damn bad that I don't have any faith that they're going to be able to scrape together many wins anyway. But I think that you actually did see some promise from McLeod, Bethel Thompson led Elks offense. This might be above both of our pay grades at this point, but I'm just trying to figure out here, and we've talked about this and I think it's well reported, the Tray four, Chris Jones, there's something off there. And if he wanted him to play wide receiver or transition to that, and he didn't want to do that, and I don't know if it's the Elks now, and it was the community ownership and now we're trying to find private ownership and we're dealing with all that. And therefore Chris Jones is kind of like the commander in chief of everything where it's my, I always look at the Rod Peterson like Chris Jones, I'm kind of in control of all this. I just don't know if you were in a different team where there was maybe more oversight that it wasn't just Chris Jones' show, maybe there would be a little bit more pushback where everyone's just like, okay, this is what we're doing. I don't know. And like I said, this is kind of beyond what we have the capabilities of knowing, but I would love to really be a fly in the wall of that over the last season and a half and just kind of know what's going on. Yeah, I think that it's weird with the whole Trey Ford, Chris Jones thing, because at the end of the day, this guy did draft Trey Ford in the first round. That was in the first round. Yeah, yeah. He actually clearly did believe in him. He moved Up to get him, right. Yep. Yep. He clearly does believe in Trey Ford on some level. Maybe that's not as a quarterback, maybe that's just, like I said, maybe it's just a result of the situation, the dire situation that the Elks are in. But I think at the end of the day, yes, there probably is something going on there. And Trey Ford, if I was him, I probably would've felt rubbed the wrong way by what's transpired there the last couple of years. Like I've said, this feels very similar to the tie cats. It feels very similar to the New York Jets. I don't think the Jets are an Aaron Rogers away from winning anything. I don't know. And I'm not the football genius here, and I don't think the tie Kats are a Bo Levi way. And I don't think the Alex, she Bethel Thompson away. So you're doing all that. You're spending all this money. I don't know. I understand being the win now, but you could still lose and not spend half a million dollars on a quarterback and being in the same position you are today, losing who a lot of people thought the Saskatchewan Ruff riders were going to be duty going into the season. So you lose to them at home. You're continuing kind of that whole thing, not playing particularly well there. Did you, like I saw, we're tarping the things now, right? We're not selling the upper thing. That was the whole, I mean Commonwealth, it's just a sad place to go right now. Yeah, I agreed with the decision. I think that it just makes more financial sense for them to only sell in the lower bowl now because there's quite simply not filling enough seats. And I mean it still looked very empty despite it only being lower bowl empty. And like you said, just a sad state of things for Edmonton, and this is the sad thing, is that they used to be the flagship franchise, if you will. That term gets thrown around a lot, but they used to be the flagship franchise of this league in terms of leading the league in attendance each year. And just to see it go downhill each and every season. It's been rough to see In terms of Trevor Harris here looking. He had a couple interceptions here, looked better than I thought was still taking a few stocks on that, AJ getting the one touchdown or really tight on that. How'd you think Trevor looked, and then how did you think AJ Lloyd, because to me that was kind of their biggest signing here going into the season. Well, I thought aj, he looked like he got a little nicked up on one play, if I correctly. So maybe he wasn't at a hundred percent for the whole game. But I mean, like I said, with Brady ra, it's hard to tell with running backs and positional players in any one given week. I think that we'll have to see a bigger sample size to see how he pans out in Saskatchewan. But as for Trevor Harris, I think that even if you look back to last year, I thought Trevor Harris played really well for the rough riders in those five, six games that he played for them. But the question for him is more so the health. I think that, like you said, he's older than you and thank you. Yeah, as you like to point out, and I don't think he's the most mobile quarterback. He's not going to avoid many hits. Maybe not. He'll be able to avoid some hits just by getting the ball out fast, which is his trademark. But I think at the end of the day, he's not going to be a guy that's going to be able to protect himself very much. And I do have a lot of questions about him making through an 18 game season, but if he's there for the 18 games, I think this team is going to be very solid. I think this is definitely going to be a playoff team this year because Trevor Harris has proven to be a very efficient quarterback in this league, and I've always been a fan of his. It's unfortunate that he's never won the Great Cup as a starter. He's came close, but I think at the end of the day, he's a guy that he's going to raise the floor of his offense. And you saw it in this game. I thought he really spread the ball around nicely and clearly he has some great chemistry with Sean Bain. We got some comments here. Then we'll get to the last game. I got to get out at the top of the hour. I got to get down. We have the Mariners in town tonight. We'll be heading to all that, but we have some comments here at Maji Elk's, still finding the way to lose. We went through that a lot last year. George, here. Alex needs to learn how to win. Got to play 60 minutes, Chris on that really collapsed here at the end. Why the Elks not used Ford like the bomber. He sees traveler because Ford, I mean Ford's not a large man, right? Is that your takeaway from that? Yeah, and he's not because you want a bigger quarterback usually running the short yardage. So he's not really an ideal fit for that either. So yeah, I agree with that. Ford will do well to sit behind the clock for you. We get a lot of that, but to me it's a little bit more of the Kirk cousins, Michael Pennix Jr. With the Vikings thing where it's not like the Jordan Love Aaron Rogers thing worked because Jordan Love was a rookie and you had years left of Aaron Rogers and then you were still able to see what you have with Jordan Love before you were ready to pay him. Where for next year he's off his rookie deal. So you're either going to have to pay him hoping that then that he's absorbed all this knowledge or then you let him go or you go. The point is to learn what you know about the guy while he's still on the rookie deal versus waiting for that to expire. I mean the Kurt Cousins Michael Pennix thing, and we've tracked him with UDub here is insane because by the time anything with Kurt Hudson, like Pennix is going to be, you're going to have to pay up for that. And then we had, we're talking here, we skip some here. Harris looks very good, accurate, pick the defense apart and Chris says, yeah, he is getting a little longer in the tooth. Yeah, I mean this might be the last kind of ride for Harris, but hey Corey Mays got his first win head coach, looked really happy for that. Anything else with Cask before we get to the BC Lions here? I'm really curious your thoughts on that. No, I don't think so. Let's move on. Alright, so full disclosure, caught up on this game. Today was the UFO playoffs last night. So we had the Battle hawks here losing against the San Antonio brass. Very excited to talk about that tomorrow. But tracking the score last night I was tracking on my phone and then went back and watched it. I'm like, oh, this is a runaway. I mean this is BC in a runaway here. I mean it was 2020 points here in the first half. Really kind of fell apart. Vernon getting his ass beat. He's running into stuff, he's getting his ass beat, he's getting sacked, he's getting beat up then Rick after the game. Yeah, we need to be more protective about him. It's like, yeah, Vernon was the one that was in the boot last season. I would hope you would be. What did you make of this? Because everyone had, I mean I think it was the Lions by a wash, which is always kind of the curse of death when all the cfl, not ca riders have the monopoly one way. But we talked about it off the top. We had comments, Cameron Dukes looked great, but I mean I thought BC really kind of, I know it's week one, but this felt like it was a big loss in my opinion. Yeah, I think the thing with the BC Lions, I think that they kind of seem like the same team. They seem like it's only one game like you said, but they seem like they're the same team they've been in recent years. They did a lot of good things in this game. When they're on, they can fling the ball around the yard. They have a lot of weapons on the offensive side of the ball and defensively they can play very well at times as well. But I think what they really lack in is that presence, that physical presence in the run game, the running game. Just very ineffective in this game. William stand back. I was not a huge fan of that signing. I thought that, I know he has that connection with Vernon Adams Jr. But I think ultimately he hasn't shown much in the last couple of years. He looks like he's on the back nine of his career, so he didn't look very good in this game. I thought that their offensive line really failed down the stretch in this game on top of all the hits that Vernon was taking, just running short yardage and just doing a regular scramble. So I think that ultimately at the end, Toronto's defensive line was really taking BC's offensive line to school and all credit due to the Argos defensive line for that. But ultimately I think BC's offensive line has to play better if they want to be a great cup winning team this year. Yeah, it was crazy to me, and I'm just looking here. I'm trying to figure out here, so I said this off the top there, she's not off the top. I said this on the pregame show. Yeah, I think I don't see the lions in the gray cup. There is something about them, and I don't know if it is the coaching staff, I don't know if it's the, we play inside, I don't know if it's the west coast thing. I don't know what it is. There is something about them where they do not have, the Kraken had that as well. I don't know if it's a West coast thing, but the Kraken have that thing where if you're down three zero, it's like they're losing the game. There's no fight back at all. Right. And the Mariners, I lived through that as well. We were up eight zero against the Royals on Friday. Lost the game, lost the game. And it is a lack of this killer. And I see it with the Lions and I agree with you, it's the same. We're running it back now. We've got stand back pretty much the same receiving core except Lucky Whitehead. Right? We're kind of running that back again. I don't know if they've done enough to over go. And I know Winnipeg's on the down slide, so that might be the only benefit for them. But I don't see them having done enough here. I agree with you to kind of overcome it where it's one thing in June, it's another thing in November, but I mean we saw this last year them losing at home late season games that they had no business losing And it's going to be even more challenging for them to make it to the Great Cup if they can't keep their quarterback healthy again. And I think Vernon, he got banged up, like he said last year was in the walking boot and he missed a couple of games I do believe, and I don't think he's going to last very long if they have him running short yardage plays on top of all the times he likes to scramble himself. So I mean I think that was a very head scratching decision. They cut Dakota pup in the preseason and that was a very interesting move. Everybody immediately said, so Don McGall is not going to run short yardage, so who's going to do it? And it turns out their plan was va. And I think that at the end of the day, it's a stupid plan. No, it's insane. I was looking at that like again, I'm easing my way back into the cfo. Okay, so Dal is the backup, right? But yeah, like you said, you're not, and I saw people calling for him and I saw Farhan arguing, not arguing, but talking to people We don't trust Al. Yeah, Vernon cannot be the shorty yardage guy. Vernon is older, he's also more fragile. I mean, we've seen Vernon have injuries. It's a horrible plant. The problem with BC is always they cannot run the ball. It's always been the problem with them since he got rid of James Butler here, I agree with you, has not been great. He's coming off the injury as you said. I know that Vernon helped mastermind that bringing him in when they didn't get olive error. I think that was kind of their backup. But I've seen this, I've seen this every time. There's nothing about this that makes me feel any better and then blowing a huge lead at home against Cameron Dukes, the backup. Toronto's had all of this off season stuff. You think like this is the time, put the dagger in killer instinct, finish the bite, finish the battle and like, oh no, we'll lose 27 to 35. That's fine. And then you got Rick Campbell like, well you don't want to reflect too much on, I don't know. I don't agree with that. Yeah, one correction, it was at BMO field in this game, but that's What I mean losing to at their home. That's what I meant. No, no, I do know. Yeah, but giving them that home victory, you come in there, let's take care of business. Yeah, exactly. And especially and for The record, sorry for as much woe as the Argonauts have they did out draw the Birmingham stallions there for the CFL season up there. I know, That's impressive. There you go. I love that. Anyway, sorry you continue. I cut you off. No, I was saying especially when the Argos are going into the season with a brand new starting quarterback, a guy that has two starts under his belt in the league, I expected that defense in particular to play a lot better in that game, but unfortunately they didn't, especially in the second half. And I think at the end of the day, the big matchup that caused a lot of problems for the BC lions was their offensive line was not able to match up with that defensive line for Toronto, which is going to be scary once again this season you think about what the guys that they have up there, they did lose some guys. They lost the two guys, Dwayne Hendricks and Brandon Barlow to the Hamilton Tigercat, but they still have Flo Roma la, they still have Sean Oakman and they brought in Jake Sona and that is going to be a scary trio on the defensive line all year for the Argos. Yeah, Jake was really good. I highlight worthy for some of that stuff. Yeah, I don't know. You're playing against the backup and Chad and all this stuff. We're going to get out of here soon. How good did Cameron Dukes look? Three and no, I'm sure scrambled all over the field. Kadeem Carey, big signing for them and yeah, it seems like, because everyone was saying Toronto has lost all these people, it felt like they shored up here where they needed to. Yeah, they're just a damn good football team. And it hurts me to say it as a Tide Kats fan, but that team is just so well coached. They do a great job in replacing the players they lose in free agency. They've been gutted not just this year, I mean this was the big exodus this year, but the last couple of years because they've had a first place team three years in a row. So I've just been super impressed by them. Ryan did witty. I think he is arguably the best coach in the CFL right now and I think he's really done a great job, especially with developing quarterbacks. You look at what he did with McLeod previously and then obviously Chad Kelly last year as first year as a starter. And then Duke's looks really good now. So I think he looked really good in this game. He had the one mistake where I think he held the ball too long and then he got stripped sacked and it ended up as a touchdown for bc. But other than that, those mistakes are going to happen. I think he looks great. Yeah, we'll see here. I was looking at the comments on all this stuff, but yeah, I dunno. I think this was the thing. Last question I guess for me on this was we'll get out of here. Chad's coming back at some point. I don't know, I think Toronto's going to be fine in the interim. Oh, that was what I was going to say was you basically echoed what Mike Mitchell said in our private chat where the same thing about din witty, every quarterback he's had has had one of the best careers ever under him. Going back with McLeod and Chad and all that stuff, I think Toronto is a force here. Last comments on that and then we'll get out of here. But I think, I mean they're number two and I mean obviously we haven't seen the Red Blacks yet, but I mean Toronto's looking pretty good right now. Yeah, I mean I would put Montreal number one like I said, but I think Toronto is going to make it a race this year. I think there's still going to be a 12 win team. I think they're going to be, you see the talent is still obviously there. They're a very hard team to beat at home. I don't believe they lost once at home last year other than the East Final. So that's going to be an incredibly hard place to play. Still. Defense still looks very good, their offensive line, they brought back all five of their offensive line starters and they still have some veterans in the receiving corps as well. One addition I really liked was Rashid Bailey from Winnipeg. Very underrated receiver. That kind of fills a veteran role there for Toronto. And I think, like I said, I think they're going to be a very good team this year. Alright, we're going to dump out today guys. I appreciate it. We'll be back, like I said, no Friday episode this week. We'll be live for the UFL championship and then Jason and I'll figure out when we are going to go live next week because flying back on Monday, so we'll figure out. But we'll have a recap sometime next week. We'll figure out. I'll catch up on all the games, we'll be going live for all of that stuff. But it should be a good slate here. I like the Thursday games kind of easing into the weekend here we get during the summer, so that should be exciting for all of that stuff. Jason, anything else you want to talk about before we get out of here? No, I think let's put this one to bed. Awesome. Thanks guys. We'll see you next time. Go Mariners and well, thanks a lot.

Will UFL Defy Spring Football Curse?

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast Reid here. It should be a fun show this week. Will the UFL defy the spring football curse, lots of UFL content coming. Hope you guys enjoy. Please like and subscribe trying to get up to 4,000 subscribers before the kickoff of the next UFL season. We'll be giving away two sets of season tickets to a lucky winner. Remember we just raffled off a bunch of jerseys U-F-L-U-S-F-L-X-F-L jerseys as well as two tickets to the UFL championship game. So if you like sporadic prizes like that and then our big 4,000 subscriber giveaway, make sure you subscribe, give a thumbs up to the video. It doesn't cost you anything free to subscribe as well. You can also join the channel for 99 cents a month. Really doesn't, but it kind of makes me feel better. Small financial contributions but makes me feel a lot better. Mailing out all the jerseys, buying tickets to give away, all of that stuff. So hope you guys enjoy if you are looking for CFL content, we did our big pregame show before the CFL Week one kickoff. The Winnipeg Blue Bombers hosting the ettes. We had the professor Andrew Murray on board with that. Evan Willmore, Jason Hussey, we had the boys over at the Owlette Supply Deck podcast. Tim MCC Cliffy. So CFL content this week will be on the CFL pregame show already on the channel streamed before that. As I said, lots of UFL content today. Look for a CFL week one recap early next week. Still confirming with Jason Hussey when that will work for him. Trying to get, if Evan can be involved, whoever wants to be a part of that. And then of course we will do our UFL playoffs recap as well. Andrew Murray, the professor will be out of town. I will look for a guest for that, but just be subscribed, turn on the bell, all of that stuff so you'll be notified whenever we go live on the show today. Dan Kaplan, longtime sports business reporter for decades helped start the Sports Business Journal, has been at the Athletic, is now freelancing for awful, announcing front office sports amongst others. Really appreciate Dan. He just wrote an article last week kind of looking at the totality of the UFL season, looking at attendance, looking at TV ratings, all of that. What is the viability kind of going into season two for the UFL. So get Dan's thoughts on all of that sort of stuff. The marketing of the league, should they be focusing on the player 54 angle. Lots of good stuff with Dan. Always appreciate him spending his time. And then of course Pat Rapino, longtime guest friend of the program with Analyze and Educate over on YouTube full UFL playoffs preview as well as lots of news and notes. This week we have a new fantasy sponsor for the league, a new kray, Kram, whatever you want to say. A sponsor for the league that's above my pay grade but lots of you have UFL stuff coming with Pat. So hope you guys enjoy. Like I said, please like and subscribe. We'll see you guys at the end and I will have a update for the 3,500 subscriber giveaway if you're invested in that. Stay tuned here because we will be raffling our UFL championship game tickets here. I will give you details at the end of the show. We'll see you then. Thanks. Well this is exciting. We do a check-in with this gentleman at least once every kind of XFL and USFL and now we have the UFL here we have Dan Kaplan now with awful announcing formerly with the Athletics Sports Business Journal decades here I'm covering sports business. Dan, how are you doing sir? I'm great and in addition to awful announcing I've right for front office sports and other publications. Yeah, I got hooked into one of their email subscriptions now and I love that. I get that every day. I really enjoy that. So if all of that and that crew over there, I feel like a lot smarter person reading about the in and outs of the WNBA TV deals with Caitlin Clark or whatever. I do think it's interesting stuff. Yeah, no, they do a great job. So Dan, we're here. You had an article up here, we'll pull up in a minute talking. Can the UFL survive here going into season two coming out of this? First off, I don't think we've talked to you just since this whole merger came around and with Redbird and Fox and everything, what do you make of this new United Spring Football League? Well, I have to say the TV numbers have been to me surprisingly good. I think they ended up the regular season at about eight 900,000 average viewership, which is something like two, 300,000 more than the average the other the leagues had separately last year. So that's a good number. Now the caveat of course is that most sports are up sports viewership. I mean it's the N-H-L-N-B-A-N-F-L, I mean you name it WNBA women's college basketball. The numbers are all going up. But still, I mean for essentially a new league with a product spring football that has had so much trouble over the years to pull an eight, 900,000, that's real viewership. Now the question that I had people asking in the story is what's next? How do they proceed? And I had one person talking about the quality of the play. He threw some shade at it, but the years two and three of these leagues are always the tells year one. There's a lot of enthusiasm. People are checking out the new product whether they can sustain that and improve. That's the big question In terms of, and the interesting point you brought up here, I want to talk about TV ratings as well, but you talk all sports being up and so is this a testament to just they're on better networks and so just more people are happen to be tuning because we saw these experiments last year. Okay, FS one on a Monday or the XFL was trying to do these or the USFL was on peacock and all these things. Is it just these are on the networks, people are probably looking for sports and they're stumbling upon it? Well those doubt being on Fox and ESPN is a big boon and XFL was on ESPN last year as well. So there is a lot of exposure, but sports consumption, sports viewership is up across the board. And I'm not saying that to deflect and there's a significant increase in the FLS ratings versus the FLS and the XLS ratings. I mean if we're talking 20, 30% chunks that an increase in a few percentage point increase in sports viewership doesn't explain that away. So kudos to the UFL. They did a great job where I think one of the problems they have as you've written about is attendance. Attendance is a big issue outside of St. Louis. I mean I guess Washington has decent numbers, but when you have stadiums that aren't filled or venues that aren't filled, that's not an appealing TV product. And I think not having the players in the markets during the week doing community outreach, doing the sorts of things all sports teams that have home markets do, it's hard. And probably the transition from the merger so quickly into the season, just a few months gap probably hurt marketing efforts. You put those two together, it probably explains a bit the low attendance, that's something they'll have the whole off season, assuming there is a year two, they'll have the whole off season to work on, but they need to get fannies in the seats. We get a lot of these comments in here. We talk every week on our Monday recaps about that and people, and I completely understand that the money brought in at the gate is a fraction of what they're getting off of the TV ads. But like you said, talking about the appealing TV product on that, how big is it a deal? I look at it as just another metric of is there a local interest in this product? And when we see Michigan averaging or Memphis averaging 6,000 people a game, and this is the second season, USFL or UFL, I mean they've been in that market two years. That tells me, okay, maybe there's a national appeal for a football product, but there might not necessarily be a local interest in the Memphis area. Well we saw during the pandemic year in the NFL when they played in empty stadiums and I realized Memphis is not playing in empty stadium, but Ish TV ratings went down that year and people were, I mean it was a pandemic. People were home. People did not like seeing empty stadium games played in empty stadiums. There just wasn't the excitement. And if you've got 6,000, I don't know what the venue size is in Memphis, but when you know see stadiums that are barely filled, the reaction is this isn't important. If the locals aren't into it, why should I be into it? And so give the UFL some distance here because the merger occurred so close to the start of the season, they probably didn't get their local marketing efforts in place like they would have. But I do think this issue of the teams not being in their home markets during the week where they're at the hub in Texas, I think I know it saves money, but getting players out into the community doing promotions like that, particularly for a minor league that's pivotal in getting people into the seats. I have a question. Yeah, talking about cost or money spending coming up here back to the TV ratings for a second before I forget, it has been a tremendous increase this year, right? And we've seen Mike with Fox Sports tweeting out all the time. Oh, 30% here and all that. To me this is the best of the best. We've given all the games for the most part, the best windows we can, they're mostly on Fox, they're mostly on A, B, C and ESPN. So to me, if we roll this back out next year, you're not going to see those same increases. To me, this is kind of the one year in terms of looking into next year, unless something really catches fire, I don't see another 30% year over year gain here. That would be unlikely. I think you saw the 30 to 40% gain because you've merged the two leagues and you got the benefits of that last season. You had the game spread out among the two leagues and they were maybe some fans were confused about what was what, but now you've got the two leagues merged and there seems to be some enthusiasm there. It'd be hard pressed to see a 30 to 40% increase next year if they had a goal. I would imagine it'd be five, 10, 15% increase. How they do that, I think they have to generate enthusiasm in the local marketplace and they probably need to try to make some of these players more of a brand name. They need to market around the players a little more. Right now it seems like they're marketing the UFL, the brand, the UFL and people in the NFL always say people don't follow the shield, the NFL Shield, they follow teams and players. It probably needs to be a little more push around that And it's okay if you don't have an answer for this, but just in your general life, to me, even last year when there was some overlap of the XFL in the US FL, I said, I guarantee you three out of five or six people aren't sitting there. Oh, well, they're just, Hey, football's on. I'm watching. They're not, oh okay, well this is the one that's owned by Fox or this is the one that's owned by the right. It's just kind of spring football now where it's the UFL. Do you sense that that there's any loyalty or is it just, hey, there's football on in the spring, I'm trying to watch content on a Saturday, or is there really brand loyalty in that way? Well, spring football clearly can pull in 500,000 to a million viewers. That's improved the last couple of years. Whether that builds enough of an economic case to keep this league around for the foreseeable future, only Fox and Redbird and Dwayne Johnson can really answer that. But you need to build brands around the teams and the players and it is tough. This has been the problem of spring football all along is if a player gets good enough, they move on to the NFL. So how do you build brands around players who if they get big enough are leaving? So it's a catch 22. You want that top player who's playing great and people want to tune in and see, but then they don't stick around. So this has always been the conundrum for spring football in terms of marketing IT as a business, as a product that people want to view and consume. In terms of local franchise ownership, which has always kind of been the eventual goal of these and especially USFL and trying to, hey, we've put these teams supposedly in markets where we see future and we've talked with the FedEx guy in Memphis, he's kind of interested, whatever. What would one of these teams have to look like in your opinion, for someone to actually want to seriously get involved in spending money to have private ownership? Well, let me first say that the sooner they get to private ownership the better because the private ownership will do that marketing. I mean then it's not the UFL marketing Memphis, the UFL marketing, the Panthers in Michigan. There's the dedication at the local level. Now if you have individual ownership, then presumably the teams are there year round or at least all during the spring. You move away from the hub system, which as I've suggested make cut expenses, but it doesn't do much for marketing in the local markets. I imagine the U NFL's game plan is a three to five year horizon to sell these franchises individually and MLS. I mean they had the unitary holding structure, which is the team's owned by the league and they eventually went to selling franchises and it took a while, but we can see now, I mean the franchises go for hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't know what a UFL team would go for. I would suspect it would be tens of millions of dollars. But again, I can't emphasize enough. The sooner they can get to an owner owning a team and having vested interest in marketing that team, the better. Where like I said, we get a lot of pushback talking about attendance. They go, well no, if the goal is this league is not going to hold these eight or 10 whatever, if they want to add expansion, whatever, if they want to add teams or grow these teams, you got to have local. And like I said, if I'm sitting there, if I'm watching the Michigan Panthers pull 7,000 fans, it's like what am I buying the trademarks? Am I buying 10% of the merch that the UFL is going to sell? I just don't even know what that ownership would look like where there's already so many hands in the pot with Fox and Red Bird and Danny and Dwayne and everyone else that's involved in that. It seems like it's a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Well, an owner may not necessarily want to keep that franchise in that market. They may want to move it to a different market. Maybe you can answer this. I don't know why the league's not in Seattle. That was a very successful market for the XFL. Looking from afar, I couldn't understand why they weren't in Seattle other than that it was a geography issue. Travel costs, renting Lumen field, right? I mean I think the original plan back in 2020, I think Seattle was kind of a Hail Mary anyway to get in there. I mean I get that we've talked forever about wanting a west coast and even just to San Diego if you're not going to do LA or anything, but people talk about taxes and all the kind of stuff going in and out of California, but to me it's worth it to have that. Yeah, do you just the center cut of America and that's where they post the map, where are you rooting from? And it's like Texas to Alabama and that's kind of all you get at the United States representation. Well, yeah, and this gets back now the XFL 2.0 had teams in LA and New York and those were two, I mean they only lasted five, six weeks because of the pandemic, but those were two of the least successful in terms of attendance of that league's teams. It was hard to break through the noise, but Seattle was extraordinarily successful. It was a big market. It was right up there with competing with St. Louis in terms of which was the number one team in that 2.0 XFL league. So I'm a big believer that you need fans in the seats, you need that enthusiasm and that spreads. I mean there's through social media, through fan groups, word of mouth. That's the way you build these things at the minor league level. So I get that you have 6,000 fans in a stadium, so if it's 12,000, what's the difference economically? The issue is TV ratings, but there's an intangible benefit from having a big vociferous fan base. Well, we were talking too about wanting an increase year over year. I think including the New York market or including the LA market, would potentially be a way that you would be able to spike a little bit more of that viewership than just like, well, we moved a team to Canton, Ohio, or we moved a team to Nashville, or we moved a team to really feel like you're moving into one of these larger markets. That might be something that would spark as well. Yeah, I remember when the XFL went to a press conference at MetLife Stadium. It was shortly before the pandemic, before the XFL 2.0 launch and Vince McMahon, I guess we can say his name, before he was completely discredited. He talked about putting the teams in larger markets because he wanted that big market pull. He knew it was going to be a lot of money. He spent a lot of money for venue, for venues and ads, advertising and all that. But he felt it was very important and I think most people who were around that XFL felt it was a survivor that it was going to last if not for the pandemic. So the question is, if you're not in big markets and you're not marketing the teams because you don't have the players and the teams in the markets during the week, how do you do this? This will be a critical off season for the UFL to see what they do. And again, getting back to ownership, getting owner operators or someone who's more than just a team president of each team, but someone who has skin in the game, that would be a big help. I have a question here from Max. One of our producers wrote in here. I want to get to real quick. Are you surprised because we're talking to local marketing, not getting the players obviously with the travel and everything, and maybe at best we fly 'em in the morning of and hit a couple things on the way to the game or whatever, but we were just down in Arlington again just as fans here over Memorial Day weekend. We were in town for vacation. I took my wife to the game there at Choctaw. Until you're in the stadium, you would not know that the UFL exists. The FL conference champions are there that that's the base of the UFL. I mean even just in that market around that Texas Ranger stadium there, you have Texas Live, you have all this stuff. I mean even just at that level having signage and banners and things, it's just very weird to me that we exist in one of the sports meccas of the world in Dallas and Arlington, kind of that area. And you would've no idea walking around that stadium. Well, that's the argument against putting teams in big markets is that you get drowned out. You should go to markets that don't have big time professional sports that don't have the NFL. So it's a debate. I mean obviously I mentioned the Vince McMahon argument, he went the other way, although New York and LA were struggling and my guess was if the league had survived, those two markets might've dissolved and those teams moved elsewhere. But yeah, I mean it's tough. You're playing where the Cowboys play, where the Rangers play, I mean the same area and it's a big market. You have to at a certain point, step back and realize the UFL is a small business when in professional sports they only have so much advertising budget. They only can do so much. But that's why, I mean it's so important to build up these local fan bases because you're not going to go from zero to 60 right away. But if they could send some of these players to the markets to do promotional events, community events in the NFL market, the players are out all the time on their off days and such. You're not getting that with UFL and the UFL needs that We talk about off season marketing. And I agree, right? We need to have a plan here and I don't know if that's a June 8th or 17th the day after the championship game on or if we pick back up in December, I dunno what that looks like. I know the XFL last year they laid off a lot of their marketing people following the season wanted them to be seasonal employees. Max here has a question. You have a firm like Redbird who has so much experience in sports. Why don't they translate what works for what they do with tous, their football club in terms of marketing, community engagement, creative marketing? Why do they seem so hesitant to dump that same money and resources into something like the UFL world? Obviously they know it works, they know they see returns on it here. Is it just, well, we don't want to spend as much money in this. It's not as lucrative a property Well to lose. I mean it's a traditional sports league sports team. You have a team in a sports league in a market and you can market around that. The players are in the market or year round. I mean this is a seasonal sports league abbreviated schedule and you don't have, expenses are high. I mean I think I said in the story I wrote, it's expensive to run a football league. I mean there's insurance costs, there's travel costs, there's equipment costs. I mean player costs are not that big in the UFL, but they're there. So I don't know how much they're making from television. I mean I think it had been reported they were getting a rights fee from ESPN, but how much that is and how much they're getting from advertising and they're clearly outside of St. Louis not getting much from attendance from ticket sales. The people I talked to figure they're losing, I mean it's not a surprise, but probably lost tens of millions of dollars this year. So I mean Redbird looking at that, I mean their private equity, private equity usually has short-term investing horizons of three to five to six years. They get out. They don't want to keep throwing good money after bad. A couple quick ones here before we get you out of here. I appreciate your time. You had a quote from Eric Alco here, friend of the show formerly the DPP over with XFL 2020 and he's with the Shrine Bull and everything now, but I thought it was interesting. This is debate of marketing and we get players in that want to move on, but then you have the players in the league that are maybe the sub NFL guys, but wanting to make sure that that's a place that they can play. We've talked about that. We had long discussion on the show Monday about you need to get to the place where people can make careers out of being in the UFL, even if then may supplement with other things in the off season. What do you make of that and just kind of the general long-term vision. We had Darryl Johnson on the show pre-season talking like they don't want the UFL to be a developmental league. We mix reviews if that's even possible to not be, but what do you make of this long-term vision for the UFL? Yeah, I mean it's sort of muddy. Is it a developmental league? Is it gal's point about Dwayne Johnson? The rocks' mantra that it's for the 54th player that is the first player cut from at 53 main NFL roster gal's point is that that message you're sending is, this is not NFL caliber play. This is below NFL caliber play. I mean that seems self-evident, but his point was that that's not a message you should be sending and it tells prospective players who might want to be on an NFL roster that this is not the place to go. I don't know if that's true. I mean if you're trying to make an NFL roster and you excel in the UFL, I imagine that footage goes to the NFL scouting departments and helps you out. We'll see how many UFL players get into camps, this NFL off season, how many make teams that would be pretty interesting. But it is hard because is it a developmental league or is it a league unto itself divorced from the NFL in its own ecosystem for so long with these spring leagues people have talked about the NFL needs a developmental league. The NFL needs a developmental league. They point to NFL Europe. Kurt Warner's the biggest example of that and there's probably some truth to that, but as we know, college serves as the minor leagues for the NFL and it's not as if the NFL isn't doing well. I always remember back when there was the C-F-L-X-F-L talks and we had on a bunch of CF reporters, rightfully so kind of defending the legacy of the CFL. Why do they need all that? And I remember we were having a debate with one of the reporters and they were just like, is that enough for the XFL at that time to be the show that you're watching the players on the way to actually be on the show? Is that enough of a driving point? And I don't know and I think they need to get away from that more. I mean is that a 20 year league? Hey, watch 'em before they become the big, I mean that's the minor leagues, right? I mean that obviously minor, Minor league baseball. I mean people go for many reasons. Some people go because they want to see the stars before they become stars. Other people go because a fun night out or day out and it's family friendly and it's goofy and such like that. So if you look at the minor league baseball model, those teams are in the communities and these teams in the UFL are not in the communities and I know we've been hitting that hard that point, but I think the sooner the teams can be in their local markets and claim those markets for real, the better. Last question from me here to point the theme of the episode this week is can the UFL defy the spring football curse I think is what I have basically going off of your article title here, how do you feel going into season two and then what would you like to see? Obviously a lot of different things, but one tangible thing you'd like to see them going into season two if it is the case. Well, in spring football's defense, we've had almost uninterrupted spring football other than 20 21, 20 19 with the Alliance of American Football 2020, we had XFL 2.0 2022 with USFL and last year we had USFL and XFL and now we have the merged UFL. So there does appear to be interest in demand for spring football and in the people willing to put money behind a league. And to belabor the point about what I'd like to see next year, more team marketing, getting fans in the seats, getting players into communities, getting players out there promoting it. I mean that's what's going to drive this. I know the teams probably have marketing staff in the markets, but nothing sells football more than the players. I lamented this week going into because there's been lots of talk of Birmingham and kind of their subpar attendants even going into it's year three now with all this and they had two media avails this week going into the playoff game and I'm like, okay, if you're not in the market but then remotely you're only having Skip Holts again for the 18th time this season. It just doesn't seem to be any sort of like, this is the time to seize on this. We're going to be in the playoffs again. We always say maybe next year. And I always get people to tell me that well read, we will try. Oh, the merch wasn't good. They'll get it right eventually they'll get it right. We know these spring leagues, there's not infinite time to do all this. I think you need to strike go now or not, right? That's right. I mean look, I think the big question with the UFL is you've mentioned Redbird is what is their commitment? How long will they, what's their time horizon? They have a lot of other investments in sports. This is not anywhere near the biggest one. What's their time horizon? Well it would be good to know long term here with all that, I was just looking up your Twitter handle to make sure I can plug it before you go. Dan, anything else from you today? I appreciate it. Obviously with off announcing front office sports at Kaplan Sports biz on Twitter. Any other thoughts before we get out of here? No, I'm rooting for the UFLI want to do well and I think the TV ratings were surprisingly good and I hope that continues for the playoffs. Awesome Dan, follow him on Twitter. I appreciate it making time today. Thanks again. Alright, take care. Well here we are. I don't think we've had this gentleman on at all this season. Pat's been working on his channel analyzing and educating and also just real life work stuff. It's crazy. Even me, I'm like, okay, minimum sometimes we got real life stuff ahead of us here, but we have Pat Rapino back on here. We're previewing the UFL playoffs talking lots of news today. Actually I have six, I never have six tabs where the UFL news coming up. Pat, how are you doing sir? I'm doing well and like we talked about in the pre-show, there is some good news, there is some breaking news and then there's everything else in between. So obviously UFL season comes to a close, we're starting to see some kids get the opportunity to work out with some teams. And in my opinion, that's really kind of the best thing about this league is okay, so who's going to go and who's going to stick? And I know we have a bunch of things to talk about in a limited amount of time, but I was going through the NFL rosters the other day and this kind of brings in the overarching timeline that Andy Murray did a bang up job giving a PowerPoint about. But long story short, TLDR only like 44 roster spots available right now. What are we doing? I know last year we were the league of opportunity this year we're the league of let's just get through year one, Reid, Let's just get, yeah, we don't really have a marching order this year of what is our drive of the league. I think it's we've merged, we're kind of working through things. Yeah, I mean in honor of pride month we're here, we're blank, get used to it. Know what I mean? I don't care what end of the spectrum you're on there, but I mean that's kind of what the UFL did this year. We're here, watch us, we're on Fox. Great. But overall we've been waiting for this for what, three weeks? These four teams going to the conference championship. I feel like it's been pretty solidified for, I think they all clinched going into week seven and I mean I don't think we have any disagreements as far as these are the four best teams and I'm pretty excited that we didn't have any hiccups as a hiccup with the tiebreakers or anything like that. And as someone who kind of lives in St. Louis Reed, I'm in 100% agreement with you on your take about. Well if you really wanted to get into the playoffs, you should have beat Seattle Last year. Last year, Yeah. It was intoxicating and nauseating to just hear people talk about that scenario and I'm just like, or we could have just won. Are you surprised? We talked, so it's really been solidified for a while here. We just pre-season and oh these are all going to be all star teams and really is such a divide. I mean there's four good teams and then I mean I would say of those four, there's probably two exceptional teams, one at least with the stallions and then there's a lot, there's six. I'm just surprised that this was so locked up here weeks ago and now we're finally here. But are you surprised going in and what we expected? I mean I thought Michigan, I didn't think Michigan was going to be as bad. I thought Michigan would've been a five and five team. I know there are some people who are saying they were terrible. My biggest thing with Michigan was I didn't feel like there was any true dynamic Playmakers on the outside and COC Mariner and Marcus Sims both proved me wrong, which great, who am I one to prove me wrong, COC Mariner is probably one of my favorite players in this league right now as a football player. I don't know him as a man whatsoever, but Michigan surprised me. I mean they were kind of like, if you can get over Memphis, you're going to be in type thing. Memphis surprised me. I didn't think their offensive line would be this terrible, I mean case Cocus has at this point a fetish with getting beat up behind big men. He's kind of like casting couch meme at this point. Arlington, I mean you went four and six last year. That was a five and five, six and four team to me. I wasn't as low on DC as I think as Mike was, but I was definitely one of those guys who was like, it's not going to be that good this year. Two boys, there's a lot of holes here. I was like, they lost some coaches and he's not someone we should care about completely. But I was like, we have, excuse me, I'm losing my train of thought. We had even, they were losing backup offensive linemen to whatchamacallit to retirement and then Josh Hammond retires and then you have Abram Smith's retiring and it just kind of was like nonstop retirement, retirement injury, retirement. And for me it was just like this is not going to be okay. And then the icing on the cake was obviously Abram Smith and then Emory Hunt I think is really the only person that's truly vocalized this. They took Derick King out of that team and when you lose Derick, you're not only saving reps on Jordan's body, but you're also supplementing the run game. And that was a loss that I don't think enough people cared about. They were just like, oh dear King Lindsay Scott's the new Dear King Dear King, almost threw 45 passes last year. I think Scott threw like nine. So it's been a crazy time In terms of, I guess we'll go through some of the news here because you're talking about the Panthers. I have a bunch of tabs opened up here. Speaking of the Panthers, let's talk through here. Mike Nolan, coach of the year, Michigan. I don't know if there's competition there. I guess on that you deal with the, I mean are you co-signed that no one dealing with injuries, everything else going through? I deal with the injuries one and two. A lot of people had Michigan as like a 4 6, 5 5, which some people have having them way worse than that. Another thing with Nolan is that they were four and six last year, two and eight. The year before after that you had, and when I think of coaching of the year, why would we give it the skip holds? He's lost four games in the last three years. It's expected the battle HOKs were expected to go to the playoffs. They were seven and three last year, wake Phillips, he pretty much cannibalized his roster, tried to do what? Flipped it. They went seven and three and then they were seven and three as a Houston roughnecks last year. When you break it down in that standard, what else do we got here homie? It makes sense. No one was, in my opinion, the only obvious selection and I just feel like if you want to get edgy about it, I don't think you're reading the tea leaves personally, I would say. Interesting. So you go with what's expected versus overcoming? I think, yeah, they look at that like in the NFL too, who overcame the adversity or who had the most whatever. I mean by that logic, Belichick should be a seven time, eight time coach of the year. I mean Andy Reed should win it every year. Bryce Perkins, Brian Luki, I mean if you watched the film, he knew Danny Ling was a half decent player. I mean EJ Perry to me was kind of an unknown because he only played in two games last year. Some limited preseason experience and he was performing admirably when he played. He was a little erratic, but he was starting to calm down. I mean you took a bunch of dudes who really didn't the offensive line, A couple unknowns there, Corey Coleman retires. The defense was great under Colin Bauer. I mean, and how much does Nolan help with that? But in the end, I mean new offensive coordinator, new defensive coordinator, a lot of new faces and these guys came out and they put together a good season and I think they match up very well against Birmingham and we can get an upset there. We'll get into that. So that's good. And we will talk the game specific here. I want to make sure we get to the, and I know that I think time permitting, I think we're working on our own Mark cast UFL team and if that doesn't come to fruition, that's completely understandable as well. But we have the UFL here, the league, I think I put in the description. The league awarded here, right? The league designated UFL team. I don't need to go point by point through here, but anything stand out, any glaring omissions or anyone that you or agree with? I would've put Sal over Jace. I think Sal was top five in a lot of these categories. A lot of people really were high on Steven Gonzalez. I think Steve took another step this year as well. Matt Casey, he's a swing tackle for the stallions. I think he could have been the other tackle over Jared Jones. Smith kind of lacked Daniel Wise as the interior. I mean Wise had some great games, but nothing too crazy. Malik Fisher who's working out right now for NFL teams, he could have been my edge, my defensive end guy kind of wanted them to expand on this a little bit, but I'm very curious to see if there was anything with the union that allowed them to, because I believe they said they're giving the bonuses to these all UFL guys. I love Jake Bates. I just feel like either Cochlan or Andre Schmidt should have got his award something they Didn't have. How so? I mean he is really been the focal point of the special teams all year. Him and obviously Marquette King getting in his own private concert after the Renegades game that I was at With base. I mean it was a lot of glam and then it kind of fizzled out, which it was kind of, my argument is when you set the standard so high, you can only come down. I mean Cochlan was I think the highest rated kicker and then Bates missing a 51 and it was a game winning 51, he missed a 39, really had issues kicking outdoors and I think Bates deserves an NFL shot 100% and they'll probably get it, but in the end, just because you hit the ball really far a couple times, there's 10 games in a season. I think he really tailed off towards the end and I mean we'll see what happens. I would've liked them to have a special teamer like the USFL did last year. They had Vinnie Pali last year as their specialist and I just thought that's a neat award because they gave a special teams player of the year award to award a special teams guy. Well no, no, we have that. That just came out as we're recording with Garrett name. With Garrett. Is this Chris Garrett? Yeah, but to expand on that, they didn't have a all UFL specialist. I get what you're Saying. Yeah. So the specialist teams player of the year could have been a kicker upon their long snapper return guy or a gunner or just a special teams ace like Garrett was. And if you're going to give Garrett the award, why would you not have a special teams specialist there? I mean they slimmed down on this a little bit. I think it has to be because of the or the UFL pa because I think that's what they said they were going to do the bonuses and whatnot. So you think they provided less awards because they didn't want to have to give out as many bonuses? Yeah, I mean they we're cutting corners on finances. You have two interior defensive linemen. Breland Speaks is not an outside linebacker, neither is Chris Ham. I mean he was a defensive tackle when the season started, you only had two interior linebackers. I mean kind of a little slim Pickens over there. You only put one running back. I think you should have had two, three wide receivers. No fullback just to me it just seems a little bit slimmer. I like that. I like the controversy. I like that. I mean fight me. I don't think anyone would disagree with me. They give Adrian Martinez the all UFL quarterback. I wouldn't have picked him. I think you could even based off the Manny Wilkins experience, you could even value that AJ McCarran is the most valuable player to his team. But that would mean we'd have to do some thinking about what is an MVP. It goes back to my argument. I talk about Id nauseum with Andrew Luck was the most valuable player to in the NFL for years and never won an MVP because we don't go off that. We go off stats. So what is value? What does that mean? And Marcus Sims kind of stopped existing for three weeks and they couldn't have given it to Justin Hall or John J. Kirkland. That's who I would've gave it to. This isn't just your AJ love coming through here. No, I think it comes down to value. I mean if Manny Wilkins reversed his stat line with three touchdowns in one pick, they win both games. I mean, he's playing schoolyard football and I love it. But at the same time, I mean if they had to change the whole game plan for him and he looked out of place against the renegades, which they have a secondary that I'm pretty sure I could suit up and play and they had Joe Powell, Joe Powell's older than me guy. Looks like a troll doll out there with his hair. Anything else from this? I want a couple other news notes and I want to talk through the game. Is there anything else on the all UFL? No, I mean there's always going to be controversy, especially with money involved. And there's a couple guys when put on there and there's a couple guys that are on there that deserve it, but in the end, hopefully see a couple of these guys dressed up on the sidelines on the Sunday in a couple weeks. Well, I guess to point out too, right, 14 USFL conference players 12 XFL conference players. So if you want to add that to your conspiracy pot, right? Any thoughts on that? I mean, not really. I mean when you're looking at the guys, every guy in my opinion really does have a case. It is what it is. I mean, people got caught up in the controversy of what conference is superior and whatnot. And I mean, I don't care. I mean, I'd have way too many other things to care about and just wax off to that. And I mean it is what it is. I mean I think it's good tweets. It's good engagement tweets and I know the UFL don't got the blue check mark does it, so they ain't making any Elon money off that, which costs $11. I'm willing to guarantee they would get that return back. Let's talk through here. We have a couple of different sponsorships here and then we'll get to the game preview. One interesting thing to me, so I don't know anything about this, is CB DUM Kum. So the first time I ever heard About, well first off, so Kum, we have an official partner now with the U-F-L-C-B-D Kum named the official CBS and creative partner based in St. Louis, Missouri, right? I guess so. Mean I've worked with cannabis industry doing a lot of assessments for them and they haven't called me. So I guess I'm not as cool as I think I am. But I Mean, are you surprised though? I mean this to me is a slightly out of the box partnership. Yeah, I'm surprised. I mean, I'm not going to advocate one way or the other based because of work stuff, but I mean if it keeps the lights on at this point and it helps these players recover and feel better, I got to support it. This is the closest thing we got to outside of UFC and these guys killed their bodies for us for years just for our entertainment. So if they're able to make some money from this, if the players are able to get good treatment and it's all legal and within the confines of the regulation. I am curious though, I don't know about this year, but next year, I don't know how a lot of this drug testing works depending on how they do it. If you do an AD or NFL teams, some of these old heads who don't know the difference between THC and CBD and kra, does that put you on the blacklist for an NFL team? If you're going out there and you're saying, I'm John Smith and after every game I rub this cannabis cream on my body and it helps me recover, does that put you on a blacklist for some players? I don't know. Interesting. Interesting. One other thing, and this is a little bit more, I can speak a little bit more about this for that much, but I do have a lot more thoughts about this. So we're naming Underdog Fantasy, the exclusive partnership on the eve of the inaugural UFO conference final games. And I had tweeted out, I said, this is great to see. Now I presumably better late than never here. We have three games left in the season. I know we have many, many DFS and fantasy and all sorts of people that followed the show and have been on the show and talked about this. Cody Maine and the established the rug, all the different things. At least we're doing it now. I don't know why you don't have this at the beginning of the season, but at least maybe this speaks to them having some sort of idea in their head about working towards this next year. And I think a lot of these moves are definitely working towards next year type items. I think a lot Confirmed season two. I think that's confirmed. I think we'll see a video once you post this. We'll see a video on this from someone we may cry. And I think when it comes down to it, as long as we got things moving forward for season two. And by the way, I hate it when people say season two, it's a 2025 season. It makes you sound like it's sad. It's sad. It's the 2025 season and I don't even like it that we call it the inaugural UFL season. I mean the league played for United Football League played for four years in the mid two thousands. Do I need to update my YouTube description? I think I have Dan Kaplan talking about season two of the UFL. Oh my God, I guess, I don't know, depending, just change the thumbnails too. Why don't you? Okay. All right. I'll do the whole redo the whole thing. But no, I, this is good. I mean we've talked about this at NA on here, and I hope this parlays more into sports betting and everything as well because again, we've talked about this, but the announcers on the broadcast know so little compared to the people that are actually spending money and gambling this. It's really almost, what's the word? Pandering. It's almost like not mansplaining is the right. Do you think Cody Maine's sitting there like, oh, I got to hear what the ESPN booth is saying about the over on this. No, the people that are really betting money and spending money on this and advising others and partaking and running sites and doing all this, they do not need the UFL broadcasters talking like, well, the over is still in play on this kickoff. Let's go. Yeah, and I'll buck back a little bit on that to the fact of, I feel like when Joel Klatts on the stick and Menifee is not bad either, but the Fox Rock, yeah, it's definitely the ES ESP N side. Some of not all. We have friends over there, but it's definitely, yeah, I mean Luke's is good. I mean, some of these guys, man, I don't even think they're looking at the damn score sheet before they're going on there. They're checking. I mean, some of these guys, they just say the incorrect names. It's like, I get in, granted, I cover this league. I supplement my retirement with the income I make off this league and the C, these guys who get paid way more just be so bad at their job, it's annoying. It's just like all it takes is a Google search of one player. Well, I get it. I get it a hundred percent. And like I said to me, you're turning off people, turning off the casuals that don't want to hear about it, talking to nonstop about it, and then you're turning off to people that you actually know about it because they're like, you're an idiot. What do I need to do? I don't need this expertise, expertise on there. And it's just such a filler of bs. It is on the screen. I know how to do basic math. I understand what 23 plus 20 is and you have a 46. I don't know. It is just filler. It's just bs. I mean, it is such a coin flip when you watch an ESPN game. At least when I watch, I'm like, this guy is going to teach me things. And klatts awesome too because he's going into coverage breakdowns and talking about bracketing and flipping up the hips. And then he got an ESPN guy who's like, that's good. What do we think, Dean? It's like, I don't know, man. Yeah, it's the haves and have nots. And I do, I was against the Fox broadcast just with the US FL being a little stale. But going back and forth this year, you can really tell the difference, especially if you're watching back to back days or two games on one day or however they have it lined up. Yeah, no, it's 100% haves and have nots. So it's sad, it's exhausting and you kind of wish for it to be better, but I mean hopefully it's about improvement, right? It's constantly building for 2025 and we heard all the time, let's just get through this year. Let's just get through this year. We're getting through here. Alright, so let's hear them focus on on the rest of our time here. I think this is incredibly compelling playoffs. I think last year the Arlington Roughnecks left a little bit to be desired here on the, what was that? The South conference, whatever the heck they called it last year with the XFL stallions, panthers here, them hosting the protective, we'll see the attendance. There was about 7,000 last week. And then St. Louis, you're obviously hosting the first playoff game in the city of St. Louis and however long they posted all the years and years and years since that. What do you make of this and are you excited for the playoffs? I mean, the best part about this is that both teams are two and oh versus each other. It's very hard to beat a team three times in one year. And I haven't looked up how many times it's happened, but it's extremely difficult to do it because the odds are, you'll get lucky at some point. Michigan has never beaten in this new era, has never beaten Birmingham and San Antonio going back to last year has not been St. Louis and obviously San Antonio didn't exist in 2020. So for me, there's that storyline there, which I find semi attractive. Obviously, city of St. Louis, I think it's 19 years to bring this back and I'm really expecting 40 K people to be there, and I expect 40 K tickets to be sold. I saw something that saw a lot of resellers and whatnot. So I wonder how when those resellers don't show up, how that works for the attendance because they bought the ticket, right? Well, they'll call it ticketed. I mean, that's what Arlington's been doing for weeks. I'm good with that. I don't care if you're in Memphis or St. Louis because if you paid the money, that's revenue. The league gets, let's pad the stats, all that goofy stuff. Now, I do think that St. Louis could easily get a 40 k. I don't know who's playing. I don't really care. I got some heat from this. I made this a point. LYDEN Wood University is the major university for football there. Their division one AA or FFC S School, they last week they had their football combine, which has all the Midwestern power fives all the way down from Power five to division three college coaches and all these kids from around the state of Missouri who go to Battle Hawk games. I know these kids, I talk to these kids, they're in my dms, they ask me this stuff, and 90% of these kids, who do they have? They got parents and they parents take 'em to the games. And I know we make the joke about the gas station stuff, but it's like these are football kids in the area who would go to this game. And they were all at the camp. They also had first form, which is one of the biggest businesses in St. Louis. They were having a thing called Summer Smash. Steve Aoki was there, ludicrous was there, Nelly was there. And these are active people who go to these games and whatnot. So I don't want to go the Toby Keith route by anything like that, but there was stuff going on in St. Louis and they still pulled 30 4K. I mean, I am not saying that would've pushed at the 40 K, but I'm still saying stuff was going on. The St. Louis version of Toby Keith was going on in 34. No, I think St. Louis has showed up quite a bit. I mean, I think that they're doing good. I think I'm really curious to see, and especially the championship game of St. Louis. Is there, I mean, I think this could be a pretty spectacular thing just for the legacy of the league. I mean, are you off the boat of saying if St. Louis goes to the championship, that 50,000 people show up? I think we will see. So I've had a lot of conversations and even the Dave Nailers of the world texting me like, Hey, what do you think if the UFL doesn't survive here? Do you think that they could, St. Louis could be the 10th team, right? Like how can we relate this to the CFL? And I told him, I said, we don't know what the ceiling is. We know what the floor is. You got about 30,000 people that are going to come. I don't know what the ceiling is. We'll see. Is it 50,000 plus? I don't know. All right. But I think we will find out what the demand is and if they can't sell it out or if they can't get, but we don't know that number yet. We only know that their floor is higher than anyone else's ceiling right now. By twofold, I mean if the league folds, I mean that conversation needs to happen, right? At least a phone call to someone. I don't know who that someone is, but I mean, I think it'd be silly for the CFL. I mean, I don't think people in St. Louis will, I don't know how much they would care at this point. They would just want football. They don't know if they would. That's interesting. There's very few Americans who adamantly hate the cfo. The casual American is just like, oh, this is football. Where's fourth down? Yeah, there's more Canadians that hate American football than there are Americans that hate Canadian football. I would feel very strongly in saying that. Yeah. And when you have a city like St. Louis that is starving for this, they want this to work because they haven't done anything wrong. They've supported their team and all this stuff, and it's like they've done all this stuff, they've done the right things and they've been burned from it. This is a city. When the team moved, they were in the Super Bowl 14 years prior. They were in the playoffs with Mark Bulger. Sam Bradford was still a budding, not a star by any means, but the Sam Bradford lore was still there where they could be a decent team. You're like, oh, if he just gets one more piece, people cared about this team. And I mean, 2020, they get a little, what's it called? 2020? They get a little, You got a little taste, a little appetizer. Yeah. I don't think they broke 30 in 2020 and then they bump up to 38 at one point, and then this year they broke 40, and now it looks like they might do it again. Man, if I'm the CFL, I'm making those phone calls. I'm figuring this out. I love it. I really would love it. But getting back to the game, we talk about that. Yeah, because yeah, no, and I think I'm happy we went down that route too for the game. People are kind of calling for a panther's upside here, but in terms of St. Louis bras, I think people have the bras, or excuse me, the Be Hawks favorite, a lot more thoughts on the St. Louis matchup. And then we can talk Birmingham. I think outside of San Antonio, I think you're getting more fans of the league that if you're remotely tied into this, you think that St. Louis going to the championship is the best thing for the league. And I think people are cognizant enough about this. If they watch your show, they read articles, they just care about this league. If this is the baseline and they're here as far as caring about the league, just slightly, they're like, this would probably be the best thing because 50,000 beer drinkers and ticket buyers and Jersey buyers, all that you're looking at pretty hefty, hefty workday as far as volume of revenue coming in. But do you think that the battle hawks have enough to do that? I mean, I guess that's my question. I 100% do. I think you got AJ another week. It looked like they were very conservative with him. I think a successful season for St. Louis is getting to the championship. So I think it's all the tricks, all this, all that. I mean, what they really need to do is just generate a little bit more pressure from that defensive line. I think there's just a little bit underwhelming. They bring in PETA from last year, and I think the team either had, they were either plus one or minus one as far as sacks that they had last year. They only had 19 last year, and this year they were either at 18 or 20. Their linebackers looking great. Mike Rose still a little bit nicked up it looked like, but when he plays one of the highest graded players in the league, Willie Harvey has put on a masterclass this year. He's got four sacks and a bunch of T. I mean, I personally think this defense, as long as they get pressure from the defensive line, I think they should be good to go for their offense, in my opinion. They got to just open up all the stops, man, they played a little conservative. AJ's obviously, maybe not a hundred percent whatever they want to say, but with the ankle. But if you're on the field with him, open it up. I mean, Jacob Sailors can take a lot of pressure off your team. And then from there, if you're able to push forward and everything like that, you can't hold anything back. It's playoff football. You're one and done. In terms of the USFL side here talked, I know we talked Panthers off the top of the show, but them going into Protective Stadium here in Birmingham, I mean, it's like we talked about. I think you're getting Danny Etling back and he looked pretty okay, and they kind of looked a little conservative and whatnot. Danny etling is a pretty athletic guy. I know Bryce Perkins looks like Superman out there, but etling is a guy who can move around and make plays, and he is uber athletic. If you look at his preseason highlight film, who with no disrespect to these players, a lot of these guys are preseason football players. He is carving teams up with his legs and whatnot. They match up well, that Birmingham defensive line is violent. But Colin Bauer on that defensive side of the ball from Michigan really pulled out the stops and really when he got exotic coming off the edge and whatnot, really gave Adrian Martinez a lot of trouble. Martinez is not Alex McGoo. He does not diagnose coverages the best way. He does not have, in my opinion, the freedom that McGoo or Jaymar had over the past couple of years. When Martinez gets pressure, he looks like a child. He hasn't played that well the last two weeks outside of his five game masterclass. He wasn't really maximizing his potential and whatnot that he has had and has shown, in my opinion, if you're getting pressure on this guy, which Michigan has no problem doing between BRE and Speaks, even Garrett Marino, Walter Palmore, Daniel Wise, Marino gained like 50 pounds of books like this week and he's moving this year and he's moving better. Little chunky, I could say that because he blocked me on Twitter. So he's not going to watch this. Maybe he does with a burner, I don't know. But you got these guys out there, it matches up well, and I think Birmingham put their left, one of their left tackles on injured reserve as well. So it's like, we'll see what happens. And in my opinion, the guy who's running this defense, kanaku from the safety position, him Bryce Tore and Lavante Taylor, Nate Brooks, these are all solid fringe NFL guys who if they don't have NFL experience, they're pretty close to having it. And these are not bad football players on that defensive side of the ball. So if you had to make your pick here before we get out of here, I think pretty confident to say St. Louis on here, but you're a little frozen, but we've still got your audio St. Louis, and then who do you have for? We'll say, who do you have for the XFL and the US L conference? I got Birmingham because I've bet against Birmingham a couple times just because I usually do it like two or three times a year just because it's hard to go 10 and oh. But I mean Birmingham is the champions until they're not. And I mean Michigan is hungry, but my biggest thing with Birmingham is how long could they do this? And it's hard to threepeat, but if anyone's going to do it, it's going to be Skip Hold who literally has a machine of guys that he just keeps churning out and every year there's 2, 3, 4 new players that you're like, oh my God, this guy's a guy and we'll see what happens. The biggest thing for me is another guy too to keep tabs on is going to be Jay. They had this guy bumper pool, man, what the name covering Jay Sternberger. And the bumper pool just looked so lost out there last week and they were like, oh, he's going to be like a nda. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, no, not at all. So if you can line that matchup with Sternberger in the slot and kind of work, especially if they're going into a cover two zone, which is one of the safeties, you have a nice little gap between the linebackers and safeties. Pool cannot cover that whatsoever. And Nku, if he's going to bite on that, he could get beat on a double move, which is what I would do if I was a skip ltz and company company. So we'll see. But there is a little bit of drama with the John Chavis leaving and the Corey Chamberlain, they've given up more points and whatnot, but we'll see. I'm excited to see it. Well, pat, it'll be good. I appreciate it. Extended time today, I know. And then obviously Pat doing his own, the quarterback rankings and everything over at Analyze and Educate. Anything else from you today, pat? Founder of Creative Arts, Founder of Creative Arts? No. I mean after the season, we'll do our all UFL team. If you're a player that's watching this, we actually made certificates. They're nothing fancy. They're going to be on nice paper and everything like that. But if you want a certificate and you are a player, I'm not going to make 90 for all the players because I feel like only four of you will want that. But if you're a player and for whatever reason you're watching this, and don't act like you don't because I'm definitely, Reed has referred you to me for certain things when they're like, Hey, Reed Johnson, or they probably called you Mark, by the way, but they were like, Hey Mark, do you know anything about this? And be like, oh, talk to Pat. Yeah, so if you're watching this and you want to serve, we'll tag you all that stuff. You know how I need that Twitter engagement, so I'll repost the video and whatnot. But yeah, we want people to know that we care about you. And maybe if I'm feeling really motivated, I'll edit the Wikipedia pages and put the all, There you go. There you go. All Mark has on your thing. So yeah, that's something we wanted to do. Just know that people care that you exist and we appreciate you entertaining us and putting your bodies on the line. Well, pat, I appreciate you. Thanks for making time today. We'll catch up with you soon. Stay safe out there. Always, always. Huge special thanks to both guests today coming on, Dan Kaplan. Always appreciate him spending his time extended overtime with Dan today. And then Pat is always making time to come on the program to talk through all the UFL stuff. Really appreciate that. As I said, look for a CFL recap coming early next week as well as a UFL playoffs recap. We'll get both of those scheduled. Just subscribe to the channel, hit the bell. You'll be notified for all that stuff when we go live. And then as a reminder, we will be live Sunday, June 16th in St. Louis for the UFL championship game. So we will do the recaps early next week. There will be no Friday episode next week we will be live on Sunday. Pat will be there either remote or in person. Andrew Murray will be there, Anthony Miller. Maybe we'll get some more remote guests. But I will post all of that stuff. So no regular Friday episode. Next week will be live. Lots of live content next week. So hopefully that is okay with everybody. A couple last notes. All the giveaway items have been claimed. Save for the Brandon Silvers jersey. This is your last chance. Go back if you were invested in the Brandon Silvers giveaway announce to winner last week, you need to go back. If that's you, send me an email. The mark has podcast@gmail.com. Otherwise I do have a runner up winner for that. So this is it. I would say probably by Monday, if you haven't claimed it, we'll be releasing that to the backup winner and then the winner of the UFL championship game tickets to sit with the professor Andrew Murray 50 yard line, I think it's Row M. That winner will be out of town, unable to claim and able to utilize those tickets. So here's the deal. If you, it is right now as I record this June 6th, you'll be listening to this on June 7th. You please comment on the video, say, I want to win the tickets UFL championship game tickets. You need to have tickets be in your comment because I'm going to search through the comments. I'm going to get all of those. And then Monday morning, Monday probably midday, Monday the 10th, I will go through and I'll post a video. I'll do the wheel thing, but I'll just do a prerecorded to give that away because you guys, we got to, there's no time here. The championship game is the 16th. So if you are invested in that, going to the UFL championship game comment, some sort of, I want the tickets entering into the tickets, you need to have tickets be in your comment on this video. I will go through Monday morning, Monday midday, and we'll post that. So that is how you'll win the tickets. You'll be sitting roam with the professor Andrew Murray. We had another set of tickets. So they wonderful listener, I guess, donated to us to gift out. We gave those away for the UFL recap. I guess it was on Monday or Tuesday, whenever that was. Andy and I. So you never know when you could win it. You could win a free jersey or free set of tickets. So make sure you're subscribed. We'll see you guys next time. Hope you enjoy the rest of the CFL Week one. Hope you guys enjoy the UFL playoffs. We'll see you next week. Take care. We'll see you next time. Thanks.

CFL 2024 Week 1 LIVE Pre-Game Show + CFL 2024 Season Preview!!!

Well here we are at long last, it's June, we're back. We have CFL coverage. Everybody every week read. We love the UFL, we want the CFL. We are here live Thursday, June 6th. We are getting ready for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers to be hosting the Montreal Ettes here. Coming up here shortly. Huge panel of guests standing by. We'll bring them all in and then kind of preface the show and everything else. If you like the work that we're doing, like and subscribe, we'll plug the other channels when those people come on. We just gave off two tickets to the UFL Championship game, which is happening next weekend. We're going to do season tickets next year for the UFL. So if you like the CFL work here, the UFL work like and subscribe. We've given away Doug Flu d jerseys, we've given away alternative football, all sorts of stuff. So like and subscribe and we'll plug everyone else's channels. But long season I think we'll do weekly recaps here. We'll figure out all that stuff, but make sure you're subscribed and turn on notifications. We'll get to all of that here. Let's bring in, I think Andrew Murray is standing. We'll get him on here in a minute as well, but we have look at this cavalcade guest. First off, let's introduce the gentleman underneath me since they're both unmuted. We have Tim and Cliffy here of the Ettes Flight Tech podcast, which only makes sense. Tim, I wanted to make sure you show off your shirt again, but it only makes sense here. You know the reigning the Gray Cup champions here. How are you guys doing? Tim, let's start There. Hold on, It's a hot shirt now did you make that? Is that an ettes flight deck? That's ours. That's our own merch. I might need to get on that. I might need to get out on that. Tim. Tim and Cliff here, you guys, have you been walking on top of the world here for the last six months in the off season? Listen, it doesn't suck Knowing that your team basically won the gray Cup and in such dramatic fashion too when literally everybody and their mother didn't give this team a snowballs chance in hell. It's absolutely outstanding. Tim, how do you feel about the Tim, I certainly feel better about your outlets. I do the Arena Football league here, but how are doing? Yeah, I do too. I mean it was a long time coming for the city of Montreal, 13 years. It was just great to be able to experience it live in Hamilton and it's just as we said a couple of weeks ago, yes we are the defending Great Cup champions but it is now a new chapter 2024 is a new chapter and the goal is to win the Great Cup again. Well I want to get into that on a couple of these teams. The Lions here, Evan, one of the assistant directors of player personnel for the ifls Vegas Nighthawks as well as everything else he does. Evan, how are you doing sir? Good man. Yeah, excited for the CFL season to start up, especially exciting. We got a couple IFL players up in the CFL right now. Corey Woodruff who played with us is with BC on their practice roster and a couple more guys over at Edmonton, Cordell Jackson and Germanic Smith on their practice roster. So excited to see what those guys do and get into the games and watch all the action. Yeah, Evan's like a real life football person now. So a couple years ago we have Evan on and he was like, oh Evan and now it's like Evan's actually recruiting players and stuff, which is tremendously exciting. Jason over with how Settle we haven't, I think the last time, I mean we've spoken but the last time we broadcast was the schedule release ride or free agency. How are we doing Jason? I'm doing well Reid, thanks as always for having me and just ready to get the CFL season underway. So I guess my first question is, and we'll get into with season preview, kind of all that stuff, pressure this season, obviously outlets repeating all that stuff, but here it seems like the carpet's rolled out for the Lions. We've got Mel Stegel on talking about the BC Lions are going to win the Great Cup, all that stuff. Tim, who has more pressure this year? Cody and the Owlettes or Vernon Adams, because I feel like a lot of people are picking, like Andy was sharing three downs picking Vernon as the M-V-P-M-O-P of the league. Tim, where is the pressure live this season? Well, I think especially you talk about va. VA got out of Montreal for a reason. It was on his own accord. He wanted to be able to get to a place where he felt that he could play and he's thrived. He's thrived in bc. I think it's just a matter of, I mean does VA have any demons that he needs to get rid of? I mean sure he would like to win a cup. He's brought in a few of his former AIT buddies who are now playing with him on the roster and when it comes to Cody, I don't know if he was able to exercise the demons from Saskatchewan. He seems to have a great coaching staff behind him. We have some great wide receivers and other guys that are supporting Cody. It's really interesting mean if I were to say if there was somebody who had more pressure on them, I wouldn't know what I would probably say VA because they're hosting the Gray Cup this year. Well, and that was the thing last year is I was always kind of anxiously waiting for the wheels to fall off with va, which they never really did. Right. Cliffy for you outlets here, have we reloaded going into the season? How are you feeling just roster wise and have they done enough to hope to repeat or at least make it to the big game? I think the big thing is they were able to maintain that core nucleus that helped win the Great Cup. I mean you got a couple pieces left via free agency or tried their luck in the NFL, but most of the main players, if you will, are still with this team and the additions they've been able to make in free agency, it's been seamless. Like Isaac Bergland, Derek Wiggin, they've been able to step in and at least in training camp and preseason looked fantastic. I think there's a concern obviously because yeah, there is a little bit of pressure to think, okay, was this a flu fluke? Were they just lucky? They just have a really good day against Winnipeg Blue bombers who arguably are still the class of the CFL. I think there's a little bit of pressure on Cody and Yellow West to prove that no, it wasn't a fluke. We are who we say they are. We are who we say we are, I should say. But yeah, I look at Vernon and he wants it so bad he wants to be a winner so bad ever since he's come into this league, he's wanted to prove that he belongs and now he's finally come into his own in BC and I couldn't be happier for him because he was one of our day one guys when he first came to Montreal and we even said to him, no matter where you go, we're going to be rooting for you. I mean even if you're playing the Ettes, we're still going to be rooting for you because of who you are as a person and I'm thrilled for va. I couldn't be happier for him being in the situation that he's in right now with BC Lions and honestly I wouldn't be mad at all to see BC versus Montreal in the Gray Cup in Vancouver this year. I think that with all, I mean I think at least for the show here and the friends of the show, that would all be the ideal match up. I mean we have a long time to get you to that here, but obviously you would hope the BC is in that or at least competing for it. Evan, we were there, a gray cup and everything now bird's eye view here, how many months after do you view it as that? The ettes eked out? Obviously they played dominant all year, but you got Cody, you got that final drive humans and the way the world works and that there's a million different possibilities of how that ended and ended up with him throwing the touchdown pass and all that, right, two feet different whatever. He's not looked at the same now. He is a great cup legend kind of all that stuff. How do you view the ettes win in retrospect now going into the season? And I see Andy's trying to get logged in here, so we'll get him on here as well. Yeah, I mean it's still impressive and we'll get into the Winnipeg side of things later, but I think there's more pressure on BC this year just because a lot of people think that maybe Winnipeg isn't going to go to a fifth straight great cup. So we will see what happens. I think the expectations for Montreal are still reasonably high. Again, I'd put BC much higher because they're hosting and a whole slew of other things, but I don't think Montreal is a team that's going to fall off. I think they've got enough talent. We'll see if it'll be enough to get through some of those teams, whether it's east or west. I mean there's a lot of question marks right now. We will see how Toronto does. I mean that's really I think the strongest competitor against Montreal in the east and they were last year and of course we all remember in the East Final. I mean we still think about that game a lot I think. But yeah, I mean I wouldn't expect Montreal to just again, fall off the face of the earth and we don't hear from them. I think looking at their roster, which again we'll get into more of that stuff later and maybe that's maybe more of my area of expertise, but I think they've got enough to make another run here and whether it's all the way to the Great Cup or maybe just to the playoffs, I mean we have to see there's a very long season ahead of us. I remember we did all those recaps starting last season before I ended up working in football and I mean that felt like a properly long season. So a lot can change between now and when we're in Vancouver and whatever it is. November. Let's get hussy thoughts and then we'll get Andy in here just now pressure going on. You've heard the question I'm asking, but just pressure on Montreal here and have they done enough and did you view that as a fluke class season? Well, I mean at the time it was certainly surprising that Montreal went on this run. I think that if you were looking at it before the playoffs, they probably would've been the fourth team you would've picked to win the gray Cup. But ultimately that's the way it works sometimes in the CFL, the upsets are quite plentiful and I think that with the ettes in terms of whether or not it was a fluke, I don't think it was a fluke, but rather just like an all time heater that I saw from that defense, I thought that defense just really carried them for a lot of that stretch down the stretch. Where do they win six games in a row to end the regular season and then win the three playoff games? So I don't know if they'll able to get, are going to be able to get that hot again defensively, but they brought back a lot of those key pieces as Cliff and Tim said. But I think that the big question for me is that is Cody Vado going to have a bigger season this year than he did last year? Because you look at his statistics last year, very modest, but you look at that Gray Cup game, he really did play a true MOP level quarterback in that game. So does that confidence really show out this season for him? Jason? Jason eighth Street, I stand corrected. Let's bring on here the professor actually Professoring today here we have Andrew Murray here coming from school. Andy, how the heck are you? And then I got these picks here I want to go through because I think this gives us a good sense of the season, but how are you doing sir? Yeah, for once I actually fulfill my namesake, right? I'm actually doing the thing. This is not just a moniker that I have online. I actually do this for a living, but I'm great. How are all of you doing? This is quite the room we have here. It's good, it's good here. Jenna's checking in here. Good afternoon from Southern California. We got Pat here. Pat and I just got done preview in the UFO playoffs that'll be up tomorrow. So Pat a double dose of read here. Andy, I want to get your thoughts on this. I think this'll give us a good sense of where at least I wouldn't say the casuals land at this point, but we're looking at the picks here. Split 50 50 here tonight for the CFL ca crew. There's BC at Toronto and I know that Chad Kelly and we've talked at nauseum about all of that stuff, but are you surprised BC favored as much as they are in Toronto? Andy, I'm not because most people have pegged them to be either at the Great Cup or Great Cup champions and also a lot of people have filled out their ballots or at least their preseason ballots as far as who the om OP is going to be. And a lot of people believe that's going to be Burnham Adams Jr. So this to me speaks to more being a season long aspirational pick. But there are 18 games, these are all individualized mashups. And I think this is interesting because if we all remember last year the Argos weren't even favored at home against Hamilton and they absolutely trounced the tie cats and took Foley by Mitchell behind the woodshed. And so for me, I think it's a bit of a dangerous game to play. The idea of assuming that just because this team is going to potentially be in the title game or win a title doesn't mean that they're going to be coming out firing on all cylinders week one. I think that's an aspirational thing to think. I don't necessarily think that's going to be the case. I do believe in VC as a long-term prospect, but I think there's a reason why Ryan din Windy has won at home several times in a row with several different quarterbacks. I mean at home he's won three straight home openers with three different quarterbacks. MacCleod, Bethel Thompson, Nick Arbuckle and Chad Kelly and now he's doing it with his fourth with Cameron Duke. So look, he's a great coach. He has his team usually pretty well ready to play, especially at home at BMO field. I understand why the panel goes that way because again, they're trying to factor in that, well I picked this team to win this entire season, this is why I'm picking them now. But again, like I said, these individual games you have to be careful with in choosing these matchups because it's hard for me to really bet against Toronto even with Chad Kelly not being there. I have a lot of faith in someone like Ryan Dinwitty, We got Mark Brendan here giving the super chat and I appreciate that Mark. Yeah, Tim, any cause any of these give you cause for concern here? I mean obviously I would say at least to me, outsider coin flip tonight, right? That kind of makes sense. We got to see how Montreal comes out of the gate. I guess we'll go first. Tim, anything stand out to you from any of these? No, and I'm not really surprised about how people are picking BC over Toronto because obviously with Chad Kelly not there. That's the biggest elephant in the room for the team mostly, at least for the first nine weeks if that's how long, if it's going to be nine or longer depending on what happens. But I'm not surprised there. I guess maybe, I don't know BC it's still BC coming over to the east and getting the sweeps across the board. That's actually very interesting. But yeah, a lot of these matchups, to be honest with you, I'm intrigued with the Elks matchup. I'm curious to see what this team's going to do and obviously you have the new head coach in Saskatchewan, so yeah, I don't really have an issue with them. I just have an issue with the three people who chose Winnipeg to beat Montreal. So No, that's funny. I guess my concern, and Evan maybe get your thoughts on this, I felt like last year we saw BC really get kind of high on their own supply I think a little bit. I think they were a little too into the donut boys and they felt, I think they rode that media wave a little bit and got humbled. We saw a couple of those games and they definitely should have won coming down to the season. You're not talking like getting into the playoffs, but there was that Hamilton loss I think at home they had Evan, are you worried about that with bc we have all this pressure this year, we got to be there, we've got 50 cent we're selling out and we've got Jonas brothers, we're selling out. I mean this is of any season since we've covered the league. I mean the most heat is going on, the lions going into this. Are you worried about that? I mean I feel like they've built their team well enough that they can handle a lot of the pressure. I think they've got a lot of continuity now that some of these teams don't have, I mean again, they're getting up there maybe not in Winnipeg territory. They obviously don't have the great Cups to show for it. I mean Winnipeg is a borderline dynasty with what they've done going back to I guess 2019. But I don't feel too worried about them. I will say it's a bit interesting that it's a clean sweep in those picks BC at Toronto, if you're going to give me another chance to plug the indoor football league, Toronto's got a new starting quarterback, Cameron Dukes who also used to play for us in our inaugural season back before I worked there. But the reason I didn't mention his name before was because he was already in Toronto last year and started a couple games and showed some flashes and they feel confident enough to go with him this year. So that's a big step for us. I'm not saying, I mean I'd maybe still pick BC in that game overall, but that pick a clean sweep for bc. I don't know, maybe that in itself might be putting a bit too much pressure on 'em for week one. I don't think we can count out Toronto that easily, even if they're missing. Chad Kelly, Let's get Cliff's thought on now that I want to get to Jason here. I know his time is a little short today. Cliffy, what do you think of anything stand out from you? I always just view this, not that, I mean I love Jamie and all these guys. Jamie's like vacationing in France. I dunno how much preseason football, Jamie. Nice. I'm kidding. But I just think this is a good, hey, not casual, but this is kind of the generic view of all this stuff right now. Clippy, anything stand out to you? For me it's a Hamilton Calgary game that's going to be interesting for a couple of reasons. One because it's Oli by Mitchell's return to Calgary since he left or no, sorry, he was actually technically was traded to Hamilton, but this will be his first chance to be able to go back to McMahon Stadium where he arguably had all of his success as a member of the Canadian Football League. But both these two teams, I think a lot of people are kind of picking them to be the bottom feeders this year. This is the year where Calgary finally misses the playoffs and Hamilton, they're going to go as far as what Bo Levi is going to take them and if he gets knocked out again, is Taylor Powell going to be the guy that's going to step up? He showed some flashes of brilliance last year, but he was still in tough as far as being the quarterback and potential future of this franchise. So I look at this Hamilton Calgary game and I think it could be a lot of fun, but at the same time we could see a lot of different things happen here and I'm definitely intrigued by that matchup for Saskatchewan and Edmonton. That's going to be interesting too if only because Edmonton has to start the game a little bit earlier because of the Stanley Cup finals and when I look at BC Toronto, yeah, you got BC flying all the way out to Toronto last time Vernon Adams played in Toronto. It did not go very well for him. But the Argos, I'm curious to see how Cameron Dukes is going to rise to the challenge and he's also got Nick Arbuckle backing up as well. Someone who is familiar with the Argo system. So I mean quarterback wise I think they'll be okay, but once again it's going to be a bit of a dog fight for those guys as well. Yeah. Jason, your thoughts on this and you're obviously our resident Hamilton expert in all things kind of be Levi at this point and everything, but yeah, I'm intrigued by that matchup as well. We had Ryan Valentine on, was it last week or the week before talking and obviously we've had injuries, Henry and all that for the wide receivers there, right? Is Shilts the backup now in Calgary, right? What's going on? What do you thoughts on, I'm trying to keep on this track here, but thoughts on Hamilton and especially Calgary, I can't get a read. I was asking Ryan, obviously there should be pressure on him, but they made the playoffs even though they didn't, they kind of limped into the playoffs, but you made a playoff team. I never know, do you have pressure on this season? I would think Calgary would want to perform better than that, but what do you think of Hamilton and then the Calgary matchup? Well, it's interesting because I think both of these teams obviously coming off very disappointing seasons last year. Hamilton notoriously are slow starters. I think the last two years they both started oh and three each season. So getting a win for either of these teams is going to be key I think in Calgary as well. Had a slow start last season and ultimately was able to just barely scrape enough wins together to make the playoffs. And I think that it's going to be very interesting to see what happens with those two teams because they're playing each other. One of these teams gets a chance to get off on the right foot. And I think that in terms of my personal expectations for the TCAs this year, they're pretty low, honestly, because they brought back bold Levi Mitchell. That's something I definitely did not expect. I've said that on this podcast going back to after the season that we had that podcast. And I think that because I don't believe in Bo Levi Mitchell as a starting quarterback anymore, I just don't believe that he has what it takes to take this team to any sort of level of success, so let alone stay healthy. So I think that's going to be a big thing as well. And for Calgary, I think that the Malik Henry injury was absolutely huge. I think that he's really their field stretcher and I think that without him, as you saw last year, there's just too much of an onus put on Reggie and ton's just not the same downfield threat that Malik Henry was. So I think at the end of the day, it's going to be very hard for both of these teams to get it going this season. And I think that a lot of people are justifiably so picking them to be the bottom of the standings this season. I'm pretty proud of predicting that. I don't think it was having a stretch that Bo Levi would be duty and that this would be a failed experiment for him. Rogers too, I feel. Well look how that panned down. We're rolling it back again, but I thought that, and there's a reason why I trust the brain trust at Calgary and they sat there and they said, same thing with the Seahawks and we're getting rid of Russell Wilson. Everyone was like, why are they, I knew how to get Russell Wilson. I lived with him all the time. I want to get Andy Satz because I know he wants to eviscerate Edmonton here. Want, this is just the example of the dynamic comments we get on this YouTube channel. We have Colin joke, how many experts picked Montreal? Winnipeg has revenge on their mind. Winnipeg's 13th seven at home, can't take anyone seriously who would pick Montreal to win. But then on the other side of the spectrum, we have comments like this from Chris Fish, orange, white fish, orange fish, Argo's going to sink. So we really, it's the angel and devil here of the two different types of comments we have on here. Chris, love you to death. Here we go. Let's go bc. Appreciate that. Andy, I know you've been long silenced about sharing your tongue slashing at Chris Jones and all of that. What do you think here, because I think we have the Saskatchewan Edmonton matchup. From what I've been told and what I've seen, Saskatchewan is just going to be complete duty this year. Edmonton's got a lot going on with the dilemma and all that. Andy, what do you think about all this? Saskatchewan really interested me because of the new regime. Obviously Corey Mac coming in to much camaraderie, a lot of fanfare, a lot of people who really believe in him turning around the culture. The best signing that was in the history of all signings in the CFO is what I heard. I know, I know the hype is to the moon, but that's how it goes in Saskatchewan land. But look, I actually do believe that the rough riders are going to make the playoffs this year and the reason why is because of their new regime. They finished terribly down the stretch two years in a row. I actually think it's going to be the opposite for this team this year. I actually think they're going to start off slow and they're going to figure it out as the second back half of the season starts to unfold. And as Corey may starts to realize what mistakes he's making in the coaching game, it's his first job as head coach and you're going to make mistakes. You're going to make errors. I do believe in his ability to assess and be able to analyze his mistakes and I do think he's going to be able to do so on the back half of the schedule. As far as Edmonton goes, I just think they're going to bottom out completely this team. I really do not believe in this roster. I just don't. I don't like their defense. I don't like their depth. I don't like the fact that they signed 2 billion quarterbacks in the off season and they can't seem to choose which one to be as their third or fourth starters or third stringers. Look, I don't understand. I like McCall Bethel Thompson as a player. I do not understand the idea of giving him that much cap space that you could have allocated to other physicians. It's not just the fact that Trey Ford isn't starting, it's the fact that you decided to give money to MBT when you could have allocated it to other roster spots that it quite frankly need to be addressed. Also, you lost Jake Rena who was a standout defensive player on that team last year. I just don't believe in Edmonton. I think they're going to bottom out and Chris Jones is going to be getting the pink slip here in a few months. Sorry, I just had to get that all off my chest. I've been waiting an entire off season to say that, but I can't stand it. It drives me nuts. And this is as someone who is going to Edmonton next month, by the way, I just wanted to let you know I am going to an Edmonton game and if Trey Ford is not starting by the time I get there at the end of July, so help me Tim, it's going down. Yeah, let's get Tim and then Tim because we all, I just will never remember last season, like pre-season. Like I want to get Trey Ford on the show. He's going to start the Edmonton I'm interviewing for, he's on his phone, bright smiley, blue skies and it was just the weirdest damn season for him. Tim, are you, because we love McLeod, right? We love McLeod. I've tracked all this stuff. He's been in the USFL back now. What do you make of this Edmonton stuff, Tim? I mean it is true. Edmonton did bring in a hell of a lot of quarterbacks at camp and you bring in seven, you expect you're going to cut four. I mean it's funny, the other Malik Henry by the way, which they had brought in that was in the CFL, he was guy who was playing in the IFL. Evan knows who I'm talking about. I ended up signing with the Albany Firebirds, but some of these guys never get a chance. I mean, but you know what we've seen before where teams have brought in guys who they think they're the be all end all, they pay them money, whatever they can to make sure that they stay in the city and stuff like that. And then they total crap out. So is that going to be the case with MBT? I don't know, but I don't think Edmonton's going to be as bad, I think as Andy wants them to be. But I don't dunno if he wants him to be bad. I think we, like City has suffered enough, Tim, I don't want them losing our home. I really don't. I would say is that I was very surprised you didn't say Saskatchewan was going to make the playoffs because of their obsidian uniforms. But I I think you know what following, seeing what they're doing in Edmonton, stuff like that. I mean it's obviously Coach Jones is getting a really, really long leash, I mean a really long leash, but you can't take away that Trey Ford is, he's like a mad and cheek code. I mean we saw him, what he did last year versus the ettes when Cliff and I were there at Commonwealth. It depends on how well MBT plays with this team. I mean if him and Gino really do well together. Yeah, unfortunately I think MBT will probably be starting by the time it'll still be starting when you get there. I'm Already putting that. Well, I mean yes, this lease that Chris Jones has had and I think part of that was his salary cap caught him with the coaching and all that kind of stuff. Vincent has a question here about 10th teams. I have a funny anecdote on that, but we'll finish this conversation really quick. Cliffy thoughts. I knew you had some things to say about Edmonton and you can throw Saskatchewan in there as well if you want. Yeah, I think what Saskatchewan did, I find very reminiscent of what Montreal did last year. Bring in a new head coach, change the culture if you will, get a new mindset, a new work ethic. It was sorely needed in Saskatchewan just about hit rock bottom as far as I was concerned. The fact that they, for two seasons in a row, they lost their last six games of the season after the Labor Day classic. They dropped off the face of the earth, not once but twice My mistakes. But still Saskatchewan was nowhere to be found. They had to get rid of Craig Dickinson, Corey Mace, we know what he can do. It's not going to happen overnight though. And it's easy to look at what Montreal did with Jason Moss and people had no faith in him whatsoever and look what he was able to accomplish. Whereas everybody has all the faith in the world in Corey base and let's hope that's just not them pumping themselves up too much because you're going to have to give this time. I mean I think he will be very successful as head coach of the rough riders, but it's not going to happen overnight. That culture change is going to take some time. I think somebody wearing green is going to make the playoffs in the west this year. I just don't know if it's going to be Edmonton or Saskatchewan. Just simply on the simple fact that Winnipeg, bc, those are the two, the top two teams in the west. As I said Calgary, I just don't have enough faith that they're going to get it all together. So somebody wearing green is going to make the playoffs. I just don't know of the two. And I looked at the Edmondson situation and I'm baffled really. I really thought Trey Ford, he is going to take his lumps. He had a lot of growing pains last year, but okay, give him the opportunity to see what you can truly do and then all of a sudden you bring in MBT and that's got to throw him off a little bit. And there's almost no faith at that point in your management, in coaching staff because to go from being the man to all of a sudden being the second man, that's not a good feeling. And simply put, I mean Edmonton, if they can get it together, I mean they've got the potential to do something. They've got the potential to at least be competitive. But I don't know, I think it's going to be a really interesting battle for third, if you will, in the west this year. Doesn't that sound familiar by the way? Cliff being the man and then also not being not the man, kind of something similar that the All West went through a few years back with a certain quarterback and VA actually he went through it so Well and I mean McLeod's certainly been through that as well where it's like, were you with the Argos? But we're not really, you're kind of the main guy. I had a funny, where is this saved here? I had this to show Dorothy, but this just reminded me of this with Tim correcting everybody on the street here. It said for the last one eight years, all you've done is fine mistakes, anything I say. And she says 29 years. So that's a little bit of Tim and I want to get Evan's thought on this. We had Dave Campbell on here talking to Edmonton. I want to talk to the jerseys too. I have those pulled up. That's interesting. Evan Dave was saying even the McLeod comes in and he's like the coolest guy and okay, let's get to work and let's do all this stuff. You're still kicking Trey forward, you're kicking that can down the road Now he's approaching the end of his rookie deal, even if it's not confidence aside this, he's losing these valuable team one reps. What do you make of the situation? Because McLeod could come in as the coolest guy in the world that still doesn't remedy. It's still not his fault. It still could not be a great situation. Yeah, it's a difficult situation, no doubt. And I think Edmonton signing MVT, it's a win now situation. The reality is this is kind of the make or break year there and Edmonton more than I think Otto was in that category too. But I think Edmonton really more than any other team has struggled mightily. And I remember last year how grim things looked when I think it was Taylor Cornelius at quarterback and they still hadn't broken the home losing streak. And it's tough and it's certainly a decision to be made to bring in a guy like MBT and put a lot of money in that direction. And as someone who values player development, I look at Trey Ford and it's tough because you want to give that guy an opportunity, but at the same time, I think some people are very quick to overlook straight forward's growing pains last year. And again, does that mean that he can't be a starter? No, I mean I think he has starting potential, but they just had to make a decision on whether now was the right time to start him or if they wanted to bring somebody else in and kind of extend things a bit. But the reality is I'm more interested to see what happens to Trey Ford after this season because now that you've brought in MBT, that's already a big enough commitment. I'm more interested I think in his future, whether he stays in Edmonton or if there's a coaching change or we will see what happens. There's a lot of different directions that could go that I can't predict. But yeah, I mean we'll see what happens to Edmonton personally. I do think they will win this game against Saskatchewan. I liked what Cliffy you said and Andy about it taking time in Saskatchewan, but I think that they've laid a very good foundation. I still have some questions about Trevor Harris and his health and his age. And if I'm not mistaken, I think Trevor Harris is actually a year older than his new head coach, so He's older than I am. I'm old, I'm the old man. Trevor Harris has been around for a long time because I'm very young, younger than everyone that's on here right now. And when Trevor Harris started playing in the Canadian Football League, I was probably still in elementary school. So that really puts things into perspective. But no, I think Saskatchewan, they definitely have a bright future. I believe in Corey Mace. I've heard great things about 'em. Edmonton is still a wild card to me, but I'm not going to count them out yet. I actually like a lot of the pieces that they have. I just think it comes down to certain strategies and again, we'll see what happens. But I do like 'em in this game against the rough riders just because again, your first game with a new staff and a new everything, it's going to be a bit different without a doubt. By the way, the CFL notes, game notes came out for the game. We're just talking about NBT is only 24 and 23 in his career. Just like Trevor Harris, the very 50 50 quarterback. Yeah. Interesting, interesting. Let's get one more, the hussy here. I know he needs to hop off in a second talking about this, talking about, because we were talking similarly, excuse me, Bo Levi Mitchell last year. Too many acronyms here similar to Bo Levi last year with they're like Hamilton, we're in a win now we got to go do all this stuff. And Edmonton now with this was Edmonton. I don't know if Edmonton was a quarterback away. You see all these, well, we just need to have, I don't think Edmonton is an MBT away from winning. So would you dump all that? Curious your thoughts with McLeod as it relates to what we've already seen with Bo Levi the last season. Well, I think that this is one desperate coaching staff and they know that they couldn't go into this season. I think their fear was if they rolled back with Trey Ford and they lost the first three, four weeks of the season that they would've been gone anyway. So I figured they wanted, the idea is to bring in a more experienced starting quarterback. And I think that McLeod, I was never a huge fan of him before, but the previous couple of years in Toronto as well as his experience in the USFL has really given me confidence in him. But my concern is more so their defense. I think their defense is going to be probably the worst in the CFL this season. I think that you lose Jake Sona also AC Leonard, that's I believe 24 sacks from last year going out the door. So I think that's going to be a huge loss and Chris Jones is really going to have to do a great job with that defense if they're going to have any success this season. I think that their offense has a chance to have some success because you do have Eugene Lewis, hopefully he's more healthy this year and you got Curly Gittens Jr. Who had a very good season with McLeod, Bethel Thompson in 2022. So I'm very interested to see their offense, but I think it's definitely within the cards that they could really struggle just like Andy's predicting. Well Jason, I appreciate it. We'll touch base here, we'll figure out what we're doing. Like I said, potentially we'll figure out CFL recaps, whatever. We will figure out that marathon here. But Jason, I appreciate you making the time today to come on. We had a quick comment here from Vincent and we will kick Jason off here. Jason, any news on the potential 10 team? And the only reason I bring this up, and I think Evan and Andy will chuckle at this, so I had a Naer comment, I think it was last night, texting me like, Hey, do you think if the UFL doesn't stick around, do you think that, let me switch this so you guys are together there. Do you think that the battle HOKs would ever join the CFL? Which I mean I can't even mind meld all that stuff here, but Tim Cliffy, are we kind of over this temp team? I know Randy was doing the media tours the last couple of weeks. I saw him on Rod Show talking about the elk sale. I didn't even have time to try to even request anything with Randy right now, but are we over that? How do you feel here? I think Cliffy was tweeting a little bit about putting some games out on the east coast here. What do you guys think about all this? So that's the thing. I mean, it's always the dream, right? And dreams are nice, but I mean if you don't have anything to back them up, then that's all they're going to be is a dream. As much as Randy Ambros likes to keep tooting that horn about the 10th team and whether it's in the Maritimes or Quebec City or even Victoria BC trying to get a 10th team somewhere in the league, yes, it would be absolutely fantastic. But I mean, if you don't even have any solid plans to build a stadium anywhere like a real CFL stadium, especially in the Maritimes, then forget it. I've said numerous times, at least if you get started in Moncton, they do have a stadium there that you can use on a temporary basis, but you got to have a solid plan in place and ultimately seems like Halifax is the place you have to build that stadium. And if you can't get municipal, provincial, or federal government involved, and if they're not interested in that, if the townspeople, the taxpayers are not interested in that too, then you can bleed all you want about wanting to have that 10th team. But until those factors finally come to fruition, that's all you're doing is dreaming and quite frankly it's getting tiresome. Yeah, it's cool to have touchdown Atlantic and of course it's going to sell out because the riders are coming into town and everybody watching the riders play and all that jazz, but you're still not really developing anything, any sort of a fan base or any sort of a want or desire to have that 10th team in place. It's all well and good to have rider fans come to the Maritimes and support them, but do the people in that area really want a team? And there's nothing I've seen so far that leads me to believe that yes, they absolutely want to have a Canadian football league team. Yeah, Tim, I'm kind of over that. What do you think? It's been the biggest question. And do we call it a dare, we call it an elephant in the room or the elephant in the league since 1982? The schooner were originally announced then I just feel bad for them really out east because it is just so gorgeous out there. Football aside too, but it's just so beautiful out in that part of the country and I really think with the C ffl shifting over to the Pacific coast this year, I think it kind of, it's trying to maybe get them out of the spotlight a little bit. Randy has other stuff to talk about the potential new ownership for Edmonton, the Jonah's brothers and stuff like that. But I would love to see a 10th team. I just think we just need to stop talking about the 10th team because you know what I think many people have said, it's like either get it done or just drop it, choose a spot, see if you can build a stadium or have access to another stadium itself. I had love to have 10 teams. It would get rid of the weird bye weeks and stuff like that and everything and the weird scheduling, but I would love to see it happen. The funny thing is it's been around since 82 and we're still talking about it. Yeah, Andy, your thoughts on this and I wanted to pull back, I guess I the comment here, but just it feels a little UFL here. Well, if we have someone and they want to do it and they want to put up the money and we really want to do it, it just doesn't feel like there's any proactive whatever here. Like Tim says, especially doing the touchdown Pacific this year. Okay, so we're taking that out of the spotlight. So what do you Andy make of this? Because when we started this, it's like, oh, expansion and adding teams and all that, but every year I saw Randy on Ride show and it's the same thing every time. I am kind of getting tired of it. Well, two points. First of all, tell Dave that it's not 1995 anymore because the Canadians are not storming the border into America anytime soon. I don't think St. Louis even knows what a Canadian football is. I'm just going to say that right now. Sorry. Second of all, to Tim's point, I mean, I don't know if it's an elephant in the room as much as it is a spider in the corner, I can ignore it as long as it doesn't come and bite me, I think I'm going to be fine. So I think for me it's like I don't really see it happening anytime soon. Now I'm also the kind of guy that would just say, look, go play in the parking lot of a Tim Horton's and we'll figure this out. But I understand the reality of yes, the infrastructure is just not being built because the cities don't want to put in the resources to do that unless an owner, a lucrative owner comes in and decides to put in all that infrastructure itself. I don't think it's going to really manifest itself. I actually, maybe I'm in the minority of this, but I actually would prefer if they did have a 10th team to have all three. I do like the idea of having extended rest for these players. It's something that I wish the NFL would just have two bi-week considering they're thinking about going to 18 games and having the exact same number as the CFL, and yet they're getting away with one, which to me just seems criminal. But I do think that the idea of putting them in an area like Quebec City sounds cool on paper, but again, it's just not manifesting itself. And if it's just talking itself in circles, I don't know when it resolves itself. Do you think about putting a team, I know this sounds absolutely insane, but do you think about putting a team in maybe the same province where you already have a team? I know, again, that seems like a hard idea to sell to your audience, but I don't know where else they're going to go because they just keep talking themselves in circles. So I don't have an answer. I wish I did. I am just like you, Reid and Evan, and I can also attest to this just from the American's perspective, from the UFL perspective, all we hear about is expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion. And for us, even us, it's very tiring because, and I know it's different circumstances because it's a league that hasn't been around as long, obviously. But I mean at some point it's just kind of like we'd rather just focus on the markets that are around and not the what ifs because the what ifs can just go on into perpetuity. Evan, anything to add to this? Yeah, I mean I think expansion talk gets overused a lot. And look, it would be cool to have a team in Halifax, no doubt, or maybe somewhere in New Brunswick or Quebec City. I mean there's been a lot of ideas that are floated around, but again, Andy brought up from the UFL or American perspective and really any pro league expansion talk is exciting when you're not on the operation side of things. But the reality is a league like the CFL, there's a lot of things that I think the league has to worry about before a 10th team is added. And again, the 10th team is what you say that gets people excited. It's like a marketing thing, but in reality, I mean there's a bunch of little things. The one thing that really bothers me, the stats in the CFL last year, it was all over the place and this year, from what I saw in the preseason, they still had to make some corrections. So things like that, the little things, if you got to worry about getting those right first before you add another team somewhere, although again, the best part about expansion if it does happen and if they can do it the right way, is from the player perspective, a lot more opportunities, a ton more roster spots open up and it's more competition and more jobs, and that's always good to see. Yeah, I agree with all of that. And it's kind of words until it's action the C, but yeah, they were even laughing like, oh, Randy, like, oh yeah, the stats are going to be better this year. It's like, okay, that was a major thing. Last drag. I don't really know if we need to laugh that off. I have a tweet here. Tim known CFL, content creator here. I wanted to make sure we talk about here. Maybe you heard him, Tim Capper here talking about the CFL on CTV. We're talking Gray Cup, all this stuff. I want to make sure we touch on this today, Tim, right in the states here we've got the CFL plus smorgasbord with the CCBs Sports Network. That's kind of how we're going to consume. How big is it the deal here that the CFL is going to be on CTV? Well, this is huge, and just for some context, for those who don't know right now, CTV is owned by Bell. TSN is owned by Bell, so they're actually a part of the whole family. It's just that there's been no C, no CFL games on the CTV network in 38 years. So they stopped, they had a contract back in the late eighties, which they were doing simulcast with the Canadian Broadcast Network Company. So this is a big thing. This is having your games on A, B, C and ESPN one's over the air for free. Free these days free and something where you have to pay for. So that's kind of like what it is for us here in Canada with this thing. And we've been talking about this. I think Cliff, you and I have talked about it for years. We've openly talked about it. Many CFL fans have been talking about this too, is that the way sports are these days, in order to gain new fans, you need to be able to show them the game that they don't have to go to TS N all the time or CFL plus to be able to watch a game. If you could have it on regular television where you're changing the channels and you come across a CFL game, and especially as they're setting it up now, it's a seven week regular season schedule starting in September. It's fantastic. It's A great idea. A lot of these places may need to, if they can see one game, they like it, then if they have a hometown team and they go see a game in person, the team is going to get more revenue, maybe a new season ticket holder, et cetera, et cetera. This thing's huge. It's something that should have been done for years, and supposedly the offer has been available for years. Bell and CTV has said, well, come on, let's do this. But for some reason, the trigger was not pulled. But finally, I guess the way that the CFL set the schedule up for Saturday afternoons worked perfectly because all, it just is a minor change from a 4:00 PM game to the 3:00 PM game. And again, having, and I know Cliff and I lamented on this last year, is that not having the Gray cup on broadcast TV for the first time and who knows how long now it's going to be not only on TSN, it's also going to be on CTV over the air for free for people to watch. So it's kind of like what they did with the Super Bowl here in Canada where it's going to be simulcast between TSN and C and CTV. So it's big. Well, it's huge. And because we talk about this scene with the UFL and this season, we've seen the ratings get better with the things on Fox and a BC, like you said, where people can kind of stumble upon it. Because now, and not that the ESPN deal, I guess, was better in America because at least if you were on the app, you could kind of see and okay, we click on that, but now you're never stumbling across CFL at all Now on CBS Sports Network, that's never happening, ever. Right? It's great if you have that and people are asking in the chat, how do we deal with all that kind of stuff, but you're never stumbling upon it where it is. And obviously on the CFL plus as well, so maybe it's a wider range, and that's why I've kind of been against this whole, where they said Lash year, well, this is a better deal for you. American viewers like, well, no, I'm in America. I can tell you it's sensibly not a better deal than it was before because no one's stumbled upon it. I think at least with this, you're saying with the Gray Cup, especially in the playoff games, like, well, let's give this on. We hear that at least the last three years we've done this. Well, the radis are great, but think if the ratings were on and you didn't have to be on whatever at cliffy, you co-signed this big deal. Oh, it is definitely big, especially when you make that comparison to say ESPN versus a BC. That visibility alone is going to make a big difference. And this is something that CFL fans every year at the state of the league address with the commissioner, that's one of the things they keep talking about. Why don't you put the gray cup on CTV? Why do we have to subscribe to a cable package in order to watch the championship game? Why is this not on a national network that is over the air and accessible to just about everybody? Because CTV does have an app too that you could watch and stream the game from as well if you're going that route, if you're a chord cutter. So yeah, it is big in that sense and as far as I'm concerned, especially with the NFL being so dominant on CTV up here, the fact that you could watch so many NF games on Gray Cup weekend and not watch the Gray Cup itself, how are you supposed to grow the game in a lot of people's eyes if you can't even have the championship game available for someone to watch, whether it's on a traditional TV or on their computer tablet? How are you streaming to not have that game on there just is baffling to tell you the truth. Andy, let's get you on here. We talk a little football now. I want to talk through uniforms here, but I don't want to have too much. I want to make sure we break it up here with this Chris, Chris, the fellow c Dragon fan, RIP, all this. But Chris, first time covering following the lead, we're going to have presumably, hopefully some people following Andy, who's the team to watch this year? Who do you have your, I mean obviously we have the favorites, we talked to Montreal, all of that, but who are you watching Christina's calling the Argos America's team, which is a complete lie that Christina, you should know better about that. That's America's team, the BC Lions, but Andy, who's your sleeper team this year? Who are you going to be watching? Like I said, you know what? Maybe I'm just somebody who has too much faith in them, but I actually do like the Saskatchewan Rough riders. Like I said, I believe in what Corey Mac is doing. I think it's going to take some time for that roster to the gel. I really like a JO led on that team. I think he's going to be great for Trevor Harris. I really believe that they're going to figure it out and their defense is going to be better and that team's going to be better overall. I think that's a sleeper team to really look for. I think Montreal is going to be good again. I really do. I think they're going to figure out how to get enough from their defense, which they always do, and they're going to be able to eek by on offense. I'm really curious for me is to see if Cody Fiato can take that next step. He did in the Great Cup, he had a transcendent performance. Can he do that again in a full season? That's really my question going forward, but I really am actually looking forward to watching the Montreal all the way into the season. Evan, same question for you and then we'll do the circle around, but who are you excited to see this year? Oh, I think Andy's battery die. We'll get him back on. He had mentioned that. Hey, good timing. Good timing with that, Evan, who are you watching this year? Yeah, I mean I think we mentioned it at the top of the show, but bc, whether there's pressure there or not, I think this is the year where they should make the jump and especially if Winnipeg maybe does slip a bit, and personally, I think Winnipeg will win the game tonight. I know Tim be mad at me, but I don't know. That's just my opinion based on some of the research that I've done. Now Winnipeg, like the rest of the season, we'll see. I mean, they've been the kings of the West for a while now, and again, I just feel like I have this gut feeling, I guess that this is the year that BC really pulls it together and makes the push all the way, and of course if they can get past that West Final game and into the Gray Cup, they'll be hosting it this year. So again, it's a perfect recipe of things and I think that's a team that you really need to keep an eye on because again, all the things that we've mentioned, it's just this has been building now for so many years and on top of just the players and the culture, I mean, they've got great ownership. I mean, you look at that home opener that they're going to have with 50 cent, it's going to be sold out. That's crazy. I mean, I think certain teams maybe in the UFL would dream of that, maybe the UFL as a whole really. But anyway, I know that's a different thing, different conversation for another time. But yeah, I mean that's the team that I'm really excited to watch and the team that I have watched for a number of years now and hopefully this year they can raise the cup. Yeah, just for new listeners on here, it is a little, and I mean obviously live and Die through every week of the CFL, but it is a little bit of a marathon and it is, at least from I've learned, it's a little bit of, you kind of know the top four or five teams going in, and then like I said, we kind knew BC Lions and I knew when they weren't going to get the first spot in the division. Okay, they're going to have to go in the Winnipeg and then it really all comes down to it's 21 weeks or whatever all comes down to that one game. Tim, I want to get your thoughts and then we'll get Clip as well. We talking Mar Doman and 50 cent and all of that, which everything's out. I'm 50 cent, maybe I'm too old. I don't know. I feel like I'm out of the demos of 50 cent and Jonas Brothers somehow. I'm not in either one of those demographics, but Tim, how's the new ettes ownership going here? We've seen a lot of strides with the Lions. How do you view the new regime and the ettes? Oh, it's been night and day. Once Pierre Carto became the owner of the Allos, and it started last year, I mean that really just started the whole new chapter of the franchise itself. He was able to put the money into the team and finally our gm, Danny Macha was able to do what needed to do in order to get the players to do what they did last year and this year, and it's even more, I mean they've redone some stuff there in stadium when it comes to signage, some different things to the stadium itself with better lighting, they're putting in a new video board over a personal Molson stadium. I think that now knowing that they have the money available to of them, I think it's taken a lot of pressure off of Danny Macha and saying, listen, we can sign these guys for multiple years. We don't have to worry about are we going to lose like a Gina Lewis? It makes you wonder if PR carpel had been around a year before, would Gino Lewis still be on the team? It really makes me wonder, but this ownership is great. The ownership is fantastic, and I can't complain. I really can't. I mean, obviously as I said at the beginning of the show, it's the next chapter, but we'll see what happens going forward. I mean, they're doing everything they can to promote this team. I know you're going to show the uniforms coming up in a little bit. Even the ettes themselves have a special game coming up in August, so they're doing everything right. I think Pierre's letting the football ops do what they need to do. Mark Waitman has done a fantastic job when it comes to with the people that are behind them and getting this team, getting Montreal ready for the defending Gray Cup champs for their home opener on June 20th. Tim, were you talking about this with the wings on? I was going to pull up the, what is it, the Rider and the Elks. Which one is Montreal's new one that you're working at? They're going to be celebrating the 50th anniversary, the 1974 Gray Cup team in August, and that was the time, if anybody knows the C FFO in the Is, no, no, no. For them it's the Delta logo. Anybody knows the team of the seventies, the A of the seventies, they know what the Delta logo is, but they're going to be wearing rumors are they're going to be doing something very, I can't say it's going to be a perfect example of what the uniforms were from 74 to they left in 86, but it will, they're supposed to do something nice. Nothing's been leaked, but right now it's just been Edmonton, Ottawa and Saskatchewan that produced their uniform. Cliffy anything you, I know Andy's got a comment about the Mar Doman. Sorry. Yeah, honestly, just not having to worry about paying bills. I think that was a big thing with Montreal during those lean years was the constant, constant turnover, the instability left, right and center with Pierre Carl Pedo running this team or paying the bills essentially. And that's the thing, the bills are getting paid so you don't have to worry about, do we have enough money to sign this player? Do we have enough money to turn the lights onto to the stadium even can we pay the rent? There's just silly things like this that your typical football fan doesn't think about, but as Tim and I see things behind the scenes, this is stuff that we were concerned about. Can we just get a team that can get it together and figure it out? And for the longest time it wasn't like that, but now with this new regime in place, and you could tell they had a plan. It is funny. The plan succeeded a little too quickly, I think in some respects because everybody expected Montreal to be terrible last year and they ended up being pretty decent and going on to win the Great Cup, and it's almost even talking with p Carl Pedo after the Gray Cup, we even said to him, this doesn't happen, right? You buy a team and then you win the Gray Cup that year, and he's even like, I don't know what to do now what do you do once you've climbed the Mountain out? Get out. Yeah, You got sell now. Maybe that's it. Maybe once you win the Great Cup, yeah, you win another one, but then what do you do after that? So I mean, it's a good problem to have. I think now, I think Montrealers and Beckers, everybody who supports the Ettes now, they don't have to be looking over their shoulder wondering when the next shoe's going to drop, when is so-and-so going to leave in free agency because he is not getting the playing time or he is just not happy with how much is being paid or anything like that. It was so important for this team to really get their core settled, make sure that the big players, the ones that helped this team win the Great Cup, make sure they're here for 20 24, 20 25 and beyond, and having a billionaire's money to be able to ensure that these things are going to happen, to make sure those contracts do get signed, make sure that the coaching staff does stay in place for the next 2, 3, 4 years to finally have that stability right now for the Montreal Alouettes is such, it's so nice. It brings me back to the late nineties, early two thousands when the team came in. They were the model franchise for the Canadian Football League, and then they just lost their way. But now I feel like they've regain that form. They've found themselves again, and if you're an Ette fan, you couldn't be happier with the direction this team is going in right now. Let's get Andy real quick. I know Evan I think has to hop off here soon. If you guys, Andy and I, we'll go a few more minutes here and get closer to the kickoff and then we're not going to do this crazy anything today. But Andy, anything else you want to say on tomorrow? Well, I just wanted to say I completely agree with what Tim and Clippy said. I appreciate your perspectives, especially your historical perspectives on what's going on with the ownership model. I mean, me and Reed have had more of our fun with following the antics of someone like Gary Stern, which is a whole nother universe now it seems like that seems like a million years. It seems like a different time. Yeah, It really does. It seems like a separate timeline really does, but I mean that's the wonderful thing that I want to say about this and also about Amar Doman is that you need these kinds of individual owners or individual efforts to be made in a nine team league in the NFL, there's 32 teams. If one is bad, everyone else kind of points and laughs at 'em and said, ah, figure it out. But in a 19 league when there's smaller margin for air when one franchise is struggling maybe financially, it really shows, I think Edmonton's going through that right now, and Edmonton's going to have a gigantic change of face here soon. Once they change ownership, obviously going from community to single ownership that's going to have to change the franchise for the better. And that's why I think it's really interesting, at least from Montreal, that the fact that they were able to transition from coach to coach to coach, quarterback, quarterback to quarterback in these last few years, they still made the playoffs. They almost had an unprecedented amount of success despite everything that was going on around them. I mean for them to go from Kari Jones, Danny Maja to Jason Moss, and going from Vernon Adams Jr to Trevor Harris to Cody Fudo and still continue to make the playoffs, I think it was a testament to them that's really incredible that they were able to still do that and to just have this amount of success despite all those mitigating factors. But to specifically go back to what I was saying earlier about Amar, I mean this is a tremendous accomplishment and to me it's something that I think I can speak for, at least for Evan and Reid and maybe a lot of people down here. This is something that spring footballers are just clamoring for that kind of level of sustainability and effort and ramping up attendance. I mean, to think about the idea of having 50,000 plus people in a home opener, it seems unfathomable and now it's going to be a reality in two weeks. It's really incredible to think about that and just all because Mar Doman put his money with his mouth and he's really pushing forward VC place, which was cavernous for such a long time and didn't have the attendance numbers, and now it does. It's really refreshing and it's almost invigorating to see and thinking this can be done. It's not just something that we talk about happening. It is happening. It's something that can happen and it's happening in Montreal, it's happening in BC, and hopefully it continues to happen in more places across the CFL and then on our end, hopefully over here too. It really just fills me with hope. It really does, and I love seeing that. Well, it also speaks to, and we'll do a hot everyone, I'm going to ask for your hot take here, so just prepare that while I do my little thing here. We'll go around, I want to do uniforms before we get out, but I'm sure Evan wants to have no business of talking uniforms, so we'll let him talk Football. It speaks to what is needed from an owner, right? I mean, we talk about this a lot on the UFL side, like, well, we need to get a local ownership. I remember when we had the mardo on, I think it was two years ago, and spent half an hour. Great, and this is my vision for all this stuff, and afterward I looked at his net worth online and I'm like, this guy's worth over half a billion dollars. What the hell is he doing talking on this stupid podcast for half an hour? And I think it puts in the work that he's done and the time and energy. That's what you need from these local team ownerships. It's not just, oh, we're going to buy this. The Michigan Panthers, the average 7,000 fans and we're going to put is a cost losing for a long time, and the MAR is booking these guys out of pocket and we're getting LL Cool J and 50 cent kind of all that stuff. A ton of work going into all that. So I just think that it can't be understated like, oh, well, the UFL just needs to find people to own teams. It's really hard. Look at the C ffl now. We're trying to, we want Edmonton to go private and obviously Montreal is taking care of right now and bc, but there's been time You guys know way better than we do times of instability for all these franchises and going away and coming back. Evan, I want to get your hot football take on here before we get out, we'll do the round table and then if anyone needs to go, I want to talk to uniforms before we get out, but hot, take hot football, take this season. What do you got, Evan? I mean, CFL wise, I don't know. cfl, CFL wise. Yeah, I mean my mind goes to a lot of different places. I look at a lot of leagues and a lot of people, but Hot takes, man, I don't know. I mean I haven't honestly thought of a lot of 'em. Maybe I'm biased obviously, but maybe Toronto, whether Chad Kelly comes back or not, maybe Toronto can still put together a 11 or 12 win season. I don't know what their, I forget what the over under is on their winds, but it's probably around nine or 10. I would have to imagine it's nine and a half. Yeah, I think people are very Chad Kelly. I'm not going to get into that, but that was the story that everybody fixated in on the off season. But I think Toronto has a lot of other pieces that people quickly overlook. And again, I think most of that is because everyone's focused on the quarterback. Chad Kelly who was the face of the league last year, your MOP, now he's gone. It's all, what are we going to do? But I mean if you look at the rest of that roster, and again, I mean as someone who knows a lot about that space, I see that as a team that they shouldn't surprise a lot of people because again, I think if they do win above 10 games, they get to that 11 or 12 win mark and make a run in the playoffs, it'll surprise people because they weren't focused on that in the off season. So maybe that's my hot take. I don't know how hot that really is. I don't have too many hot takes nowadays. I got to keep things more professional, but we'll settle for that I think. Tim, what do you got here? Ettes come out. Cody has forgotten how to throw football. No, what's your hot takes here, Tim? Sean Lemon will play more games in the regular season than Chad Kelly. Yeah, well actually I did have that bookmarked here. We didn't have time to talk about it, but I do have Dave's, I do have Dave's tweet here about how, and he is representing himself in the arbitration like Bold Strategy cotton. That is interesting to see how that says. He's literally betting on himself. Literally. I like that. Cliffy, what do you got? Alright, I'm going to say I'll do an ette one and I'll even do a league wide one as well. I think Tyson Philpot leads the league in receiving. I think you watch him go off this year. I think it's been there. He's had injury problems last year, that's why he didn't put on. But again, he built that momentum towards the end of the season and all the way in through the playoffs and to the Great Cup to make it that great cup winning catch. I think he takes that momentum and he truly, truly goes off this year. And as I said earlier, I think a team wearing green is going to make the playoffs in the west. I still don't know which one, but I mean if you put a gun to my head and force me to choose, I'd probably say Saskatchewan by the slimmest of margins. But I definitely think this is the year though, where you see Calgary just, I just don't have the faith and I'm a huge Matthew Shield guy and I think he'll end up taking over the reigns from Jake Mayer, believe it or not. But I just don't see enough horses, pardon the pun on that Calgary team to really make something happen in the East. I think Ottawa's going to be improved, but they too, I mean just based on what we saw in the preseason from them, it's hit or miss. I mean, I think if their stars show up to play, they'll do good, but I just don't see them dominating. I don't see them coming out of the gate hot and just bursting through everybody. I definitely think Montreal, this is their division to lose, quite frankly. I think Chad Kelly stuff, aside with Toronto, Toronto's going to be competitive. They're going to do decent, but again, I think this is a wide open vision for the ettes to, I won't say dominate, but they're going to do extremely well in. And honestly, all of this is going to make for a very fun season and I am jazzed right now for Great Cup to get out to Vancouver and be a part of that. I'm excited whether the Ettes are in it or not. If they're in it, great. If they're not, oh well, I still think Great Cup's going to be absolutely outstanding because this season as a whole has potential To be really, really outstanding this year. Yeah, Cliffy, we're bringing the whole West coast contingent now. So you guys come hang out. We'll do all this stuff here. We'll do hang out at BZ plays. Andy, what do you got here? And you're muted. Make sure you back up. Up. There you go. I got three actually street specific ones. My first one, I think that Trevor Harris is going to lead the league in passing. He's going to be completely healthy. Lead the league in passing. Yep. I said it. I said it. That is a hot take. That is hot take. That's my Andy. Don't bother on your head. And I think Samuel Lys catches double digit touchdowns and helps him in that mission. I really believe in him. My second one is a little bit more dower. I think Calgary misses the playoffs and I think Dave Dickinson's going to be looking for a new job at the end of the season. That's my second one. That's also another one. My third one. It's not just because of the gentlemen who are on this show. I think the Ettes go back to the great cuff. I think they take it, I like Toronto a lot. I believe in Ryan did Witty, but there's something about them playing Montreal in the playoffs that doesn't sit well with me. And if they don't have Chad Kelly, I definitely don't feel good about it. Although you'd probably argue that you do want to see Chad Kelly again, honestly. But we want to see last year's Chad Kelly playing. Yeah, you want to see that one game. Chad Kelly? Again, that's my hot take. I do think BC's going to be in it, but from the east, I don't believe in Ottawa. I don't believe in Hamilton. Sorry. Jason and Toronto. I will say one thing I'll say about Toronto that concerns me real quick. They have a great offensive line. They cut all their offensive line backups in the preseason. If they get injuries in the offensive line, they're in trouble. And that really concerns me. I understand. I know they have a lot of talent. I know one of their biggest player personnel guys, Vince McCree, moved on to the Buffalo Bills and I think that's going to show because I'm really worried about their ability to restock the coverage. But those are my three really biggest hot takes. So Trevor Harris, Dickinson and Montreal, those are my three big ones. I think if you listen carefully, I think Chuck Hill just threw another interception. So I think I just heard that call come down. I got a couple here. I got a couple here. First off a hot take. I think Chad Kelly will play more games under center than Trevor Harris does for the Saskatchewan of our Fridays. I think Harris will blown up. I think Harris is going out. I completely disagree a hundred percent with Andy's steak on that. I think Trevor makes it half through the season. I think he's done also. I think McLeod, Bethel Thompson's going to be duty. I think that he's going to, I talked with Dave and I don't think at least Trey can run and do all those things. I know McLeod can get the ball out quick and that's what they want, make decisions. I think he's going to get blown up. I think I don't want wish him to be hurt, but I think that that is not going to work out. I think he's going to be duty. My bold take, and this is not what I want. I think BC misses out. I think BC misses out. I want BC versus outlets. I've seen this before. BC is not for the cold weather. Getting in there at the team and we'll see this year, the last couple of years, they're not built tough that way they're not built to come in and play and okay, yeah, we can host Winnipeg, come in, Winnipeg's going to run the ball down your throat. They do all the time. I have until I see otherwise, not from an on the field, but there's a locker room disconnect. And I don't know if Campbell's too, I'm the buddy, buddy, coach, and kind of all that. Wow, we'll wash this and forget about it. I dunno. I saw them fall apart last year. I saw them, like I said, the top get really high on their supply and I see that not working out for disappointment of all. Tim, anything crazy there? No, I don't think so. I mean it's new season. Who knows what the hell's going to happen. I mean, yeah, I dunno. No, but no Evan's wifi. That's, let's talk real quick here. If you guys got to go whatever. I want to just touch on these. Are you guys good for five more minutes to go through this or you want to get out and get prepped for the game? Go for it. Alright, so let's do this. I was talking about, I think it was Jim Mullen, how I liked the Elks uniforms. So they have this new one out now. It's got the shiny shoulder. I hate this new uniform. What do we think of this, Andy, you first? Yeah, this blend is strange now. It's obviously giving me a lot of vibes as an organ duck alum. It gives me a lot of vibes of some of those jerseys. I mean, I don't know, there's something about the steely pads on the shoulders that this doesn't really fit to me. I don't know why, but it doesn't seem emblematic of Edmonton. Now maybe I'll get a better idea of the city when I go visit it myself and perhaps maybe I'll change my mind then. But yeah, I'm not crazy about this. And the numbers, the fonts for the name and the numbers are a little strange. I'm not feeling this either, but those shoulder pads are just strange, especially the stripes going in between the framing too. It's a little weird. Tim, good to you. I'm trying to find, because I want to find the photo. The previous ones I thought were pretty nice. So Tim, what do you think about this? Yeah, The patch that you can't see that's on the side I really like. I was expecting a little bit more. I mean for those who don't know, it's Edmonton's 75th anniversary as a football club. Yeah, let me get the patch Here. Yeah, but the shoulder pads themselves, they're like triangles. The triangles that unquote represent the forest of Northern Alberta. It's just okay. I mean, I'm okay with the numbers themselves. I know, it's funny, we know quite a few Elks fans who really hated the numbers over the past couple of years. I'm glad bringing back the yellow to the numbers is a nice idea. At least they won't be unreadable from the press box and on tv. But what I thought was funny, and people will see this in the next, at least in the next one, I think if you're going to show Saskatchewan, is those stripes seem to be the newest big thing in the CFL. You showed the picture earlier of the ic red thirds, those also had the stripes. So do those and so will Ottawa once you show the Ottawa ones. So I think these are cool. I was going to joke and say long Leah the obsidian order, but it's a unique thing and I think if they end up going with that new logo full time, the SI guess, what would we call it? The S. It's like the S with the wheat. Yeah, Right. Yeah, yeah. The sweet logo. There you go. Yeah, I'm okay with that. I think it really looks good. The one that they use now, I understand it is part of history. It is a little dated, but there's only so many times that you can use the Safeway logo like they did there in the back there. That's their throwback one there. But I like this look, I really like this look. I want to see what it looks like in real person or on tv because obviously as we know, just talk to major league baseball, things can look a little bit different under the lights, so under camera lights. So I think it looks good. And these are all alt jerseys in terms of this will be the rollout, the third string one, Right? Except for Ottawa. Except for Ottawa. Yeah, Ottawa is a new cliff. You thought something is, I'll pull up the OT one. I will say, I don't know how the heck they got ice cubed to be a part of this, but I love that video where he's like, damn, that's even a hard name. Like Red Blacks. I thought that's based on the lumberjack, right? The northern Canadian woods. I dunno if he knows all that, but Cliffy, what do you think of this? This was a cool look for the Red Blacks too. We got a lot of anniversaries and things going on, right? Yeah, they're going for the retro vibes here of the Ottawa rough riders from back in the day and it's nice. It's okay. I mean, it's funny you talk about Red Blacks, either the uniform's got to be predominantly black or predominantly red, right? Just to keep up with the name. I mean, this is not terrible. I mean it, it's fine. It's fine. And I know they're going to be wearing these all season at home, with the exception of the red uniforms, I think three dates where they're regular red centric uniforms. But this for a 10th anniversary look, which kind of funny to celebrate a 10th anniversary. But I mean listen, whatever gets people excited and of course whatever sells jerseys, right? So I mean I guess that's not bad. I will say Saskatchewan's jerseys are good in the sense that people apparently have been really clamoring for black jerseys again in Saskatchewan and it's one of those very polarizing things. People either love those retro black jerseys or they absolutely hate them. No, I think this is a great compromise. It's a very dark green, but it still has kind of that black effect. So if the riders want to do a blackout game, they normally do, you could wear these and no problem. It would work. It would blend in practically, even though it's not black per se, it's still a very, very dark green. And I got to say, especially what Tim was talking about with that new S wheat logo, the sweet logo I guess we'll call it now. Yeah, I like that. I like that it's part of evolution, just like the L West logos evolved over the years. Saskatchewan is a team that is very much rooted in history, but someone or a team that really needs to, I don't want to say get with the times, but as I say, evolve, grow a little bit and change and I think you're looking towards the future. That's a futuristic looking logo that still has that classic look to it. But at the same time, you know what it is. As soon as you see that s, you see that thresh of wheat, that's a Saskatchewan ruff rider's helmet and Edmonton's Team. I was just joking. I'm literally looking, see what it costs to buy them. That's how bad I am. That's how bad a part of all, I'm sorry, Tim, continue. Well, I'll Say by the way, the things on the uniforms, the triangles, they kind of reminds to what you would see on a topographical map. That's what it reminds me of when I first saw it. It's like, okay, I understand that they're going for the forest. Look, by the way, for the Red Blacks one, the Red Blacks with their giant name across the front kind of gives me vibes of the old ettes ones that they had ettes plastered across the front. That could be a little smaller. That could be a little smaller. I mean, they can't really help it in Saskatchewan because that's a long spelling name. But I mean, yeah, make Red Blacks just a touch smaller. But other than that, I like those jerseys. It's a really nice throwback to the original rough rider's. Look, Just if we have any new, and we'll get Andy on here, We'll get Oh, oh, they're new helmets. Yeah, they're new helmets too. Yeah. Ottawa's new helmets. Do I have those? What do they look like? It is similar much to the very popular throwback helmet that they wore last year or last two years where it's the current R, just the R soap without the saw blade on the side and it has those same stripes going across the helmet. I see. There we go. Kind of like that. There we go. Yeah, There. I will just say if anyone's making any decisions about teams for uniforms, I mean the lions now are fire. I mean the blackout and the fog. I mean these are hot. These are hot, hot hot jerseys. Andy, any thoughts on this and then we'll get out of here. Andy, did we lose you? I mean, I've always loved the gun medal jerseys from the BC lions. That's one of my favorite kits of all time. I love those. I think I really like the gun metal outfits though from bc. Yeah, I think these are good. The more I look at this, the more I look at the Emiton one, I think it's all right. It's kind of like snake scales. It's a little bit Tampa Bay Viper is a little adjacent, a little bit there. I was thinking Hounds tooth when I first saw it. Oh yeah, yeah. Here's the question. Do I pop on the MacCleod Bethel Thompson, Elks jersey? That would be a bold strategy. That would be kind cool though. I still like to take that patch there. That's a take on re-imagining of the patch that they had originally, I think when they first became, when the original Eskimos team became, when they first came to be. So I kind of like that look. But yeah, I said, and then we'll get see the whatever the ettes are going to do. I'm sure that'll be released sometime in late July, early August. Well, that'd be exciting. Andy, anything else from you before we start winding this down? 10 minutes to kick off? No, just really excited to start another season. I mean, for people who fall in the league longer for me, I'm sure it's always Christmas, just kind of restarting the league. But I really just appreciate getting more and more knowledge. I mean, and I think both could say that we are still downloading more history and more knowledge about this league every year because we're sort of playing catch up compared to you guys and everybody else who covers the CFL and has covered the CFL for so long. But I'm always excited about it and I really look forward to it so much in June. It was something for me to kind look to in the summer and just saying, well, there's more football on the horizon, but it's a different kind of football and it's a history that I can start to treasure and now that I have more perspective as far as players, coaches, previous records, things like that, it really helps me a lot and I love that. It kind of makes me feel like when I was a teenager, when I was getting to know the NFL, it's starting to, it's like getting my knowledge wells adjusted every time I go back into it and start to learn about it. So I really appreciate that and best of luck to the Ette. I don't know how they're going to do in the peg tonight, but it's going to be really interesting. Can't wait for this game. Great opening match. Tim Cliffy here with Ettes Fight that podcast. Plug your guys' stuff. I know you guys do weekly, everything on there. I don't think anyone that's on this way doesn't know who you guys are, but make sure you plug all that before we get out of here. Of course, one thing I will say is after the game tonight, please make sure you check out our YouTube channel because we will be doing our post game show flight deck live and we'll offer up our thoughts on what we saw against the Winnipeg Blue bombers, good, bad or other. We'll be on there and we'll talk about the game itself. And of course we're back every week doing the podcast as well, so make sure if you're not following us, follow us, whether it's on X, Facebook, Instagram, pretty much everything, s flight deck, you'll find us all the major podcast platforms, YouTube, make sure you're subscribed and hit the notification bell for that as well because we plan to do a lot this year. I mean, we got so much done last year, but I still feel there's so much more that there is to be done and we just want to keep, I always say I want to take this as far as we can go and go a little further. I think especially now, doing the live shows has helped us get a chance to do that. We were able to go to different stadiums last year and do post game shows, live on the opposing team's field sometimes even, and that's awesome. We want to be able to keep doing that and just keep growing this channel, keep growing this podcast and really just spreading the love, spreading the awareness, if you will, for the Montreal all the west. That's been our goal for this and we want to keep, as I said, taking this as far as we can go and going even further, Tim and having team presidents hop on and spoil your streams and stuff. I see you guys posting all that stuff. Good stuff on that. Yeah, Tim, what else you got here and then we'll get out of here. Yeah, as I said, I think I'll kind of echo what Cliff was just saying. I mean if it wasn't for an idea, our partners show Flight Deck live to the main podcast. Like I said, we've been growing more and more and as we've seen anything can happen during these live shows. So just give us a chance. You may not like out of the Wests, but just give us a chance and you'll be surprised on who we have on the show. I'm sure you'll be interested in the stories that we tell. Well, this will be good. Like I said, I could subscribe Hussy channel as well. I think we'll figure out some recaps here coming next week. I don't think Evan schedule a lot of that. We'll figure it out. Maybe Andy will hop on after he gets off his big vacations. Andy's heading New Mexico, maybe we'll get Anthony Miller on. Anyone else? Appreciate it guys. Enjoy. Should be fun. I'll get my stuff on here and we'll get out of here. Enjoy the game. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks As always. Thank good show Tomorrow. Yeah, and big show tomorrow. We got Dan Kaplan coming on. We're talking UFL playoffs. So yeah, no rest for the wicked here. We'll see you guys next time.

UFL Week 10 Results, TV Ratings + Attendance! Winner and Losers From UFL Week 10!!

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast. Reid here. Here we are, exciting times today. This might be the most exciting post UFL weekend recap. We have, I'll get to that in a minute here. We're going to be giving away some free tickets today to the UFL championship game. I'll give you guys all the details of that. We are waiting. Andrew Murray fighting traffic on his way home has the link. He will join when he can, but we have a lot to get to here today. Before we get to Andy, give me your comments Now if we need to pad a little bit, sometimes it's like two minutes into the show and sometimes it's like half an hour into the show, but we will get Andy here momentarily. Lots of people joining filling you guys in on all of this stuff today. First off, big episode coming up Friday. Got everything confirmed, talking with Dan Kaplan, formerly of The Athletic Now with Awful announcing freelancing. Dan wrote an article last week talking about is UFL doing enough to survive into season two? Had a lot of good quotes, friend of the show, Eric gco, all of that. We'll get Dan's thoughts. We talked with Dan. I mean I've talked with him every season about the XFL and the USFL and all that stuff so it'll be good to catch up with Dan. It is the UFL going to survive the Spring League curse and then Pat Rapino coming on. Haven't had Pat on the show proper here. I think the whole season. Pat's been busy working and doing his own channel over at Analyze and Educate. We'll get Pat on. We'll do a full UFL preview here on Friday. Playoff preview heading into the weekend. Little windy here. Hope it's okay. Finally it was raining all day, got sunny here. And then for you CFL fans, I see Jenna here checking in. Yes, the new Red Blacks uniforms look good. I think the Saskatchewan Ruff Rider alternate football uniform looks good. We will be doing a live, it's already the event channel. The event page is already on the channel. We'll be doing a live CFL pregame show Thursday, June 6th before the kickoff. A game is at five 30 Pacific Montreal Ettes At Winnipeg. We will be having the professor Andrew Murray joining us. Jason over with Hussey's Huddle will be joining us. Tim and Cliffy with the Ettes Flight Deck podcast. And then I think Evan will be on as well. We're just trying to figure out with Evan's schedule, but I know Evan wants to be a part of that and then we're trying to figure out, it's a lot to do 21 weeks plus playoffs post game recaps on Mondays, but we'll see. Jason seems excited for that. So we will do our best here but CFLS coming Thursday. And then like I said, Dan Kaplan, pat Rafino for Friday's show. So subscribe, make sure you're subscribed to the channel here and you'll want to be for all of this stuff. So Chris is here in the chat. A couple of things here. So first and foremost, the tickets that were won, the UFL championship tickets did the big reveal last week on the episode. Hope you guys enjoyed that. That listener is unable to attend. So I said, well why did you submit? So scheduling conflicts. So those tickets are still available. I'll probably post tomorrow how you can win those. We do what we can here. Also the Brandon Silver's jersey, if you are the winner of that, if you submitted to be the Brandon Silver's jersey winner, that Jersey has not been claimed. So you have till Thursday when I record to claim that. So if you are one of the people that went on to get the Brandon Silver's jersey, make sure you do that and then we will do the UFL tickets. But Chris Tisdale here, well here's his comment at least. Anyway, Savage, it's over for the defenders. Chris is a rockstar, listener, watcher, viewer of the program. Chris has donated an additional two tickets to the UFL championship game. So if you were wanting to go, this is your first opportunity. We are going to raffle these off at the end of the stream today. Must be present on the stream to win. So let's keep that YouTube watch out or watch time up here. We're going to do it the last thing today, so must be on the stream to win. Here's the tickets here. We have section one 13 row F, good seats here, seats 11 and 12. These are coming from Chris. Chris is in the chat, he's on YouTube. Give Chris a dap, follow him on Twitter, all that stuff. These are from Chris. I will give you more details about how you want to be signed up for this once Andy gets on. But spoiler alert, you want to be subscribed and then we will be giving bonus opportunities if you want to give a super chat into the chat or if you want to join the channel today, 99 cents a month or you can give a super chat. That will give you an extra option. I will give you more details here. You can subscribe, do all that stuff right now. We'll give you more details. Fill all that in at the end. Yes, so we have a foosball. Brandon Silvers is the legend. Yes, you'll want to be a part of that, but like I said, we'll do that at the end of the show today, Philip. Yeah, we'll talk about that through all of that with the supplemental draft. Yeah, Abdul here checking. Give me some comments here. We'll Pat, while Andy is coming on here, yes, can't wait for the interview with Dan. James checking in here. Andy did a great job last week. How to fix the UFL. I hope they're paying attention. I will say this, I had a comment yesterday and there were lots of everything over the weekend with the DC defenders, 12,000 in change attendance and I had tweeted out like, boy that's, that's almost twice Birmingham and Birmingham's in the playoffs DC ISN in the playoffs. Renegades aren't obviously got a lot of kerfuffles and then I saw the media availability this week for the stallions and there's two people available and I had put out, that's a really easy way in my opinion. If you're the Birmingham staff, let's get some more remote. Let's get some more media availability here. It's the last home game of protective. We're in the playoffs, we're hosting all that stuff. Just thought that was surprising. The Brahmas media availability came out today. Much more impressive. Like eight or nine. All the coaches and the coordinators and we got players and we have open media availability, but I just thought that was odd that we talk about Birmingham a lot on here. We have a lot of all that stuff. That's little stuff you can do. Like hey, let's offer the media in Birmingham an opportunity. Can we fly some people in early? At least do the remote stuff. So I thought that was interesting. So hopefully they're listening. I can tell you sometimes sounds like they are listening, but yes, I think there's lots more that can be done here. But yes, get subscribed to the channel here. I get ready for that. Let's do some more comments and then we got TV ratings, attendance here to buy this over for Andy to get on. Jenna checking in. Good evening from Southern California. Hopefully we'll win the tickets. Just go around Tanner, get subscribed, join the channel, get a super chat ready to go here, but we'll do all that. BTA caught is a lot. Really was hoping for a Alamo Dome of playoffs. Playoffs situation, not so lucky. I think the battle dome will be rocking. Very excited to be there. We're literally under two weeks away here. We'll be in St. Louis for the UFL championship game. I know Andy's going to be a part of that. I know Anthony Miller's going to be on there. I know Pat's going to be a part of that. Max. Let's see, you got to submit. You can give it to anyone you want. You can give it to Mike Mitchell. You can give it to anyone that wants his I zoom in I thing too far here. Philip here. Houston checking in. Appreciate that. Yeah, Tanner, the elf stuff. It's tough and especially now work schedule CFL is hard enough with my work schedule ramping up here in the summer. I am very excited that Anthony Miller, he was on the call last weekend, got to see a lot of those clips posted online. I know a friend of the show Emory Hunt's going to be doing that. Maybe we can get them on to do a couple of check-ins, but I do not. I've never been qualified enough to do a week by week on of commentary of that. But they're doing a tremendous job and I think if we had gone back a couple years and pick the wrong league to cover here with Van Ville football and all that said, maybe we could have got it on the elf thing and that would've worked out. Christina not going to comment too much tonight. Hopefully have lifey duties to that's fine, but just as time matters here you get part of the giveaway and also, yeah, CFL for free. CBS Sports Network. If you're on fubu, if you're on YouTube tv, that's on there. Most of the games during the summer are on cfl plus.ca. You can Google that. Those are all free. You can watch it from a phone, a laptop. You can airplay it to a tv, plug it in. That's usually what I do. I usually just watch it on the laptop. You can plug it in HGMI cable as well. I know that's how some people get around like MLB blackouts and stuff like that, but they're all free on there. Plug it in, check it out and no, it should be exciting. Yeah, Thursday it'll be a really good game. The defending champs and Montreal ettes against the team. It's a great cup rematch at Winnipeg. Very excited for that crypto checking in here. Appreciate you Chris. We certainly do appreciate Chris on that. Lots of comments here. Lots of comments as I continue to break my channel here. Yeah, Pat's checking in. I know if you want to watch maybe they can start uploading CFL games as well. We'll see how that works out. That would be a fun experiment. Let's start uploading CFL games to YouTube and see if that works out. Lauren set. Y'all checking in here? Yes, Lauren would love to win. Lots of stuff of all that. Yes. And then we're talking, yeah, 50 cent a BC place sold out for the BC Lions home opener. That's the Saturday before the UFL championship game and then tickets on sale today for the Gray Cup. Jonas Brothers announced for that. I said that I am not in the demographic to watch the Jonas Brothers, so that's probably a good signing for the lead to get some of those younger players in there. Younger fans in there. Lauren Panthers are on the hunt. Appreciate that. Well Christina YP duties took about six minutes here maybe That's good. Christina's back with all that stuff. Yeah, Fs all check it out. Be with the channel. We'll give all the details here Thursday like can subscribe. We're going to do a full season breakdown. Jim and Cliffy know the outlet outlets inside it out. Jason follows all of that stuff and then we get Evan on. Andy's I know is already taking notes on all that stuff so it should be excited. I think we do a pretty damn good job with CFL coverage on here from stateside and like I said, appreciate Jason kind of carrying the load with a lot of that stuff during the season here. There we go. But Pat's getting on the board getting on for the win the championship game ticket, so alright, enough of that right now. Let's get the TV ratings here while we wait for Andy. Give you guys thoughts on all this stuff as we pull up. All this stuff came in here, UFL week 10 rating Saturday, 754,000 on ESPN, the Michigan Birmingham game that no one showed up for, even though it meant a lot in terms of getting the home field vantage sort of even the Michigan couldn't play at Ford Field anyway, so we appreciate that. 754,000 for that San Antonio St. Louis here. 836,000 on Fox, the 4:00 PM window on there, Sunday at noon DC Arlington DC hosting at 893,000 and then Houston, Memphis here. That was the toilet bowl. I saw it called the potty bowl. I think a wonderful brand. That's a great way to get YouTube views branding something. The potty bowl Houston, Memphis 649,000. So I will tell you and talking with Mike today, I think the league wanted to give a little bit of a bump to that last game of the season here giving the stakes away for now. Memphis will get the right, Memphis will get the number one draft pick here coming into the season here, going into the supplemental draft and all that stuff. It really didn't seem like for a long, long time anyone wanted to win that game. I was tracking that kind of off and on. We had a wedding show on Sunday. I thought, God, is it so six to three here, what's going on? But overall, I think you have to be thrilled with this week 10 here going in. I think Mike had on that one of the games peaked over the potty bowl game, I think peaked over a million for that at one point in the later hours of 1.147 I think if I'm listening for all that stuff. So we'll be interested for that and I want to talk about this and I think this is a conversation for kind of another time once we get done with the season, so we saw a big bump this year, right? Prioritizing TV time slots, give you more fox, give you more A B, C. You see a lot of the Mike Movahill of the world, Hey, everything's up 40%, 30%, all of that. This is the season you're going to get that bump, right? You're never going to get that again next year. If anything they'll be dropped just because season one to two novelties off of it, but you really got the big bump this year prioritizing giving the time slot. So I'll be curious to see kind of what that carries over into next year. You're not going to have those, the big leaps, right? It's kind of like the apple silicon when they came out with the new MacBooks a couple of years ago and they got the huge jump jumping off of Intel that first year and then ever since then it's like microme upgrades just because that was the big kind of generational leap for that. So I'll be curious this year, I know in one of the tweets, Abdul had a good comment, I had bookmark. Are we going to see that continu into next year and we'll see. I'll be curious with that because obviously you got kind of the big bump right here, Christine, if the rock needs to come to St. Louis, I would be surprised if they're not. I know obviously Danny and the Rock were there. We had the pregame post-conference or pregame press conference with them before the Tyler game last year and then they did the media stuff on the field and we were part of all that kind of sneaking in there. I was with Anthony Miller and Anthony had the right pass and I said, Anthony, I'm going to follow you in here. I see Andy checking in here. I think if he's a thumbs up, we'll get him pulled up. Ready to go here. Andy looking very man last here for the hour. Well at least I don't blend into the background. I have a couple of times. So that's really all I'm trying to factor in here. So thank you for being so patient and everyone being so patient about it. Southern California traffic is not enviable. Do not try it. It's great. Yeah, I guess we're giving away two free tickets at the end of the stream today. I'll give you more details all that once Andy can start talking. We got the wheel, I have the here, can I do this? I have the wheel ready to put in here, put our names in and everything. It'll be exciting. So we'll do a live drawing for all that stuff. Andy, we're talking ratings on all of this. The toilet bowl 650,000. I know they tried to give some extra juice to that with the whole draft pick. Did that do anything for you? Right. Memphis gets the number one pick now moving forward and then are we presuming the rest of the order will be given up by the season standings? Right? It's not like the roughnecks get second pick, right? I mean for me it's just thank God it's over. That's really the only thought I have towards that game for me. I know it's important for the teams involved to get that first overall pick and congratulations to Memphis obviously I think we all knew that John DeFillipo of the two coaches was the superior one in terms of his ability to try and manage what was happening this season. I know it didn't go well for him. Memphis had a lot of problems on offense and defense and for me it didn't really matter because Houston was just that much more worse. They did not really have any identity whatsoever on offense or defense this entire season. I know they led the League of interceptions, but really there wasn't much of a calling card for them on either side of the ball and obviously Curtis Johnson didn't really make much of a case for himself to stay on the team. I think that's a hard discussion to have with him afterwards. I know we've talked about it for weeks, but I just don't think it's going to really pan out well for him. But for me it wasn't really so much about the game itself, it was just more of the implications of now what does Memphis do with this and can they use that as a chip for next season and can they use that as a way to generate interest for next season because let's be real, their attendance obviously was not enviable in any way, which we'll get into later. I will say though, I'm not sure about you, but just hearing all those horns during the game was really interesting. It was almost like a CFL game in a way. There was a lot of, I thought I was watching Montreal Ettes home game, how much blaring and horn blowing and all that in the background. It was really interesting. I don't know if I would employ that strategy again, but at least it made it seem louder than the number of people would indicate that it should be. So I'll give 'em credit for that. In terms of in this, again, we'll get into this off season, but coach flip sticks around here, right? I mean you get rid of the coach and then hey, to me this isn't like, we're not Caleb Williams here. I mean it's the first pick of the UFL supplemental draft that's coming or whatever they want to call it. Call it. I had a player DM me today like, Hey, do you know anything about that? I mean it's not a game, it's not a generational changing pick here, but I mean do you think they get rid of the coach and they're like, or do you think Coach Flip is around here? Yeah, I mean for me, I have to think that they're going to retain Coach d Lebo. He just seemed like he was into what was happening on the field. I mean I remember there was a play where Vinny Pop Holly ran to the sideline, he got a first down and as he's running off the sideline, there's Steve Felipo right there congratulating him and slap him on the shoulder. I think he really appreciated his time, has appreciated his time in the league and I think he deserved another shot. To me there were a lot more problems with this team, the roster namely, and obviously the injuries didn't help as well. It could be a lot better of a situation for him. I think that's something that they have to consider going forward. So for me really wasn't much of a DeFilippo issue. I do think it needs to be rectified in terms of what do they put in front of them, what kind of resources they give him going forward. So for me, I think he deserves at least another shot. A couple of questions here, Tanner. Do you think Memphis will stay with Cus if he still plays or move on Port Port? Dude, do you need some help? Yeah, I mean does Case come back for this again is case sign me up. I mean that's a twofold issue. One, it is the offensive line, but also Case Cookes takes a lot of hits. He does not know how to get rid of the ball. He needs to be coached up in terms of getting rid of the ball. I think they need to get a proper quarterback's coach to get in there and tell 'em, look, we can't have you taking these hits. You need to get this ball out fast. You just don't have the offensive linemen or the assets. You are not Trey Forward, you're not Adrian Martinez, you're not running out of this. You need to get the ball out of your hands. So I think for somebody in Casey's case, they need to get somebody in there to be able to coach him up and tell him it's not worth it long-term for him to be able to keep taking these hits. He's just getting beat up. I mean he was saying on the sideline during the St. Louis game that he was having breathing trouble. That's not good. I don't want that. Okay, I don't want that. Or actually it may have been the Michigan game now I think about it actually it was the Michigan Panzers game, but not just for him but just for consistency purposes. The only thing that was really consistent about this team to me, I know David Davis was really good. Darius Victor tried his damnedest. I know he wasn't really the same on this team as he was with the generals, but they tried to get the most out of him, but they just didn't have the offensive line in front of him to be able to use him as well as they should have. Yeah. Does he need to go to the tug of io? We did the juujitsu so we could figure out how to fall stuff properly. Get him Tyreek Kill and Jalen Waddle too. How about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A couple things here about attendance and stuff. We'll get back up and then we'll move on to the back stuff. No, we already did that one, Chad, that viewership and systems of the year, which I thought was a plus this viewership could have trended. I agree. I mean looking at the ratings here, this terrible, terrible Sunday night game here, still getting 600 now, I don't know if that's what you want. I don't know if I want 650,000 watching that game, but I think this proof, like I said, I would say before you got on, this is the year with the big jump, right? We're giving all the time slots. You're never going to get this sort of growth from year one to year two from year two to year three. I mean it's just not going to happen. It's not possible. Well, that's the thing. You get these isolated takes, I don't know if you saw it, but there was that one coach from one of the colleges who came on on Sunday night and said, I've just watched this rough next game and I'm watching this quarterback play and it's horrendous and he's isolating one singular play from Nolan Henderson in this game that really has no implications. And this is a backup quarterback in a game between two teams that have won one game the entire season. And I just don't know what to say to people who want to isolate those singular plays. I tell them, go watch release Perez. Go watch Adrian McCarran, go watch Adrian Martinez, go watch somebody else because I don't, you can take one play of any league. I could do that for the NFL. I could be like, look how terrible this league is and I could show you a play from that Denver Broncos, Indianapolis Colts game. That was the bane of our existence two years ago on Thursday night. And everyone knows what I'm talking about. And you can take that play in isolated play from that game and make it, you have to be consistent in your viewership. The problem is people are going to rag on these leagues because they see those isolated games, but follow those who really keep with it. And I think for me, this is good in terms of the numbers, I really think this is more consistent. The most it's consistent been since 2020 really. And so for the league, I think that's good, but again, as we talked about last week, how do we build upon that? I've already given a lot of my suggestions, but I think this is really encouraging and I think this is something they need to build upon going into the off season. And I'm curious to talk with Dan next week and then if need be, I'm going to get Ben Fisher on as well with the Sports Business Journal because my thought process all along is whatever the number is, because TV ratings and everything, it's been manufactured forever because we want them to be nebulous because then the TV networks can try the advertisers whatever they want. And I mean, I've told this story before, but when I worked in Bakersfield, they literally mailed out the journals and we had the sweeps week and we would go out and it was the most salacious stories that we could do to run promos on because you wanted everybody to be thinking of KGET that week, whatever the couple week period was for all that stuff. And so it's always been this inexact science, but I have to think that there's 400,000 homes just on A, B, C or Fox or NBC or whatever all the time that they just factor in. And so then you get the 600, maybe that really only was 200,000 or I mean obviously the people are watching, but I just think that there's a non-zero number of homes across that are just rated into these numbers. So yes, you're getting the boost this year because we don't have the FS one and the ESPN two games and all of that, but this might be consistent to next year. I'll just be curious, like you said, if there's any growth on that, I can see them running these back. I don't see another 40% increase on it. I don't either, unless there's some drastic changes or unless there's a Caitlyn Clark esque player that's suddenly going to show up in this league and massively improve viewership, but I don't think that's really going to happen in at least the foreseeable future and everybody wants that golden ticket. They want that one player that gets everybody to start watching the sport and that just doesn't, you can't wish that to happen. So you need to find alternative ways of creating that viewership. I think what I will say is I want to know, I wish there was a way that you can measure this and it's really hard to analytically, but can you find the people who besides bandwidth as far as how long they're watching because YouTube does that. Can you find people that you know are seeking it out? And that's hard to say. How can you tell, is this on at a bar that no one's really paying attention to or is this actually being viewed by somebody actively at their home? How do you measure that? We don't have those kinds of ratings yet, but that's the market and research that maybe needs to be looked into is can you survey people? One thing I did like the XFL did last year was when you had the surveys that you submitted, I think sometimes they would ask through a newsletter on your email server, they would ask you, okay, well how often do you watch? How many games do you watch? Do you watch casually? Do you watch Seriously? I think you need to send things out like that. Can you send feelers to people? I know that'll be your core base, but at least try doing that and I think that's important. It's interesting. Yeah, we talking got a lot of Caitlin Clark in here. I mean that's the thing with YouTube that why McAfee was able to get such a deal with ESPN because here everything is tracked on here. I know how many new people watch, how many old people watch, how many new subscribers watch, how long they watch, when they turned off, when they turned on when this, and so TV is such an antiquated beast in that and that's why we pontificate over these ratings all the time. But I mean the streaming when they finally get the ratings now, but see they don't want to, right? Because in the TV networks, and I love Rod, right? I love Rod Peterson and they got sponsors on that show and I'm like, God, what are these people paying for that and what are they expecting in terms of, because you watch their YouTube traffic and it's whatever, but I'm like, how many people are watching that channel? Well, it's whatever number the game plus and them want to say, and there's no real way to track that. I'm always curious that where there's so much, it's a hundred percent transparency on YouTube and it's no transparency at all on that and like this, like Lauren, this Hulu live count for ratings. No, they don't count streaming for that kind of stuff and they're talking like do they count the bars and sports bars? Probably not, right? I mean there's all these different caveats to all that where again, with the YouTube and all that, we get all that. Let's get attendance here. I want to get to the games. I want to make sure that we get enough talk about the football on here, but 7,000 here for Birmingham. 34, good showing increase for St. Louis here you would expect with the playoff spot on the line here, DC 13,000, I had commented on Twitter basically double Birmingham for a meaningless game against the Renegades and then Memphis with 6,000. We expect all that. I have a summary of all the ratings here now that we're done with the regular season, but any initial thoughts on that? Look, that's quite a bang for Birmingham to finish with, isn't it? In a final regular season game where you're potentially going to win your USFL conference championship regular season. Yeah, fantastic there. Look, I think this is really great for DC to have these numbers at the end of the season. I mean it was a fantastic matchup with Arlington, so a great game to be treated to for the DC fans at the end of the season. I know they didn't win, but that was really something that showed to me is that that DC fan base does scare. They do. I think they're one of the really true form fan bases in the league. I really do. And I believe that after the pandemic, I really believe that we all did. I think that was clear in front, but everything else here, I mean St. Louis obviously they're going to always turn up and they increased a little bit over from last time Birmingham. We got to talk about this. Look, I know you don't want to hear it and I know I don't care if you have a profile picture with a flag wearing a hat and a pair of eyeballs that's telling me it doesn't matter. Guess what it does because if you don't have a attendance numbers, guess what the league's going to do. And I don't like to say that, but it's true. You have to hold the markets accountable. I think the league needs to do a better job of appealing to these markets. Absolutely. I lined that out last week, but if you don't start putting in numbers, things are going to happen and it's not going to be pretty, and this does matter optically. It matters on tv. And I don't care if you think it doesn't matter in terms of the number of people there because saying, well, the TV money is where it is, it all matters. Every bit of it. The TV readings matter and the people who show up matter and it looks better on TV and it looks better for the community and it looks better for what you're trying to sell. Everything sell. It's all symbiotic. It all goes together. It all is working in tandem. If this is not here, if one thing's not here and the other thing's not here, this is all valuable and this needs to be put into place. This has to be done. These leagues don't have the luxury that the CFL does. For example, I'll talk about this more on Thursday, but look, take the BC lines for example. They attendance wise, were not doing great for a long time. They had a hard time filling up that space. The dome obviously they had a really hard time filling that up, especially when they weren't playing well. They get a new owner, and I know I talked about last week, ownership maybe is not what's in the cards for this league, but just isolated example. Here comes Omar Doman and he is putting just every little bit of piece that he can into getting people into that stadium and they're pushing towards 50,000 in their season. They're going to be sold out, they're going to be sold out in the seasonal, they're going to sell out. BC play is going to be sold out for that. And that's three years of really hard work and ground on the ground marketing of really going out into the community. It really is working with the amateur football, engaging with them, engaging with, I mean I see that all the time on Twitter. They're going to food banks, they're doing community outreach. They're having people come in, they're going to classes, they're going to schools. I understand that you can't do all that in the 10 week season, but yes, I completely cosign with you. I'm just saying, and I'm not saying they have the resources of the 10 week season or the time span or whatever, but do something to get more engagement because you have to if you're not going to get any increase in that engagement if you don't do something. And I just don't feel like that effort's being put in here. I really don't sometimes and I want it to. I really do, but I just don't feel like it's there sometimes and I want it to be there because Birmingham deserves to have more fans of their stadium. They do. This is a fantastic team to watch. I've enjoyed watching the Birmingham stallions. I sing their praises every week, but yet there's no people showing up why? There has to be more consideration to this and it's a shame. It really is a shame that it's substitute 10,000 at this point of the season, at this point in their existence in the third year of them existing. And this is where we're at. I mean this is less than half of the attendance that they had that first game we went to. This is not a good trend and I don't like it. We'll see how many people show up for the game next week, but they're talking about PAC Protective, PAC Protective, half of the stadium's not being pushed past. We got to one point, are we going to start being stopping, being disillusioned and just understand what's going on? There has to be more effort put in here and I know, look, people think I want to keep ragging on Birmingham. I'm not trying to do it out of spite or trying to take things away from them because I do believe that this is a team that's really worth celebrating. I wish there were more people that were there celebrating. I Wish there was too. I wish there Was too. There's not there. Yeah, No, and like I said before, you got on the media for this week going into the playoff game, skip Holtz, and it's a defensive tackle available for media. If you are a Birmingham media person and you want to cover the team this week, that is your opportunity. I don't understand that. I don't understand that. And I guess before we got on, San Antonio has eight or nine different, they got people today, they got people tomorrow, they got people Thursday, they've got the, I just don't understand how, if you're the, I would say the premier team of this league, I'll say that. I mean battle hawks are there too, but in terms of play on the field, brand notoriety, it's one A and one B with that. And that's why it's so disappointing Birmingham and that you're going to, I just don't understand that. I don't understand how that's like, okay, that's our strategy going into this. It's the last time you're going to be in Birmingham because the championship game, you're not playing for the championship game to be, this is the last time you're going to have with these fans for the season. You're going come to St. Louis. Let's try, but I just don't understand that you're not, this is crazy. If I were them, I mean like you said, availability for players. I would make some of these players more available, especially those who are the most prominent on the team. I think about last year when McLeod Bethel Thompson came down for his one stint for the New Orleans Breakers, and it was in the hub, it was in Birmingham. So vividly remember the fact that Paul Woods, the writer, the Argos historian living up in Canada decided on his own dime to come down and talk to McLeod Bethel Thompson about his time in the SFL and why it transitioned. He had no reason to do that. No, he did that on his own time and his own dime. There were CFL people that came down and wanted to watch CFL players in the league. You got to figure out that cross. There's cross promotional that can go on here, especially with in Adrian Martinez's case, I mean every time that ES ESPN talks about him, they talk about his college days. They saw him in college. Tom Ville saw him at Nebraska, at Kansas State. You can cross over to those people. You really can. And I think more of that reaching across the aisle needs to be done instead of just pretending like, well, we're not going to make these people available. Those who want to find them will find them and they'll find back channeling and whatever. No, make them available. Make it a point of emphasis to be able to make these people available and also make them have a relationship with those who maybe spent time with them in the past. That just to me, that disconnect just baffles me. It really does because I think there's a lot of people who are worth celebrating in this league that came from other leagues or came from colleges or came from different backgrounds and there's just not that connection that's being made and it really does baffle me. Yeah, Abdul here. We'll move on here. I imagine what it tends be Birmingham wasn't good. Well, it makes you think about that. Just real quick with this, I do think this is worth, and like I said, we'll do a deep dive here, but just to get this up here, we'll do a deep dive after the season. I wanted get to the games here just to break it down here. U-F-L-U-F-L, regular season average attendance ladder, St. Louis, 34, dc San Antonio, Birmingham here, Arlington, Michigan, Houston and Memphis here bottoming out. Just any general thoughts of that because it is interesting. Top three and we rag on San Antonio a lot. There's been a lot of the w Scott Baileys of the world and when we got burned with the a f and all that, but seeing it laid out here is pretty interesting. This is a UFL center and obviously figure is tabulated from Mike Mitchell. I mean that's the thing. You do have to have that conversation about being burned by the a f, right? Memphis and San Antonio are your two clear markers here. Memphis, the Express back in 2019, were pulling in 12, 13,000 people. And at that time I'm watching that and thinking good crowd, it could be better. I mean that looks great now. I mean you're talking about possibly top four in the league with that kind of numbers and that's what they were expecting. Again, I know I've gone on and on about San Antonio, there's a myriad of reasons why maybe that's not pulled through as much, but again, there doesn't seem to be that same level of camaraderie. I know again, it's people who maybe say, well, this league's going to be gone. I know that residual effect is really hard to get rid of. Whether or not you know that the team folded because the league folded or because you thought they left casual, people can't really disturb between that. And that's why I really worry about Houston. Oh my God, I don't know what's going to happen with them when they go back to University of Houston Stadium. Are they going to pull those people back in there? I don't know. I think they got to put the people. I think they got to repromote. They do. They're not just going to absorb all those people. Again, I think it's going to be similar numbers if they're not careful. So they've got to continue to put in the work. The Michigan one, the Panthers, I wish, I wish they had better attendance. I think it's a good team. Again, it's the same thing with the Birmingham thing. I think it's a good team. It's worth going to games for. And Ford Field is a nice field, it's a nice facility to go to, but it's like people just don't know what's going on in their area and that's something that has to be addressed going forward. And the same goes for Arlington. We talked about that last week as well. So for me, some of them it's you didn't know or promote enough others. It's a legislative historical battle where it's, well, we're fighting history against us and other ones, well, I don't know if people know that we rebranded or moved across town. So it's a multi-pronged issue. That's really the problem. And the only two real consistent figures are the ones that never really changed, never really changed their identities as teams and never really went fully away, which was DC and St. Louis. They've managed to hold strong for the last four years. Last comments here and then that we get to the games. Mike said here, Michigan was late with ticket distribution, but it's like it's week 10 now I get the first couple weeks, it's week 10, it's week 10, we got to get this going. And then the other thing, you're Darren, I think it tends will be an issue until they get out into the community market. Some quit leaning their rating to the standard. I agree. But I guess the UFL wants to be a TV product first and foremost. I don't think that that's going to be the long time thing of that. So keep in mind, reminder here, be subscribed, like the video and then like I said, join the channel or super chat here. You get an extra entry and all of this stuff. And then we'll give a couple details here in a minute. How to get the giveaway for the two UFL championship game tickets, Andy. And these aren't the ones that are sitting by you. So this person, maybe that's the more incentive. These are the previous, I don't think so. I was one sent by the professor, but we have those to give away via Chris Tisdale. So like I said, give a super chat, join the channel here, 99 cents a month. Be subscribed. We'll get to all that. Andy, what games stood out to you this weekend? Because there was a couple really prodding games on here in terms of San Antonio and the Braas and then kind of this toilet bowl at the end. What stood out to you? I mean, one thing, all these are one score games, which is a league you really want, right? Yeah, let's do, I mean for me, look, the Panthers have the blueprint to beat the stallions. They've lost by a combined eight points in their two matchups. They know how to beat this Birmingham team. Birmingham is struggling on their offensive line. Adrian Martinez is getting chased down and that's a big problem for them. They kept getting in these situations where they're in second or third and long because Martinez gets sacked in long situations. They just don't seem to have the same magic on offense at the moment. I think they need to start leaning on the run game again. But Michigan had the clear blueprint and it's almost ironic that on Sunday when they were doing awards, when Fox was handing out their awards, all the players, they named Jake Bates the most clutch player in the league and he misses the game winning field goal on Saturday. I know he had some incredible kicks this season, but you might've wanted to recount your votes at the last minute. This Birmingham team is in serious trouble. I'm going to say that right now. And I know a lot of people don't want to hear that, but they're in trouble and they need to figure some things out or else Michigan's going to walk in there and upset them on Sunday. They've got to be careful because last two weeks they've had breakdowns on the offensive line, both defensive lines for the Panthers and the Brahmas completely beat them up upfront. They're having lapses in the secondary. They're having not only penalties, but you're also just letting these wide open touchdowns happen. I mean, Mariner gets behind the secondary etling kind of finds them in the back of the end zone. You're starting to have a lot of defensive breakdowns. I know we talked about John Chavis not being in there as the defensive coordinator because of his health issues and it's really a shame, but they've got to figure something out. They've got to regroup because they're really looking valuable for maybe the most they've looked really in the last three years and they've got to start putting something together because they're not going to find themselves in St. Louis if they keep playing like this. Michigan's going to find a way to crack through. They've gotten closer and closer each time. And I mean they led the game until that last drive until Adrian Martinez put together a comeback drive and threw that touchdown to Jay Sternberger. But Birmingham was trailing most of this game and Michigan had their number upfront. Is it the league kind smartening up to Birmingham what they're doing? I mean this has been forever here. Is it? Do you play the defensive coordinator switch? I mean, where do you place the blame on Birmingham? I do think that Michigan just knows how to play them really well. They played them. They're in the conference, they played twice. But I mean this is something that we saw from San Antonio last week. I do think that there's tendencies that maybe Martinez, they finally started to key in on just getting to rush up front. I mean the guards have just been bullied up front. And that's the thing. When you have a good pass rush up front, I think that does a lot to affect the quarterback. So for me it's just been really good pass rushing honestly. So for Birmingham, they've got to figure out something of the game plan. Now again, you got this test run almost before the playoffs, so who knows, maybe Michigan showed too much. We'll find out. That's what I was talking about last week. Did they tip their hand too much? But I think when it comes down to it, most that you want out of your players is to play at the best time of the year. And for me, I think Michigan is just playing their best football. We'll see about their offense. I still think they've got to continue to run the ball. They have been. And that's the other thing, you've still got this rotating quarterback thing, which is interesting. I say that just stick with one guy and keep going. I know Bryce Perkins didn't really throw any passes. He mostly just ran. But I think what you have to do as Michigan is you need to stay with one guy and lean on him for the entire game unless something happens to him. But this Michigan team really does have a clear identity and they have a clear message that they're coming after Birmingham. I got a comment here, foosball, I'll get you your comment here at the end here. I think it's interesting to talk about, okay, we're seeing the rematch next week. I think we'll dabble on a couple of the other games. We'll talk bros. But I mean, what do you make? Would you be disappointed to have Panthers in the championship game here? I mean it certainly would be Tanner here wants, is there going to be an upset? I mean it certainly would be. I think the biggest upset would be quite surprising. It would be. I mean, considering what they've done the last three years, I had say it's less spicy because you obviously want Adrian Martinez to get an opportunity. I still believe he's going to win the MVP. So from a viewership's perspective, I think Birmingham is a sexier matchup of course. But Michigan is a qualified enough team that they deserve to have a shot. If they play defense the way they do and they run the ball the way they do, then yes, you give 'em a shot. They have one of the best signal callers in the league. No, absolutely not. I don't even think they have in the top five because they've rotated through four different quarterbacks. But they're qualified. And I think I know on TV it's not going to look as great, but football is football and I think if they can play well enough and they can play defense against Birmingham, they certainly can play that way against the Hawks. So they're absolutely deserving. Yeah, it's just weird. Like you said, they really have had no actual quarterback play most of the season here to be ending up on all that stuff. Do you want to talk DC here, I'll get the slide pulled up, but DC taking care of business at home, right? Finally getting a little bit of, no, sorry, excuse me, fever Dream here. Renegades closing out the season with the win. I did see that with Bob Stoops getting teary eye in the locker room. I mean, great final effort by the renegades, the game winning drive there engineered by Luis Perez. He really put forth a fantastic season. I'm not sure if you saw those stats that Bob Sos posted on Twitter, but I mean Perez basically led the league in almost every category. Had this been a better team, he would've had it to been in the conversation for MVP. He was spectacular. This is by far his best season as a pro. We'll see what happens going forward. I mean for the Arlington renegades is the turning of a new chapter. We're talking about what venue are they playing in next year we're talking about what's the quarterback situation? Does Perez come back? Does Bob Stoops come back? This is a really big unknown for this team going forward. So for me it's kind of a last hurrah. Maybe that's why Stoops perhaps got a little bit emotional. This team was good enough to be 500. Would they have been good enough to get in the playoffs? It would've been borderline, but this team was absolutely not the record that they show. I just think their defense had too many lapses and their special teams also did too. They let 'em down, but their office was more than qualified to carry them. And I really loved the chemistry that they had on offense. We talked about this in the chat. Is this the last game? Do we see Temu? Do we see Perez again here? I think Tom is going to stick around. And the reason why I say that is because I just don't think he's really going to stick on an NFL roster. He's fine. I just don't think his assets really translate well to the next level. He kind of just reminds me, as I said, he's kind of a spring football lifer in my opinion. He's meant to be playing in these kind of leagues and look, I know that's not what players want to hear. They always want to believe they have a chance at the next level, but some guys just fit in really well with certain styles of play and certain levels. And the same thing goes in the CFL. There's guys who are all love to watch in the CFLI know they would never really do anything in the NFL and I know everyone's going to argue about talent level and all that. It's not just that it's fits, it's also what fits your skill level and what fits your assets. And for Jordan Tommo, I think this is the right place to be and he played well enough this season. He still, again, like I said, he throws a lot of picks, but I think he needs to continue to play in leagues like this and I think he can make, it can be a decent living doing it. So I would say he could stick around. Yeah, I think, and this is the same and we will see more about this obviously with the CFL coming up here on Thursday, but yeah, once you decide I can make a life here and this can be whatever, and I'm going to be a part of this and not look at this as a springboard, I do think people have made whole careers and legendary careers and championship careers and just taking care of their family and living in nice spots and it really can be a part of it. And I think the CFL, the people that hit on who are like, oh dude, we are supportive of all of that. I think it's, you get a lot of people like, oh, this talent level. Like man, these guys play a game they love, are able to make a whole career out of it. You get paid enough and then they can retire and go do kind of whatever else they want to do. Here is my headphones. I got 10% of my headphones. I think they'll make it to the end of the episode here. We'll see. But they can just make a whole career. But I think that's cool. I want to talk about this and I did see this and I want to talk about the safety that happened in the game. Lauren says, Arlington the only league team in the league to score on themselves here. Pretty wild. That was quite the wild back and forth. That's just a comedy of airs they've had this season, right? It's just continuing to shoot themselves in the foot and that's really what could have prevented them from winning this game. They were lucky that didn't happen, but more so it ruined the opportunity to have potentially have overtime, which I know Mike was rooting for extremely hard. He wanted to overtime, which we didn't get this season. That's the thing we never got in overtime in the UFL. And to my knowledge, I mean it's only happened I think once in the USFL and I think it happened twice in the XFL the last few years. So this cool patented index OT has not happened and I think the big reason why is because nobody kicks PAT. So you rely on these point conversions and I think that makes the likelihood of it happening less and less so I think. But honestly that's fine because you know what? You don't want players playing too many plays anyways. So either way, the overtime resolved that issue because you don't put in too many plays and if you don't get there in the first place because no one makes the conversions, that's fine. So it does it both ways. Of course overtime is exciting. It's really, but for me it's not like a requirement. I'm not sitting there during a football season and being like, boy, we didn't get any overtime. That's unfortunate. I know people like extra football, but I think about player longevity and I think that's good for them not to experience that too many times because it can really be taxing in the body. I will say, and this is such a side note here, excuse me, with the extra point rules as they are, you do get a lot of that like, oh, it's six to whatever. Did someone miss a field goal? You do get that a lot from the casual city now, which I think we're just so ingrained in the NFL. You look at seven and 10 and you kind of know the scoring patterns and obviously we've had a lot of score gums and everything this year, but I do think you get that from the cash like oh six to six, like man, these kickers suck or whatever, like well no anyway, but yeah, I agree that you're just not prone to getting as many of that because out of that pattern of you go one, two or three or someone goes for two and then you might never get a conversion the entire game and then it ends up being totally off. Oh score. AAMI fanatics would have a field day if they were in this league. I wish we had more score AAMI nerds in these leagues because there's so many different combinations that can happen with all the weird conversions and all the different point variables. I think that would be awesome. Darren, are you complimenting Andy or are you criticizing Andy? Darren's got a comment here. We'll pull that up here in a second. Let's talk here. Let's do San Antonio then we'll talk, I guess the toilet bowl here at the end. We might go a few seconds over here for the wheel, but we'll try to get out of here. Net low score and the fair hit. What did you make of this with the Battle Hawks and securing home field advantage? Just Rusty coming out of his injury for AJ McCarran. It's really unfortunate because this offense just was not really up to the standard that it had been before he got hurt. Jacob Sailors, I wish they kind of leaned on more this Battle Hawks team. I really would love to just see run the ball, but I know they like to do these bubble screens and they like to throw out into the flats and they also really like to get Jor Pearson going out in space. I understand that. I mean the biggest thing, they just got to make sure that AJ stays healthy. I'm not sure if you saw, but he was having a bit of a T with some of the promise players were aiming at his ankle, which look, they were clean hits, okay, they were just hitting him and I know you don't want to get hit in sensitive areas, but when a team knows you're hurt, I'm sorry they're going to do things like that. I know it's not okay. People can talk about the ethicalness of it, but the promise are trying to win a football game and they know where the main points are for this team and Major McCarran iss the engine that really keeps everything going. So I don't like seeing other players trying to hurt other players, but I get trying to rough a guy up a little bit when he's not a hundred percent. But the problem was really the break problem for them was they were having more offensive inconsistencies. Chase Garber's looked really, really rusting and he reinjure himself, Quentin Dormy, man, I know Dormy didn't throw a pick, but he almost threw a pick like three different times. He really just loves to throw that ball over the middle and harm's way. So I don't know if he's really the answer for them. If it gets into a playoff situation for both these teams. I mean the biggest thing in this whole game was that super challenge that happened when the Braus had the two point conversion and then Adrian McCarran ran over to Coach Beck and basically said, Hey, there was an illegal man downfield, you might want to look into that. And they reviewed it and it came off the board and good for him, good for him noticing that because there's a lot of chaos going on in that moment. That's a huge plus for them to be able to notice that. And then the miss field goal at the end, obviously, I mean they hosted that playoff game by the skin of their teeth, so battle hawks survive. Again, they've had some good luck after that Michigan loss they had earlier this year. I know they also had the close loss to the stallions, but they managed to win some of these very critical close games this year that they needed to and now they get to host their playoff game, but they've got a lot to fix on offense. There's a lot of things they need to clean up if they're going to be able to have dreams of hosting the championship game. Couple things. Yeah, max was texting me like, if destroying is on this team, the bras also probably are not in the playoffs. Didn't the Brahmas miss last year? Wasn't it the miss field goal kick from the guy that had done the punt block and all that, right? This is 18 different leagues ago, but Brahmas Miss, I believe the Brahmas miss the playoffs from a Miss field goal last year as well. So I think that that's the chemistry coming back around. They did and that's the thing, they've had a lot of kicking issues themselves. I mean that's the thing, you've got to have a reliable kicker now even then there are kickers you think that really are fantastic like Jake Bates, but there's been other guys who've made more of their field goals this season. So for me it's not something you want your season to come down to obviously, but that's just how it's kind of crumbled. And you might see that this weekend. I think we're going to be seeing some really critical last late minute situations. I think both these games are going to be really good. Alright, so we're going to do the last, we're going to talk Toy Bowl here and then we did a little bit off the top. Comment on the video jersey if you, or excuse me, too many giveaways. Comment on the video tickets. If you want to be into tickets, you can join the channel. I'm looking, I don't have any new members, but we can join the channel, get an extra entry. We have a couple of super chats that I wrote down already, but super chat, join the channel here, make sure you're subscribed. I'll check that, but we'll give it away here. But we'll probably go like two, three minutes over the top of the hour. But make sure, like I said, comment because we got to give it away. So I hope there's more than one person on this. Chris was very excited for all that stuff. Lauren's invested here so we got at least one on here, so let me know. But I comment on the video tickets. We're giving them away here in less than 10 minutes. So Andy, what did you make of this? Philip doesn't like us calling it the toilet bowl, but that's kind of what it was. What do you make? I mean, as I said at the top, I think it's good that Memphis was able to show that, in my opinion, that they were slightly better than Houston. I know they weren't a very good team this year, but Houston to me was the dog in the league and I really wish that it ended up better for them, but there was just no identity in this game for them. As far as offensively, offensively, again, I just don't know really what they hang their hat on going forward. For me, it wasn't so much the game, but there was something else that I really wanted to touch on here was Joel Klatt. First of all, for him to try and put in as much enthusiasm as he did in calling a game like this. Tremendous credit to him. He really just, I feel like he cares about these leagues. Yes, it really does and I really appreciate that. I've had the pleasure of meeting him in person. You saw me shake his hand at the USFL game with Birmingham and the generals and just a really nice guy, really nice down to earth guy. He took time to talk to me. He had no reason. He didn't owe me anything. He didn't have to, but just really, really pleasurable guy to talk to. And for me, I think one of the biggest things I took away from this, he was talking about this, it was either the third or fourth quarter was Reed. Annette was on audio talking about like, oh, make sure if my last pass I have, it's not like an interception, I don't know if Reid Annette's talking about retirement, but then it launched Joel Gladd in this whole thing about saying, you know, just never know when it's the last time some of these guys. And he goes, I hate to be Debbie Downer, but this is going to be the last time for some of these guys. And for me, that just kind of brings home this whole thing for me. It's just like, look, this is not given. This is earned and this is something that I think you have to be grateful for that you have as a player, as somebody involved in the league, as someone who covers these leagues like we do. I really appreciate the ability to be able to talk about these leagues. I know, yes, do I complain a lot about certain things? Yes, but I want things to be better. I want these things to survive and I want these guys to have a chance to finish out their careers and be able to continue to play games like this and be able to just go play the game they love. I really do appreciate that and I'm glad that someone like Joel Klau was able to say that on air. I think he really gets it. I really do. And I want to see more of that level of appreciation for these things. I want to see more of that. I really just kind of took that from the whole thing and it was relatively, let's talk about it. It's a relatively meaningless game and that is still a gem that I was able to find in this viewership experience. Well, I'm sure they're like, what the hell are we going to talk about here for three hours? But it's better than the over under on the ESPN stuff. I mean, I see that even this weekend watching. I mean that's all that they talk about on there. There's no storytelling or player trying to get to know, give any sort of insights at all. I mean it's really crazy on that. Guys, make sure you comment. I got like six, seven people on here, so make sure you comment tickets here before we get out of here. Tickets. This two free, I mean this is like a $300 value here, Andy, but yeah, we type that showboats, all that. Anything else from these two teams you want to make sure we touch on? As I said on Sunday, let's send these teams both out to the pastors where they basically belong for the rest of the year. It's tough. It's tough. I mean, I don't even know if the Houston team was good if they would've turned the attendance around, but it certainly, I mean this is kind of, it's the worst for that and it's the worst. That's both of these teams are two of the weakest in terms of attendance. And obviously that doesn't help at all either, but it's overall, I just not a good situation for these teams. I don't think I have the UFL center tweet up here anymore with all of that going back and forth, but it's hard. I mean it's hard to get excited about that. I mean, Arlington I thought did a decent enough job when we were there. I know there was a lot more tickets distributed, but hey, at least they were buying them earlier in the season and getting season tickets and all that. Yeah, no, like I said, these markets, both of these have a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done. Philip says, how do you think I feel guys? Well Phil, I told you, I told you six months ago. I said, get on to something. I'm rough next for life, man. Well, here you go. You could have been the braa, could have been the braa. Like I said, comment, I got two comments here, comment tickets if you want that. We're going to do that and get out of here. Darren, that said, Andy channel and Jim Barker. The guy's a spring football guy, can't make it to the NFL Barker. Describe the UFL as a second rate of four down league also describes CFL, second rate of three down league. Hey, hey, Hi. Okay, I don't know where I said that, but you go ahead and pick through my comments and tell me Mr. Darren, and we'll have a conversation. I have not said that whatsoever. Maybe it can be Workmanlike and actually find that comment. So how about that? No, that's clear. Chris here says, I think the event staffs are overworked, underpaid, and not looking to put in extra effort even with fans offering to help out. Unfortunately. Hopefully it improves next season and I think we're going to have a big deep dive going into this at the end of the season. Any thoughts on that, Andy? Yeah, I mean that is a good point there by Christopher. I wish that they had more staffing at some of these games. I've been to a handful of them and I've just noticed there's not nearly enough people on hand. But again, if they know that they're not going to get the number of people attendance wise, I don't think they're going to let that. They don't need to employ more staffing if they don't need it, right? They're not going to overstaff. So for me, I agree with you. I wish more people were on staff, but when they have the same number of levels in terms of the fan attendance and everybody who actually shows up, they're going to continue with that thought process of, well, we don't need a staff because who's showing up? So there's a push and a shove that needs to happen here if they're going to be able to actually give more resources for the fans. And then we had here, where was the, oh, they were talking about ucci to the bras has already said, excuse me, ucci to Memphis DeNucci ISS done. He said he is not interested in that. He wants to own the UFL team. I don't think he necessarily wants to play in one. He did mention that, we talked about that last week. He's more interested in sort of being the manager as opposed to not really playing in any of these leagues. He had his fun. I think he enjoyed it. He used it as a launchpad to get into the NFL and that's fine. Again, if there's guys who want that and they want that one-time experience, I have no problem with that. I just wouldn't harp on that so much. If I was the league itself, I would just celebrate their time as they were in the league. But not trying to say, Hey everyone, use this as the base of operations before you go to the NFL. It's like, I think you just need to about the time that they spend in the league. All right, here we go. This is going to be it. This is your last chance here. Comment tickets. We're going to give it away. Andy, are you excited? The live giveaway on the podcast, I want to know how fast this thing spins. That's really my curiosity. It's really cool. So guys, I say like, make sure you're subscribed, comment tickets. I'll add you, otherwise we're going here. I appreciate it. And then like I said, check out the video, but we still have the silvers jersey to give away speaking of the dragons. So we'll figure that out. And if that's not claimed, Andy, I do all this and then it's like claim the prices or be available. All right, here we go. We got however many on here, we've doubled up for all the other stuff. And if you win email, the Mark has podcast@gmail.com. Give me your, well, yeah, because then I'll etransfer you these so I don't have to ship anything out. So email the mark has podcast@gmail.com. Here we go. Sandra, Sandra is the winner. Sandra is the winner. Sandra, make sure you email the Mark has podcast@gmail.com. Remember, we're going to have one more opportunity. We got to do it this week. I think we might have to do it before the podcast just because the game's coming up, but I think the silver's jersey. And then we'll do the tickets, but make sure you're subscribed and then we're going to do 4,000. We're going to do season tickets for next year. So tell your mom, tell your friend, tell your neighbor, tell anyone else. Andy, anything else before we get out of here? We're over time here, so I appreciate it. I appreciate you, Reid. Thank you for your patience. As always, notification to everybody else, I will not be here on Monday for the recap. I will not be available. I'll be on vacation and so I will be watching the games. Don't make fuss about that, but you can expect me to be in St. Louis next time I see you in person and I will be there in all its glory to be able to cover that game with you. I cannot wait, but I'm going to go try and tan first. So thank you very much and thank you everybody who's watched and commented this season. I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to coming back for the championship game, so don't have too much fun without me, Reid. Yeah, we'll figure it out. I'll figure that we'll do something next week. I have my friend, we're going to, the Mariners are playing Boston and the end of July, he is like, have you figured out what you're bringing to Boston yet? I'm like, no, no. Oh, here we go. Abdul's got a good idea. Well, there'll be a recap money. I could just post the full game highlights. We don't even need to do a show. We don't even need to do a show. We can just post all that stuff. Like I said, guys, yeah, Christina, here's the email. Make sure you do that and then we appreciate it. We'll see you guys next week. Thanks Andy. Thanks everyone. Let me get where the heck's my outro. We'll get out of here. See you.

All UFL Markets Returning in 2025: How UFL Can Avoid Season 2 Drop-Off

Well, I'm excited today. This is going to be a fun one. Andy is always on the Monday, Tuesday recaps. We're talking the UFL gameplay and the results from the week and attendance and all that stuff, but we're doing a deep dive today. We have some comments coming out from Darryl Moose Johnston talking about next season. Andy's passionate about getting this marketing kind of plan survival guide together here for UFL season two. We're going to do all that today. I'll preview everything else but first, Andy, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I love that we get to double dip this week. I really do and I guess we're going to do it next week too with CFL as well, but this is fantastic. I've been giddy to talk about this. Yeah, so this will be good. So to set the stage today, we have Ryan Valentine coming on here after this where we're talking CFLA lot of preseason off season notes from Ryan. He's a three down nation. We do have friends over there. He's doing the Calgary stem. Peters beat for all of them. Very appreciate Ryan spending I think 25 minutes coming on the show at the end of the program. I've already tabulated and done the results for our 3,500 subscriber giveaway. Check that out. The Jordan Temu jersey, Brandon Silver is Kete Turpen, PJ Walker, and then the UFL championship ticket. So all the winners have been announced. Check at the end of the episode if you want to be part of the next giveaway. We have here, I think 4,000 subscribers to season ticket, the season ticket pack to the UFL next season. So that's a lot of work we got to get to here before our UFL 2025. So like and subscribe, share the video. It doesn't cost you a penny. If you appreciate the work we do, you can join, hit join, be a member for all that. But a lot of work goes into this. I was thinking Andy, again, I could just go to download some UFL games and upload 'em. I don't understand why we're sitting here putting this work in, but Andy is putting together a plan today. We're going to save all of this stuff. Have I precipice and everything? Have I gotten everything out of the way? You always do a standup job read. Okay. Well anyway, so can subscribe. Like I said, get us up to 4,000. A lot of work for all this stuff. So news and notes before we get into everything today, like I said, Darold Moose Johnson is kind of carrying his comments, kind of carrying the torch today with what we're going to talk about. But UFL showcases have officially been announced, so this is, we're really kind of feeling like, okay, we can talk about season two of the UFL. We can talk about 2025. We've got showcases, moose is talking about all of that stuff. Locations here. I don't read too much into it, right? We have Washington, DC, St. Louis, Houston, the Orlando. I did a tweet today. I said put a team in San Diego cowards. You're doing the showcase there. I understand they don't want to pay any of that stuff. Like I said, I wouldn't read into this as any, these are expansion cities, but any thoughts on this? And then we have a couple specialist showcases coming up as well. I mean the San Diego showcase is nothing new. The only question is, is it just a specialist showcase or is it an all encompassing showcase? Because that's been the case the last few years. Nick Novak, former kicker in the NFL noted Chargers kicker, obviously spent a lot of time in San Diego, has been running the specialist showcase the last two years in October. So the question there is, is it the specialist, just the specialists or is it going to also be in all encompassing, all kinds of players, all kinds of different personnel at that location? So it's not really, yeah, It looks like we're getting two it looks like. So the Novak one will be October 19th and then it looks like then we get a full-fledged one on the 20th. So we'll probably fly, we'll get Danny or whatever in there. We'll get Dwayne, we'll do some media stuff, but that could be, hey, that could be a fun weekend. If you want to go check that stuff out here end of October in San Diego, that could be fun. I think I'm going to make a point to go to it since that is in my backyard and I didn't go to the specialist showcases the last two years. I got notes from them but I didn't actually get to attend them. I had other things going on, but this time I think I might make it a point to go out to this location, the Orlando one that's interesting but I can understand them wanting to hit the Florida market. I understand them wanting to get that southern demographic and especially in that area. I think that makes a lot of sense. So I think the locations are great honestly, regardless of whether there's teams in those cities or not. Well yeah and mean we had the Hawaii showcase before that was a lot of publicity with that and obviously the rock lives out there and his off season as we're putting a team there, but I think it's good to read into this, the San Diego, they usually do the Arizona as kind of the West coast one, so I like they're at least getting into California for that in case people, it's easier to travel north south I guess and apply to Arizona. But I think combining that with the Nick Novak showcase I think is probably was the selling point for that of like, well let's get everybody in here and then we can do two days. I've heard mixed messages about some of the specialists getting to be able to showcase at the non-specialist showcases. Okay, well they're the last thing to go. People are already tired, it's at the end of the day. So I like this. We're splitting it up and let them kind of be able to do that as well. But this is good. I mean I don't think 2025 was super in question. Mike has always said, I feel like we get kind of this half season to build up and then next year, but does it make you feel better knowing that we're kind of heading into this now? It feels like the league is short from saying we're coming back official, we're coming back, it's official. Well, there's just not the cloud of unknowing that there was last year, right with the merger and I mean it's not even that people were talking about that necessarily this time last year, calendar year ago it was status quo. People thought there was going to be a second XFL season and a third USFL season and instead what we got was completely different, but that tornado had not hit for quite a while. So for me, I mean look, things could always change but I do believe what Mike said is that there's the intention to have that second season and so for me it is more security obviously knowing that there's actual calendared events, but I don't think we're going to have the sudden heel turn that we did last year. Well and also the exit fell, had other drafts planned for this fall and then those kind of got rolled into the dispersal draft and the supplemental dispersal draft and I mean this is different. We have a date on the calendar we're holding somewhere to do this. I mean there's another, because you have to look at, there's various different steps of getting married to someone is the highest step and then there's like, okay, well we're engaged. Okay, well then we're dating, okay, we're going. There's not all putting a calendaring and a potential XFL follow-up draft to the training or to their showcases is a little different than booking a venue somewhere. So at least I feel better about that, that we got that going. The other quick news, I thought this was great, stumbled upon Anthony Miller. Bob Stoops had his final media call of the season because obviously the renegades aren't going to be in the playoffs. There was a question here about his future question whether he'll return next year. We've talked a lot about this with the XL coaches with the pay structure. Are they returning with the markets here? Presumably staying intact, which is part of what we're going to talk about with Darrell Johnston today. Bob Stoop says right now I know, but who knows what's going to look like our contracts go through the end of June after that. We'll have to see if it's looking like for the following year. I hope to, but you never know what the whole structure is going to look like. If it works and fits my life, then yes, if it doesn't work, then maybe we'll see. I don't read that as super positive, but you go for it. It's not the most positive message and I understand where stoops is coming from. You walked into the XFL with a preconceived notion of how much money you were going to get and we knew that the pay structure between the USFL and the XFL was markedly different that had been reported as such. Now with the league's merging and now is supposedly going the other way where money may not be as free flowing for some of these coaches. Hence what's going to happen with some of these XFL teams because they were grandfathered into their contracts this past year and that won't be the case next year. I understand the apprehension to potentially come back if the money's not there because quite frankly it should be. Their services should be paid for and these are stalwart coaches who really don't even really owe themselves to be in this league. They love coaching, that's why they're in it, but they don't owe anything to this league and they neither should they. It's fantastic that there's an individual like Wade Phillips coaching San Antonio brass. It's fantastic that there's a legend like Bob Stoops in this league. That's amazing. But by no means is it guaranteed and it shouldn't be guaranteed. Like I said, I've said this times during the season, I almost can't believe that Skip Holtz is still around considering what he's done the last two years. He absolutely should be in a college somewhere at a D one college making considerable amounts of money coaching a D one program and who knows, maybe he looks to that next year if this Birmingham team, regardless of the three paid or not, I think he looks to that. So the money situation is absolutely valid and so has every right to feel that way. I think if anything, I do feel like this league should try to keep around in some capacity, maybe keep 'em as a consultant for league business in an administrative role perhaps. I think they need to consider another way to keep him in the fold, but if they're not going to pay him as a coach, then why should he continue in that role? Yeah, so I think to round this into our conversation today, I think the Arlington renegades will continue next year based off moose's comments we'll get to right now. But whether stoops is there or not, I think far relates more to kind of the pay structure or what they're going to do with that. So here we go, kind of meat and potatoes today, I'll make a keynote or I'll make a time code here. We'll get to all this stuff. Andy has put together a survival guide today. We know according to Moose Johnston, EVP of football ops for the UFL, the eight teams are planned to return next year barring any. And again, a plan today could be changed tomorrow by something happening. Plans for the A to return, I believe they're currently deciding as we speak. Are we doing any expansion? We've done our relocation talk in the past, but I think Moose understands the, and I'll pull up the quote here, I think Moose understands the importance of saving face and we are in these markets a couple of times. So I got mark's on here. Anthony had his, but there was more, I think the quote was longer on Mark's one here, kind of just summarizing all this, this was the interview that Moose did, I think with the Michigan market going into all this, yeah, action five news, excuse me, in Memphis going into the end of the season, basically them blaming the UFL for their own kind of attendance woes this year. I think the responsibility on our side was not getting the merger done as quickly as we had hoped. That was the delay in all of this stuff and we're going to get into today how do they remedy that going into next year. But in terms of if there's going to be changes to the markets, I do not see any changes in the markets. There was talk and ongoing talk still about expansion. We're going to have a decision on that soon. That would be the only thing that would've changed. It would be great for us and a lot of people's opinions to be able to stay status quo and get our feet underneath us and have a really strong season two. So we have here now this is from, and I'll get Andy's comments on this and we'll roll into the guide. They understand their attendance issues are self-imposed I would hope partially because of the lack of marketing they've done. And then also which relates to that kind of the shortened truncated runway leading into this, but then also at least operating under the fact that we'll be in these same markets again next year. I don't know, are you 50 expansion, but Andy, let's get your thoughts on this and then we'll get into all your other stuff. Well, based on those comments and based on his tone in those words, I would say he's considering staying pat as far as keeping the same teams, but more so not really over budgeting and continuing to just sort of keep expenses as they are, which in my opinion is we'll get into later. I don't think is really much of an option if he wants growth. And so the status quo line is a bit concerning because I think status quo is not the way that this league should be looking at going forward. I am not necessarily saying that they have to expand, which I'll also get into later, but they have to put more effort into what's being done right now. And I know that he keeps saying we'll have a strong season two, I'm sure he felt the same way about the USFL having a strong season two and clearly nothing really changed, especially those ratings. The ratings were potentially even worse than they were in the first year. So I don't think that's something that he can really let rest his laurels on and neither should he and neither should this leak. There's a lot of work to be done here. So for me it's not encouraging in terms of people who are always advocating for expansion and those people out there, but more so I don't know if it really spells any sort of semblance of idea of growth or any idea of there being button pushing or any sort of risk taking going into the season two, which again, I argue needs to be done. One less comment here and then I have a comment, Eric, one less quote, then I have a comment and then we'll get into, Andy's got a PowerPoint and everything. Very excited for all this. He says here and this, I've been thinking about this even while you've been talking. He's talking about performance moving forward. I think one of the most important things for us with the UFLU US L was as quickly as we came together, it made it through season two. We all knew that there was a lot where we could be better. I think in season two I'd love to see the opportunity. Basically the fact that by having a season one and then rolling into a season two that felt like we had the momentum there and what my comments would be to moose or anybody that would, God listen to this, the ownership here, leadership still thinks that just existing in the space is going to be enough and to put yourself in the zeitgeist, we were, when the USFL came out, it was in the weirdest time where the XFL had got pulled from everybody. They were excited about that. Everyone had sat around for two years or a year and a half when they kind of announced this stuff. And then it's like we're doing, here's the USFL uniforms, Doug flu's talking, we're coming back. I mean Stefan and Zach's USFL stream drought was like 30,000 views. There was just such a weird influx about all that. And I think they got so high on that supply of like, man, this is really, really exciting stuff. And then going into season two, I thought it was like, well this will just be better and wasn't, I think they realized that obviously we got into all this merger stuff, but I think they got a self inflated idea of what this actually was, but it was never really sustainable. It was just this weird, you know what I'm saying? It was this weird confluence of everything and then when the XFL came that didn't get it. And then when the XFL, then when they merged here and either ratings have been good this year, but it's all kind of, I mean the only reason they've even gotten up this year is because some better TV networks, there's been no growth of any kind of anything they've done. It's just, well we've put the same product now on a better TV network and so it's dry more to me. There's nothing that they've done of, we're doing something, we're adding a faucet to our bathroom to make it more appealing for someone else. Well it goes back to the dilemma we talked about when you went to that Arlington game. Yes, the product is good. Do people know that the products exists? And that's really the biggest thing. You can have the greatest products in the world. It doesn't matter if people dunno what it exists and you need to get the message out there. And I don't think they've done a good enough job of getting it out there and neither in some ways the XFL was hamstrung in that last year too. They didn't want to overspend on that. But the fact of the matter is there needs to be more done boots on the ground in order to get this out there. So no, just existing is not good enough. The USFL existed in a space when there was no spring football and good for them, but then the XL came in and it became oversaturated and just keeping things the way they were didn't really sit well with a lot of teams and a lot of people started to gravitate towards the XFL because they were playing in their own cities. They had individual teams, they had individual trademarks, new trademarks I argue, which I'll get into later. But that didn't really, I didn't think that really helped things in terms of their growth in terms of there being, there was just too many teams. There was too many spring football teams, there were 16 teams sprayed across a five month schedule from February to July and it was just too much. It was oversaturation. So it was really twofold of a problem. And here the USFL has to, or the UFLI should say, but the remnants of the USFL, Well it feels very USFL. The thought process needs to change a little bit in terms of that. I just don't think you can just exist. I really don't. I argue that you have to think more beyond that. Well, and also my last comment here, the novelty's gone now in 2022. This was very novel still because like I said, that's why we were all clamoring over the spring league and was that the greatest thing in the world? No, but it was like we didn't have anything. And then fan control football, we were all obsessing about that. And then it was like the USFL and then COVID ended and people like, well, I can go to the store again, I can go watch movies and I can go do it. Lost weird. We were all just in this bubble. So anyway, I rambled enough here. Andy's got here, look at this. We have graphics and everything here. We have our survival guide going in. You tell me when this is a slideshow, you tell me when to move on and preface this, but Andy's putting work and so this is kind of avoiding the drop here next year, avoiding the lack of novelty, avoiding all of that stuff. How do you maintain going into season two and not have a drop off that we've seen in years past? Well, for me it starts with a few points. So if we're going to get into the first subject here for our survival guide, I've broken it down into several sections and I would like to go kind of point by point in each one. You can stop me at any point. Also, Reid, if you want to jump on in. So first of all, marketing. We just talked about that, getting the message out there, the UFL has not done that enough, just quite frankly has not done it enough. We don't know the teams that are in the markets that they are besides St. Louis are really not really pulling their weight. DC has done a good job, but clearly there's been a bit of a dip in terms of enthusiasm this season. I know part of it's the team may be not performing as well, but clearly there seems to be a bit of a retraction on those numbers. First thing you got to do, we talked about this tabling and networking at local sporting events. Get your message out there. I don't care. Advertise in front of or during games in the area. Basketball games, hockey games, baseball games. I don't care. Do something. Get your name out there. Tell people that you exist. The Frisco fighters I remember got a message out about their games when I was at an Arlington Renegade game last year and then I'm not going to go to game because I don't live in Arlington, but at least they're trying to tell me like, Hey, we exist. That's all I need from you. That's the first thing I really need you to do. So advertise at local games, get it out there. Just do anything. You can't do that. Think that's my first point. So the Frisco fighters are getting their word out at a UFL game. Do you think the UFL is getting their word out at the Frisco fighters game? I would wager probably not. We'd have to ask somebody who would go to Frisco Fighter game. You know what I mean? Again, I think just to piggyback on this, you need to understand where you are in the market and we've talked about this before. Well, who do we credential and who do we not and what do we allow and do we do all this? You need to understand that you are a community based football sporting league at this point and act accordingly. You are not a top five six market league in this market in terms of sports. The same legwork you see the CFL and the Frisco fighters and the Savannah Bananas and all these people do that is more, I'm not saying you're the Savannah bananas, but that is more what you need to do. You should be at the Frisco fighter games as well. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that cross synergy needs to continue to happen, especially consider this year. I mean they started later. So the IFL had actually I believe kicked off even just before the UFL had. So you have that opportunity to do that cross synergy. You really need to work on that. Going into other things, merchandise, I want to see more merchandise. I want to see shirts, I want to see stickers. I want to see decals. I want to see anything out there. I want more merchandising period. The shop needs to be updated and face lifted. I need to see more stuff. Besides the Jersey thing, I know everyone wants jerseys, but clearly they're very much to do about nothing on that. They don't even want to focus on jerseys, which that's up to them. I think the replicas are passable now, but I would like to think that you have a hardcore, you have a more authentic option for your hardcore fans. I think that would sell almost as well as the replicas would. I think so too. You got to get the replicas out there and you got to, now I know naming rights, obviously that comes down to contracting with players and that's a little tougher to do, but any sort of replica out there, just anything they do like they used to do in college before NIL existed, you would just have the number, right? I mean, in my college I bought several jerseys that were the numbers of my favorite players. Of course they couldn't put the names on them, then they would owe them royalties and they couldn't do that. But I would do that. And if you want to do that in this league, that's fine. If that's a way of not paying players for a name likeness, that's up to you. But at least get the replica numbers out there. Get more numbers out there. That's really a big thing for me. And I've never understood this because the XFL was going to do, or I think that the plan was back in the 2020, you're an employee of the league, we're going to sell the jerseys and by signing to play this league, you are an employee of this league and we can sell your merchandise and maybe we give you a cut or whatever. But I think that of any benefit of having a single ownership league is like, no, you play and we're going to put Temu on the back of the jersey and sell it. And the top five sellers, maybe you get 10% of whatever. But that's what you get for being in this league. You would think so. I mean I think that would just go gangbusters. Absolutely. Would I love to go to a Renegades game and buy a Perez jersey? Hell yes I would. But guess what? That's not an option now is it? And so I mean look, I'm getting a custom Adrian Martinez jersey sent to my house. Yes. Did you hear that Stallions fans? I'm getting a Martinez jersey sent to my house courtesy of me buying it and creating it myself because I had to, because that's not an option to buy in this league. That's a felony in my opinion, a merchandising felony. You have to be able to get better at that. You must sell your assets as much as you can. Well, but like I said, and just being able, I think the names on it would go such a long way of people. And the whole point of these leagues is like the CFL and you have this connection with the players and here's this guy that's been trying to go out, like you said, people would have a Perez jersey. I have two Mike Forge jerseys in the Seattle Mariners played half a season here last year. I brought him up, but you know what? He was a really fun guy. We watched it. I don't want to have just a Mariner jersey. I want to have a Mike Ford jersey. That was kind of my guy. And yeah, I'm going to get whatever, but I never owned a RS jersey before then, and I'm too hardcore on it now that you're like, I got to have a couple. But people support the team, but people support the player far more than the team. And you want to have players that you connect with. And I think when this entire league is built around connecting with the players, because that is, it's certainly not the 99% level of talent that it is in the NFL you're watching. You want the people to cosign with these players and kind of their journeys as well. Yeah, absolutely. I think that goes a long way in creating that relationship with the fans and speaking, creating that relationship. Let's go into ticket base. I need a $20 ticket base for all these games, period. $10 not doing it for me anymore. You need to create value in these tickets, but can you have packages and can you have deals? Yes. In fact, you need to have more giveaways. I agree with what Tom Mecal that said a couple of weeks ago. You need to have more giveaways. That just needs to be more part of this, more spatulas and Memphis games, I don't care, but give more giveaways. We need to have more items that are part of this whole package and incentivize these people to come out to these games, have entertainment ready, have showcases by players, have giveaways, everything. Just get people in there if you have to give stuff away, that's just a big thing for me, but it starts at least a decently priced value here. And then you can also have deals for families. If you want to have families come in and have a certain ticket base of a certain number of children come into the picture, that's great. Awesome. Do that. That's a really important way to get people in. Well, and I would say also you need to have that base price always be that base price. And I think you can give things on top of that. But I will say who I was someone that went to the game, whatever last Saturday, I don't even know what we paid for those tickets. I bought them back in February whenever when they went on sale. But I saw the week of $5 tickets. Get a free hoodie, get a sweatshirt, get a hat, all this stuff. And I'm like, man, I bought this thing full price four months ago. What the heck? Right? So I mean, I understand you're trying to get people in the seats, but then you're also like, that's alienated. And I'll tell you, not only is it the UFL that deals with that, not real larger professional sports deals with that. Kraken deal with that is a huge problem where we, a season ticket holders pay and then you can go on game time and get the thing for half price or they're doing, like you said, giveaways, whatever. So you don't want to alienate the people that you're trying to sell these season tickets to by then. Like, oh shoot man, if you wait until two days before we give you, we'll give you a dollar 75. You come in. We're just trying to fill this like, man, I'm supposed to be your diehard. I'm supposed to be the one that we've, believe me, we've had long talks because the NHL, we have our own season ticket rep and we've said, we feel totally ousted you give us a 10% merch discount every year, which I think you should probably do. I know the XFL did that. I think you could get that going, but I've bought all my merchandise season one here come season three. I'm not buying 10% worth of merchandise to make any of this worthwhile, but I agree you don't want to, I read went on a rant there, but you don't want to devalue and heard the people that are also spending full price for your product. No, absolutely. I agree with you. And also have VIP packages have an exclusive club deals, people who can set up events for them. That's another thing that they really need to work on. Again, they need to work on that being a thing in the area when the people are going to the games. They have to be able to work on that too. I think that's an absolutely humongous part of it as well. Absolutely. And the upgrade, that concert we went to also in Arlington for the weekend. We had tickets. I got emailed the week of like, Hey, do you want to upgrade? We're doing VIP. You were talking about VIP table or you get club. And I knew we didn't want to because we wanted to be on the floor to watch the show, but I'm like, yeah, if I was there with a group or you're like, shoot man, yeah, we'll take eight people and maybe we get whatever comes with it. Bottle service or a cheap bottle. I'm sure it wasn't, it's not the Vegas club, it's the House of Blues. But yeah. Are you trying to upsell those people that even I understand wanting to get the new and a $5 one for whatever. Why don't you get an extra 50 bucks out of the people that have already spent money for you as well? I would wager they don't have enough people selling tickets for these markets, but I think you would need to have, I don't know what you're doing. I think Mark Cuban told that story when he bought the Mavericks. He walked in the next day and just sat on the phone all day making calls. I think you need to have, I'm not doubting the energy level of a lot of cos and people in the world that are involved in this, but I think there's a lot of work that can be done that's not necessarily costing dollars. Well, can we multiply Cory by a hundred? Because I think that's what we really need to do Here. Remember when he posted TikTok videos like I am sitting here at 50 yard line, these could be your tickets. Hit me up. We'll get you all involved in all this. Give a face to this. Get these people. That doesn't cost any money at all. These people are already on salary or pay per hour. I mean, they're already on the clock. Yeah, get 'em to do something. Work your interns. I also, seriously, they Should all have interns. You should have interns. You should have 50 interns. I get called every week to have an internship and I'm just a jack here in West Seattle as a wedding videographer. I get called every week, Hey, do you have anything to do? And I don't. It's too much. You can get 50 interns if you're the UFLI guarantee. Work with a school, get people to graduate that want to go into sports business management, get 'em involved. Well, Reid, that's what I was about to go into as well. Appealing to these college markets. I cannot believe that there's not enough, especially when they're playing on these campuses. University of Houston, get the kids in there, get people into the stadium that are in the local area, the University of Memphis, obviously being right there with the Liberty Bowl. Get these kids into the stadium, sell it to them, sell it to groups, sell it as package deals, do internships. Get them involved. Be like, Hey, we got a deal for you to work in the booth or work as an audio visual technician. I mean, I got a job straight out of college with my college because they wanted me to be an audio visual tech. Just do something to get people involved with these events. You got to get these people involved. And I think the fact that they have an appeal to the college markets really, I don't know. Part of me makes me want to scream inside because they need to appeal to that, not just the families. Well, I remember when they were moving to Rice and everyone said, well, it's going to be tough. I'm sure they're going to run all these deals and get all these college. That's what everyone said. All the Texas people, excuse me. All the Houston people said, oh, rice will be robbed, but they're going to get all these college kids don't run a bunch of deals, did they? There's 6,000 people in these games. Did they appeal at all? Have someone stand outside the campus there? I mean, I wouldn't want to give away tickets. I would almost say like, Hey, come for your first game free and then we'll figure it out from there. We will stamp your ID and you got to buy to come in the next time, but give kids a free game or give 'em a $20 credit to their Sodexo catering then on campus or something. I mean, Jesus. Yeah, absolutely. No, I a hundred percent agree with you. I have not seen the rice contingency in the rice stadium. I'm just going to say that right now. Also, moving on to my last point here. Sell your tickets in the fall, please, for the love of God. If you're going to roll into season two and talk about having momentum, great. Start selling your tickets. Get the venues in place, start getting the ticket deposits. Start doing it in the fall. We cannot have this late start thing anymore. I know it was a whole merger. I know there were backlogged, but there had to have been at least some semblance of knowing who was going to be there. I know Mike went on about there being 11th hour negotiations, but they had some of the teams in place and they refunded people on their tickets. So I don't understand why it wouldn't have been such a bad idea to just be like, oh, sorry, that didn't work out here. We'll give you back your tickets. No problem. Just get the tickets out there. That's my biggest thing. Start selling earlier during football season when people are thinking about football too, right? You're in football season, you're in high school, you're in college, you're in NFL. Everybody's thinking about football. Start thinking more about football afterwards. Everyone's in the mode for it. They're not fatigued from it yet. Start thinking about it in the spring. Get people on the ball and start getting those ticket deals out there. Well, and also, I know you're going to have schedule here talking to, but the February earlier start, I think behooves as well where people are already in the mindset and especially the routine of that Sunday mornings, watch the game Sunday morning's here in the east and the real markets and the UFLK. There's too in the East Coast, but this was what I had said when Daryl, when the article had come out, and this kind of curtailed all this, and this goes off the point about that, I said, this is great. He's not avoiding the elephant in the room with all this stuff. And I said, it's obviously multilayered, but the number one thing is you need to keep marketing and ticketing people on. During the off season, the XFL laid off many of their employees immediately following the season. They had already talked about doing seasonal coaching, employees, all that stuff. So they weren't layoffs. I mean, they reorganized their whole marketing office, but then they didn't lay off all these other people. It was like a seasonal hire and that's why it was misreported and all of that. But that doesn't work. This leak has to exist 365. And until they do that, I do not think they'll see substantial growth. I don't see that happening this year. I see what June 16th is the championship game. I see June 17th offices go dark except for a couple. We'll see, I would love to be proven wrong about that. All this. Oh, re and then see, this is what I want to see. But I don't see that. I think that they see them just having a longer runway next year of like, well, we can do December on knowing what we're doing versus this year where it was later. But I do not see them keeping seasonal people on. I would like to be proven wrong, and therefore I don't see them improving. On your point here, I'm not opposed to having seasonal employees. What I am opposed to them is just completely shutting it off together and just going, like you said, into the dark. That's what I don't want to see. You want to have a seasonal employees, that's fine. I get it. I understand you're not going to keep people on staff who work out of the booths the entire time. That's not going to happen. That's fine. And that's the same deal with the TV studios too. They can't keep those people in the entire off season. That's fine. I get it. They'll do their research when the time comes back around. But as far as the league operation staff, you need to keep those people in place and you need to keep them thinking about next year. That's just how it goes. Let's start rolling over to the next year. Let's keep it going. For me, it's been really interesting actually, following a league that has consistency. I'll say this, knowing that when I watch the CFL, I know they're coming back in six months. That's a good feeling to have. And I know because there are still people in the league office that are still working and operating as if nothing's changed. That's a really big feeling to have. We have not had that with all these spring leaks. We didn't really have that. We didn't have that with a F. We didn't have that with the XFL, both iterations. We did not have that with, I mean FCF was always kind of up in the air. What are they doing? USFL? Obviously we just have not had that feeling. And if as people who follow it consistently don't have that feeling, you can't imagine the regular people and casual people are going to have that. And just last point this, we'll move on because there's a bunch of slides, and I'm trying to brainstorm this. I don't even know if, okay, maybe we don't need to do stuff here June, July, August. We'll do the showcases. That's enough temp pole. That's enough things going on. But maybe August 1st you're like, we're going to hire guy, girl, whatever you want to do. A couple marketing people, and then we're going to look at a calendar and we're going to go, okay, these are either, okay, we're in Arlington. Okay, we're going to target, obviously Dallas, we're in Houston. We're going to target that St. Louis everything, but let's put a calendar and let's spend a week in Arlington and then a week in San Antonio, a week in Houston. Then let's go here. Let's target, okay, this Cowboys game's going to be good. Maybe the Cowboys are playing whoever there's some sort of overlap or they're playing the lions or, but let's plan this out and just get a handful of these people and rotate them around. But like I said, maybe you don't need to do the full summer, like the showcases that might supplement all that through. But I think especially during football season and when there are events in the fall, you need to be out there targeting in these markets September 1st or August 1st on you got to have someone in there at least every couple of weeks. Yeah, no, absolutely. And consistency is key in this case. Alright, what do we got here? Money. This is short, but I just wanted to touch on a couple of things as far as payment goes. Pay competitive salaries. I know it's hard to pay these players, I get it, but I need to see more paying consistently versus what they get in the CFL. Now I know there's different conversion rates. That's Canadian money versus US money. I know it's obviously a longer season. There's a lot of that, but I would like to see some of these player wages increased 10,000 from the base. I know I can already hear the accountant, the screaming, hearing me say that, but I need to see more competitive salaries. I think that brings in better quality players and it brings in players who believe that they can actually get a livable paycheck week to week from this league. I need them to continue paying players as far as quarterbacks, I do think that there needs to be some more allocated in that way. One thing I did not put on here, I meant to put on here was salary cap. Should we consider having a salary cap here? I know there's not individual ownership, but at least allocated money from the league that they know they're going to be able to spend. I wonder if there's an ability to kind of have a regional salary cap in these teams. I know there's a lot of legislation behind that and all that, but clearly we know that some of these players are getting a little bit more like the quarterbacks, at least they were in the XFL than some of the other players. So let's not try and keep that a secret, You mean? Yeah, the league would provide some extra money to incentivize that. I like that. To me, and this is interesting because it's the USFL, this is the USFL brain side, but it's what the XFL 2020 did with Vince McMahon. We're like, we have no competition. We will pay what we pay. The second the a f went away, I remember I was listening to Mark Perry's show and it's like, well, Vince McMahon came out and said, why would I pay anybody anymore? There's no competition. And I remember when they were having these mergers and the CBA and all these players like, man, they're really going to be able to take care of us now. And it's like, they're not going to pay you any more money. They don't have to. Right. And you need to understand that. So I would agree with that. I think quarterbacks need to be the exception. We know the USFL, at least right now, according from what I know, is that's not gotten carried over from the XFL with the quarterbacks getting paid more. And we will see what the coaches too here, right? We've talked about this on the Monday recaps forever. There might be a coach Exodus out of this when they go, well, I was getting whatever with the XFL. And I know Rick had some figures when he was on, I can't remember off the top of my head. And they're like, I'm taking a 50% pay cut. Well, I'm going to go, I got enough money, I'm going to go sit at home. So we'll see. But I think that yes, smart targeted spending to get exceptional players. If there's a couple guys that you need, what was the guy for Lindsay? What was the guy for the Dragons? We brought in the big running back from the Broncos. Was it the guy Lindsey Scott? Lindsey Scott, right. We can pay a little bit. There's I sorry, Philip Lindsay. Excuse me, Lindsay. Oh my gosh. Philip Lindsay. Oh my gosh. Yes. Philip Lindsay. Excuse me. Well, I say you arrived by saying the wrong. Yes, but we can target, target spend certain people, and I get you're going to get a little butt hurt in the locker room, who cares? But welcome to the professional sports. We were paying Brandon Silver as a quarter million dollars and we were yelling for BJ Daniels. I mean, it happens. But yeah, I think targeted spending for that would be good. Anything else on the money? That one here? Well, the other thing I thought about was this whole ownership thing. I know they've talked about having individual owners from a deciding standpoint. First of all, we already talked about this, what owner's going to buy into what it is right now other than the St. Louis and maybe the DC franchise? There's not really much incentive to buy these. Second of all, you need to have consistency as far as what the decision making process is. Do you really want a board of ownership people running this league? I already argue that it's a little bit messy in the CFL and because it's nine teams, because it's not that many voices. If you have more teams, I would say that's fine because then you're healthy and you can continue to have, have a board of voices and you have enough people that can balance out these decisions. But when it's this few of owners factoring into the decision making process, and if one tanks, that's going to really look bad on the entire league. I don't know if that's necessarily the best move right now. I think you continue to have league ownership, maybe community ownership. I don't know if that would be an option. I think that could be something like more incentive for the community to be like, Hey, do you want to own shares of the team? Like the Battle Hawks for example, when people buy into shares of that team, like TRO football, do you want to be an owner of the Wild Beast? Well, more of wild Bases or whatever it was. Yeah. You know what I mean? The Packers, the Saskatchewan Rough Riders, that kind of more idea Board of Governors. Can you have that? I know that varies from team to team, but can we consider that instead of doing it individual ownership? I mean, I think that's something to at least look into and at least incentivize people to become more part of this. Do you want, I didn't, Ben de Nucci put out something about a few weeks ago on Twitter saying, Hey, how do I get in an ownership here? I mean, that's a former player who played one season in the XFL, not in this version of the league, and he's already talking about that. And we have players, like you said, that own shares in the FCF. You have Marshal Lynch, you have Austin Eckler, you have guys who have shares and equity in something that they believe in. I think that's worth looking into group ownerships maybe. I think that's something, I don't think one entity should be the ruling point here yet. I don't think there's enough capital and enough teams that are good enough for that. But community ownership, group ownership teams, and then having the league as your umbrella as far as decision making, ultimate decision making process and having a commissioner. Yeah, I think that should be absolutely. Look at My brain's going wild right now. A couple things before I forget. One, I think we are a decade away from a real individual owner buying any of this. I mean, five to seven years at least, truly, honestly. B, could you imagine? We know the headache they have already with Fox and Redbird and Daryl and Russ and Danny, and we want the XFL kickoff and we want this and you want that. And then can you imagine if you're Fred Smith or whatever, the FedEx guy, and then you're coming in here and you're like, I got to argue with eight of these people, or I got to have, how do I fit into this? But what I do love is, like you said, yeah, get Ben in, get some of, and I don't want to go crazy. You don't got to be fan control football, like you said, where you got eight people with each team. But yeah, if there's passionate people, and I don't even care what it costs. Maybe it's more just a name than anything. But yeah, let's say Bend Ucci owns 10% of the Sea Dragons and you go, Ben, put in 10 grand or five grand and you get 5% or whatever. And again, the Kraken does this a lot. Does Macklemore own a controlling interest in the Seattle Kraken? No, he does not. But it looks really cool when he comes to games. Does Marshawn Lynch own a controlling interest and anything? No. But then you see Marshawn Lynch was at a Winnipeg Jets game and he was wearing the, and the people are like, what's Marshawn? It's like, well, he is an owner of I, he's an owner of the team. But yeah, get some of these people involved. Get some former players involved. Let's say Bob Stoops retires, but he still wants to have ownership. I think that's a great idea. Even not so much for raising money and equity and all of that, but just like, Hey, there might not be one singular owner that wants to carry this on because they would have to fight with 1800 people at Fox about all this stuff. But like, Hey, Ben and UJI is really passionate about that. Look at all these people we have because they believe in this and they want to put in whatever their money to be involved in that. And God knows even what fan TRO football was even charging these people to be involved with anyway. I mean, it could have been anything. Yeah, who knows. I think that's A good idea. I think that's a great idea. Well, thank you. I think it's something that worth considering, at least, if we're going to have any sort of semblance of ownership or identity as far as who is factoring into the decision making process on these teams. Obviously have good staff in place, director of player personnel, team presidents, all that. I think you need to continue having that as well, but get people involved. Again, be more incentive to get people involved into what's going on in the actual area and having people that think that they're just being there and being part of it. It means something. It means something to them and it means something to the community. I really believe that. Individual owners, I just think, like you said, we're too far away from that right now, and I don't think there's really a, as much as I want League to Grow, I will be the first to tell you it's not a capitalistic venture. I mean, we're not buying stocks here. I mean, you want to believe that, but it's not really that simple yet. It's not buying Tesla stock and hoping that it goes to the moon. It goes up. Yeah. When an NFL owner does that, they understand what they're getting into and they understand that what value they're going to get out of it. An NBA owner getting that value, what they're going to get out of it, the market's always going up. That's not necessarily the case with this leak yet. I want it to be the case, but it's not yet. Alright, let's go out of here. Okay, teams, so this is our expansion talk. Well, we'll probably get a little bit through this, right? I don't want go five hours on this, but I think we're doing all right. Yes, so teams, alright, listen, I'm going to come out and say it. Keep the teams where they are right now and here's why. If we believe that there was not enough work put into where the teams are right now and that they weren't given a fair shot, then let's give 'em another chance. Let's consider this year one of a three year clock on some of these teams. Reset the clock. Reset the clock. Now, I'm not going to count the USFL hub situation thing. I'm not going to count that. What I am going to count here is Memphis, Houston, and Michigan specifically, let's say for those teams, they stay in their markets for three years. Maybe you build something with this Panthers. There are some Panthers fans, there are some Panthers fans, and maybe this team has not, this market hasn't really understood what's in Ford Field or what's going on in Ford Field in spring. Maybe that needs to be a little bit better job of marketing from the UFL and telling people, Hey, this is a pretty decent team that's been making the playoffs. Maybe you should go watch them. Market that, put that out there. Houston has been a complete debacle. Obviously the name changed, the logo changed, the staff changed. They changed stadiums. That's a completely complete disaster. Get them back in Houston Stadium, the University of Houston stadium and the renovated stadium. Get the staff I think is going to change, I'm sorry, condolences to the staff, but I think it's going to change and the roster needs to change. But get back in good graces with that Houston market with the Roughneck fans. That felt jilted by what happened this past year in Memphis. Like we said, I don't think we necessarily go knocking on Frank Smith's door and getting a big paycheck to save them. Just do a better job of getting their name out there and letting people know that they exist. That's my biggest thing and amongst all the other marketing ideas that I sent earlier, get all that involved there. I think you give these teams another chance. I don't think moving them is really a great idea because I think it could potentially alienate people. I understand that, but if something's not working after three years and you really put in the effort to make it work, then let's consider some other options. But for now, I think you keep everybody's stand pat right now. I don't really believe in moving teams. Well, we've gotten a lot. I mean every time we did our big expansion relocation with John Lewis and all that, you do get that all the time. We're Ted, in the past, you don't have enough time. You're like, okay, but you've had, this is, we've done Memphis now. We've done Michigan, but that's fine. Reset the clock then you have no excuses. You can never talk about all that stuff. If you talk here, move the XFL back where they belong. But I mean at least right now, we can't do that. Right? Because then you'd have a five three split Because then it would go back to being 3.5 and then that would be unfair. Unfair. So that's the thing that damage has already been done. They made that decision. They went forward with it. I mean, in a perfect world, I would love to move Houston back to the XFL. I think that's what I would do if it were up to me. This is kind of the most unrealistic point that I put on this list because I know that's not happening, but that's, I'm sorry. Get mad at me people. But that's, but that's where they were. That was their brand, the USFL brand. That was the gamblers. I am going to skip over here for a moment actually. Also, if you're going to have these teams and if we're going to have more teams moving forward, can we not rely on these old trademarks? They don't mean anything. I'm sorry. They just don't. They mean nothing to this generation. I'm really tired of hearing this. Well, the steam from the eighties is back. No one, I'm sorry. There's just not the fan base there. That generational support is not there because they haven't existed for that period of time for almost 40 years. It's not going to just magically come back because the trademark is there. It's just dusting off some trophy on the shelf and be like, guys, look at this trophy I have. It's like, cool, awesome. I haven't looked at it. I visited your house 20 times and I haven't even thought that it existed. I just, I'm tired of the trademarks. I think you got to just create your own brands. That's again something that I really liked in the XL. They're trying new brands, they're trying new ideas, they're trying to establish an identity. Don't try to bowl out an old identity. Jim Kelly is not coming back to play for the gamblers. I'm sorry, he's just not. Let's try something else here And put just the roughneck thing real quick. The giveaway here, that's at the end of the show far and away. PJ Walker had the most with the roughnecks, had the most peoples wanting to be a part of that, right? And then tamu was high there and then silver as you would imagine, then chirping the least and it was, we want that roughnecks, we want that PJ Walker, we want all that. And like I said, I just think they totally undervalued that, oh, it's five weeks and who cares and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, I also agree it was the same thing when they're like the UFL, they got the league trademark like, oh, do you think they're going to use because back and they had the Iowa Husky whatever, and you're like, there's no equity in that at all. I have argued on this show that there was no equity in even these USFL ones, but especially whatever the UFL ones that they had, I couldn't even tell you. I mean people talk like the Wildcats. I think maybe just because it's 2020 and not the 1980s, but I think these USFL ones like, oh well the Canton Gold was big back or we get the, I think you've already attracted any of that demo you're going to get by just existing as USFL. I don't think adding any old legacy USFL stuff is going to do any good. I think you might get some jilted XFL fans, but I still would probably argue you probably have as many the XFL people as you. I don't think that many people stopped, but yeah, maybe get back only three years, three, four years ago versus anything else. I mean, that's the thing. It's recent, right? I mean you could bring back DC defenders because you remember 2020, those fans clearly remembered you can bring back the St. Louis BA hawks because those fans remembered. So that's fine because that's recency. That's things that people have a memory of. You don't have those memories with USFL. Most people don't. I'm sorry, that's not the demo that they're going to be looking at. So they have to consider creating new identities, new brands. That's my point. Which leads me to my next point. Yes, I also believe that there needs to be at least some little bit of expansion here, but just by two. Okay, and what I would really like to see at least is a West coast team, maybe two West Coast teams maybe. Obviously you want to have, if I was going to move Houston back, I would put two teams in the USFL, but if you're not going to do that, then one for each. Okay, so let's consider this. I want a team, obviously I want a team in San Diego. That's been a crying point for me forever. I want, But that's not even just because you live there, it's because it makes so much sense because it's the west coast St. Louis that you can capture that jilted fan base. I mean it's not just because you are in San Diego. Well, it's two points. One, let's get a western demographic because the region map is atrocious considering that it's not even past the Mississippi. It's insane. At least for unless you're counting Texas, that's nuts. You got to be able to have teams in the west coast just get that demographic there. So Oakland a city that has been completely jolted because all their teams have left. I mean that's really a market you could tap into. Do you play in the Coliseum? I'm not necessarily sure about that. Maybe you find a different venue, but there's growth potential there because they've lost so much there. Right? San Diego lost chargers. They're on your aid of that. That's something that you can tap into and obviously the a AAF thought about that and it kind of worked until they collapsed. Then I thought about a wild card here. I know this is going to sound completely, this is off my rocker, Andrew. What the hell are you talking about? Fargo, North Dakota. Listen, I know Fargo is not that biggest town and I know most of these markets are, at least in big metropolitan areas, you have only about 120, 125,000 in the Fargo area, but something that they really like to support are the North Dakota State bison, which are very wildly successful college team that play in a 18,700 capacity stadium. Not that big. Not that big, and you can at least galvanize and maybe get that town involved in spring football because at least it's something where, oh, there's a professional team that is playing in my area. That's really cool. I know it's not the glitziest town. I know it's not sexy, but if you're already having these teams in hubs anyways in, you're flying the players out. Why not? I mean, if you're deciding not to tell people, Hey, you don't have to go live in Fargo, North Dakota at the beginning of tail end of winter, let's consider that. I think that would be really cool. Try something like a market that I think has shown football enthusiasm and then maybe try that out. That's kind of my wild one. I know people have argued for things like can Tulsa, that's fine. I understand that. Fargo's kind like my wild card idea maybe. Let's think about that one. That's kind of a crazy one, but I would say the top two would be Oakland and San Diego obviously. Yeah. Last point on this, because at least for me, I've hammered a lot of these points over the last couple of weeks. I don't want to regurgitate too much of what I've said, but even when I tweeted today, put a team in San Diego because of the showcases and you got all these people like, oh yes, let's kill the league with the California taxes. I don't care. I don't care. You got to put one there. I don't care. You got to pay for it. It's fine. You have to have a west coast presence. The Vegas thing didn't work, can't really do Reno or anything. Portland is not, and you're worried about travel. At least flying to San Diego from Texas is easier to getting up to Seattle, but you got to do it. I don't care. You got to buy the bullet. You got to have a team in California, sorry, American Airlines has, I don't know how many flights from DFW to San Diego, but it's a lot. I've done it many times. It's cheap, it's affordable and they're ubiquitous And the taxes aren't the same because the players you, if it's that disparaging, because from what I remember when we did the whole pay breakdown is your tax, when they play in California, you're taxed, right? And then wherever you play the game, which I think is so weird, I think if you're based out of Texas, but I understand the state's got to get their things, so then if you have to compensate as a league, if you have to go, okay, the players that play in Texas, we're going to pay 'em an extra 5% to make up for it just to balance it out so that then that's just what you have to do. You have the money to do it. If you're not going to play the players more, whatever, I would get to that, but I think whatever it is, you have to turn that over. You got to play at Snapdragon or whatever that is in San Diego and put it to bed. I just think, I mean I love Snapdragon as a venue. I really do, and I think it's not an overwhelming amount of capacity. It's about 35,000. I don't know if you're going to fill that necessarily, but just even getting it half full I think would be an accomplishment just to get something in there. And look, the city continues to add sports, so they will have competition as far as other pro entities, I mean just in the last two years, you've added a very decently popular women's soccer team. They have rugby, they have this new stadium that everyone's playing at. There's an MLS team that's coming next year that's being added. There's an NBAG League team that's being added at the end of this year. They're getting other pro entities in the city. Again, You're running out of time. They're running out of time. I mean, that's the thing. You're starting to lose competition to everybody else, which is why, and this is my biggest thought, and I've thought about this now with how this league operates. If you're going to put it in San Diego, push your chips into the middle of the table. Do not be complacent. Push your chips in because guess what everybody else is, all these other teams are putting out merchandise, they're doing raffling for tickets, they're doing all kinds of stuff to get people into the stadium. I mean, like I said, the Padres have been selling out like gangbusters. People are starting to get back in the idea of like, okay, there's pro sports options in the city. Again, we're not just a fair weather city because the charters left. That's not our identity and that's great. That's fantastic for the sports identity of this city and if the UFL is going to come here, they need to treat that seriously and they need to treat the people seriously. I'm just going to say that. Yeah, and I like Oakland too and we got all that, but we'll move on here. But I like Oakland too is I just don't know quite the stadium alignment yet. How do you do all that, where they play it? But anyway, I think, I don't care. It is anywhere in California. I would be fine with playing. When I lived in Bakersfield, we shot high school football games in Tehachapi. I don't care if it's in Tehachapi in Kern County. You got to play somewhere. You got to get out. Alright, broadcast here. Well we'll hammer through this. Let's try keep this hour 15 maybe. Alright, broadcast. I feel very passionately about this and this is maybe something people don't talk about as much, but I really want to, alright, first of all, ESPN, stop talking about betting so much. It's driving me nuts. Listen, I've had it. I'm somebody that cares a lot about look broadcasting a lot. I've been a broadcaster, I've done TV and radio broadcasting. It drives me absolutely bonkers to hear how much they talk about betting and look, I don't know if that's a command from on high or if somebody's telling say all this, but it drives me absolutely bonkers when there's a game that's on the line that has playoff implications and all they can talk about is player props and the over under, I don't want to hear about it and I don't care if you think your betters want to hear about it. In fact, betters aren't looking for that during the game. They know that's going on. They have that information in the back of their head the entire time it's happening. As somebody who has placed bets before, I understand that that's happening and I don't need the screen to remind me of that. Okay? I really don't. I just don't, and I don't need to hear that anymore from these broadcasts. There needs to be a clampdown from the league and tell these TV partners to be like, listen, let's chill out on this a little bit. Well, and also I've got, because I've said a lot of these, but the people that know what you're talking about are smarter than the broadcasters, so they're talking about it. So then you are just annoying the casual people that don't really know what's going on because spoiler alert, the people that I know that have been on the show that the Cody Maines of the world that would love to get in a room for a half an hour with any of these USFL execs and talk to them about how to actually implement DFS and sports betting and fantasy. They are smarter than anybody in the league that is talking about this. And so every time I hear, and this is no offense to people of the show and I would probably take Stormy out of it, I think Stormy does a really good job and I think Stormy really knows, but I would talk mostly the Booth people, they know more than you and you sound like an idiot when you're talking. It's the over, it's the over, it's the over, it's the over. You're only annoying the people that don't know what you're talking about because everybody else that actually cares about it is smarter than you and so please STF you. I'm very, very tired of it. It's very much a chore to watch some of these games, especially on ES, espn. Yeah, and look, I think it deal legitimizes the product, the product that they're trying to get out there because they're saying to you, well all this is just a giant prop. That's all it is. There's no implications to this is just We don't care about the game. It's only the people that are winning. Yes, you should only care about this if you have money on it. That's how it sounds to me and I think that's a gigantic disservice to this league. I really do. And the UFL needs to say something about it. Moving on. I do think just to kind of touch up on it, the bets should be covered before the games, which I think Fox does a good job of. They mentioned it a little bit at the top and then they're like, okay, there you go. I remember they had the live lines underneath next to teams, especially back in 2020. They would have the spread cover on both teams, but they didn't really talk about that as much. They just said, okay, here it is. It's the information that you need and that's fine. I'm okay with that. They touched on it and then they let it run. And if you want to talk about over under when it's hit, sure that's fine. If it's an appropriate time to do that, but don't force it, don't force that information in there. That's really the biggest thing, but I want the broadcasters to not really touch on it that much. So that's the last thing I'll say about that. As far as the players go, I want them to interview these players and these coaches, but can we do it when they're not heaving and hawing? I know they're trying to get in the moment of the emotion, but I think it's better when they've had a chance to kind of collect themselves. I really do believe that. Let the celebrate their teammates and let them get a breather and then talk to them, not run up to them right after they caught a touchdown. I just don't think that works. I really don't. I want to see them. I know people want to catch them in the moment, but I would rather we're getting those moments on audio. I love when they're talking to the coaches and they're getting heated about certain things. You get that They fly on the wall stuff, That's great. I love that. That's fine. But when you want to talk to them, do it when they're sitting down and then you can say, Hey, what are you looking at? What did you miss on that last play? That's fine. I'm okay with that, but not in the moment. Just give 'em a moment to collect themselves. One quick note, I was just looking because I don't bet on sports at all, but I was like, can you bet on sports in Washington so we can do it at the tribal casino? So that's all legal to do that I watch basically every Mariner game that I'm not at. I don't think I could tell you one time in the last three years that any broadcaster has ever brought up a prop bet the over under a team's favorited ever. I couldn't tell you one time and I watch every game with the sound on invested the whole time. And again, I know baseball is not football and people, they got the I bet on football. I'm just saying I watch sports all the time when they're not hammering at home. Anyway, please, this is good. I mean I don't see that from NFL broadcasters, Padre's broadcasters certainly don't do that ever again. That's knowledge you have in the back of your head when you know that you're looking for that and that's fine, that's okay, but not for the purposes of a casual audience that you need to bring it up that many times. You really don't. So that's all I'll say about that. Also, if you're not going to talk about betting, let's talk about the stories of these players and also let's not talk about how they're going to be in the NFL. They do x, y, z. I don't want to hear about that either. I want to focus on your merits as a league and what these players are getting from this league. I think the CFL does a really good job of this. The CFL talks about their players, they talk up previous players they talk about, and I know I get it, it's a lot more history and all that I understand, but talk about the players that you have right now when somebody is in the NFL and you can say, oh, this guy is doing really well, that's awesome. Good for him. Great, awesome. Bring that up. But not in the moment of, oh, we're trying to push this guy out of here. Do you think the CFL was eager to push Nathan Rourke out of their league and get him in the NFL? Hell no. They weren't. They were trying to keep him around, but they knew in the back of their heads that was going to happen probably based on how he was performing. But they all, I'm sure secretly wished that he would stay and they would never talk about him moving on. That was never the conversation. The was going to come later when he made that decision. That's a discussion for afterwards. Well again, it's a crutch of that. I know these players, excuse me, I know the broadcasters do these calls. I'm sure they're very cursory level things. I mean I've seen obviously the ESPN production calls are different than the Zoom calls that we get with the three people I saw today asking. It was like 40 minutes of just three people asking the players questions. Like, okay, let's get more. I dunno, I don't feel like that's the best use of time, but consider who I saw on the call. But they don't have the time to get invested in all that all week, right? You listen to the baseball broadcast like, man, I was down at the clubhouse earlier today and Julio was showing me the callouses on his hands because even here they're not, and at least this year the broadcasters are all in the markets, at least from what I can tell. I know they were in Arlington, the US FL, they wouldn't even fly people in. They would be at the sound stage. It was like, why haven't I seen Kevin k Kugler on TV the entire time? Like, oh, it's, they're not there. But yeah, they're grasping for shots. I think you got to do a couple more production calls if you got to give a couple of these guys Zoom calls and they could talk with some of these guys, but they need to have more to talk about. Yeah, otherwise it's the NFL. It's Battle Hawks have a lot of fans and then it's the over under. They're running out of stuff to talk about. Not all of them. Some of them do, but not all of them do the same amount of research and you can tell which ones do I agree and they need to talk to these players beforehand. And on that note, if there could be a pre-game show on some of these players and their profiles, that'd be great. Just half an hour they don't need much. But I know it's hard for programming because there's all these other things they're slotting it into, which again, we'll go into my next point about scheduling. I think it's possible if you are able to get it for maybe certain games, we're able to get more of coverage that way. I just think it's really important to have that there and have that be part of building up to what's happening and people realizing, oh, there's a game coming up soon. That's good. You need to have that sort of preload I think, and I really would like to see more of that Last point on this would go on, I think a pre-show would be beneficial more to the UFL than a post-show of getting people invested in this than like, Hey, Scooby and what's his name? Or excuse me, or talking like, we'll see you next Saturday and also promoted on you. I think it was Mark Perry had to post on the UFL news hub like, Hey, could we get the UFL to promote this? I'm like, Scooby's retweeting. They're like, what is it with the league? I understand you don't want to retweet Anthony's article with Sports Illustrated whatever, but last year the XFL would retweet some fan stuff. We're at the game and that's fine. The Mariners will retweet me every once in a while if I post a cool photo there, but retweet the damn show of the people. This is your thing. If you're not going to, God forbid, spoiler alert the Seattle, they'll retweet articles that cover their team and when someone posts like, Hey, this person's injured out the rest of the game, the Kraken, they'll tweet it as long, it's legitimate, it's real. But this whole like, well, we can only retweet and then today we're going to retweet 87 inactives all at one time at seven o'clock on a Thursday, but then we're not going to retweet the UFL today show ever. That's happening. That's on your own stupid network. Put it on ESPN. Don't just put it on YouTube, but yeah, at least make it visible that way. It's crazy. Yeah, sorry. It is. No, I agree. They need to make it more visible. I agree. All what you said. Alright, last one here because the Doty's looking through the window here. What am I screaming about? Alright, last point I just want to make here, and I really believe in this for two big reasons. I want this schedule to be the week after the Super Bowl. Now look in the future of this might change a little bit because I do believe at some point the NFL is going to have an 18 game schedule and they're going to be on President's Day weekend for the time being, let's put this on President's Day weekend and let's continue to have that. It's probably going to be a week after that eventually. But I need to have it there because for two reasons. I know everyone's concerned about the weather and oh, it's too cold, but I also think it's better for games to be too cold than to be too hot. In my opinion. I would rather deal with that than deal with heat. Secondly, better for the players. You can get these players in the mini camps in the NFL. You can get them into OTAs, you can get them signed on the CFL rosters during preseason. You can get them into other leagues. Just it's better for the players and it's better for the transitioning and as a TV viewer, there's other things going on. We've talked about this ad nauseum as summer starts to approach, people are just not there and they're starting to think about other things. You've got to make sure that you appeal to these people if you are going to have this TV schedule, you need to be able to get people incentivized to watch these games. I think having it right after the Super Bowl and everyone's thinking about football is a great way to do it. Sort of extend out and then yes, you do run into March Madness. I understand that. As I said, one of the biggest things you can have is a rolling by and have different by weeks involved in the schedule, try to schedule it or at least pinpoint it in a way that maybe you can have the championship game the week after Mother's Day, not during Mother's Day weekend, nothing conflicts with it and then we can move on. Also not having on Memorial Day weekend if possible, but again, I know there's some fanatically that has to happen there, but for me that would be the perfect schedule. I think the XFL schedule did it right last year. I'm just going to say it right now. I really believed in it. I liked that everything was kind of wrapped up by mid-May and we can move on and didn't have to worry about anything else. I know everyone's going to be screaming like, well the USFL is still going on. Yes it was, but me, June was starting to grind on and I just was starting to get a little bit tired there. Okay, I'm just going to be fair there. I want to say that it needs to start earlier. Keep the UFL, keep it earlier and keep it the week after the Super Bowl. I really believe in that. I will say just as a, and I agree with you, but just as a contrarian rating's really good this last weekend, so at least there's that and I agree with you a hundred percent temps players. I know the Houston game I think was crazy hot, whatever the clip, they had the water in the center's crotch and he is like, that's my balls way coming out. I thought that was funny. Do more of that than the Oh yeah, she really good fly. I would rather see more of that fly on the wall or coach flip yellow bs. I like the earlier start. I think it's better for the players even if they don't immediately get picked up. You have more opportunity in the next three months than you're shackled into a league and then getting injured and then getting out and then trying to figure it out. Even if you're injured or get banged up in the playoffs, you still have a couple months. You could figure it out. But that being said, like I said, ratings are good, which is great and part of that is just better networks and everything else, but I thought this last weekend was going to be a schnoz with a not the games meaning a lot and it was actually good. So we'll see kind of the playoffs. Hopefully they grow, but I do agree with you on that. Yeah, no, I agree too. And look, I think you can finagle around those ratings. I really do. Last thing I'll say, I mean I remember there being a player like Darnell Sanky last year winning the XFL championship game with Arlington and then moving on to the CFL and then winning the championship with Montreal and doing some late season pushing there. I just love to see these players play more leagues, get more opportunities. If they're not going to make NFL rosters, hell, let's get 'em on other fields. Let's continue to see them play and let's continue to see them be active. I really love that idea and I think that schedule makes a lot of sense. So that's my 2 cents on everything. That's what I believe in and that's what I think the FL should do. I'm here for free consultation if they ever need it. Do I ever think they're going to call me? Probably not, but you know what, I'm here if they need it. My phone is always on. Yeah, I do like that when they're read Andy or we're swaying the whoever, but again, I've been through this a lot passionate about it. We're probably saying stuff they know, they're probably saying stuff maybe they know but don't want to admit. I think it's probably some of it, right? I think there was a lot of hubris involved in this, surprisingly so, just surprisingly. So having lived through all this for the last couple of years and especially where the way the CFL does and then with the USFL season one, I'm like, okay, what? We were just at the Gray Cup three months ago and now, okay, what's again, I think knowing your place and all this right now and wanting to build to that, but I think the end of my point here, and this is a conversation for the off season, but how we are handling all of this training, camp media, everything going in needs to be reevaluated way to going into the next year. I think that the situation they have right now with whether they're overworked or not, these team communications people and then we have 40 minute Zoom calls that nobody's on. Then we have other ones that aren't whatever, that no one even shows up. They don't. And then we have people that are trying to schedule and like I said, I've just given up, that needs to be remedied and that's a whole nother kind of off season topic I think for media media relations in the UFL. Maybe we want to tackle that at some point. This was a little bit more logistics today, but it's a work in progress. But I think at least we had tangible things here because always people say, you bitch and moan and complain and here you go. Here's thought. I thought it was a good bulleted we could kind go through and not get too meandering. So I thought it was good. Absolutely. No, I've been looking forward to this and this is, and I'll just say this, this is from reading comments, this is from listening to people on your show. This is from listening to other people on other shows talking about these leagues. This is the years worth of buildup putting forth this kind of plan because of all the things that we've seen past, present, and hopefully future that leads me into creating this list. This is why this is comprehensive thoughts on all kinds of different things and you know what they're going to continue to change as this landscape changes. But that's sort of where I stand right now based on just so many other things that have transpired over the last few years and I'm happy to have been part of it, honestly. It's been really interesting to kind of be part of all that process and I can't wait again, like I said for CFL next week speaking of another chapter in another week. Well Andy, this has been good. I appreciate it. Like I said, we've have you eight teams now next year we'll figure out expansion. Good time to start talking about all this stuff. Appreciate the work. Stay tuned after the break here, Ryan Valentine and beyond. Like I said, give the CFL. It's already the same kind of, I know the football rules are a little bit different, but if you're fine watching UFL and kind of the way that game is where it's not always a hundred percent, this will be good. We'll see you. Appreciate it Andy. We'll figure out what we're doing next week and we'll see you guys after the break. Thanks. Well the last time I saw this gentleman, we were sharing an adult beverage on the Las Vegas strip, but I never want to make fun of children at all. But I am glad that the Golden Knights did not advance in the Stanley Cup playoffs. As a Seattle Kraken fan, I be, it was good to see, but it was good to at least be able to collect some merchandise for your family. How are you doing Ryan? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I was also, as soon as they lost I ran downstairs and rubbed my child's face in it. So don't worry about that. He is old enough. He's a teenager now. I was also super excited to see them. That's good. Yeah, deep in here. I had Dave Campbell on last week and the Oilers fandom running wild and everything else. So we're here CFL stuff today talking to St. Peters. Maybe a slight 2% Lions here just because of that. But I was trying to, we were going to get tie Cats people on this week and it just didn't work out Tommy Wise. So we got Ryan carrying the load for the CFL big news coming out, right Malik Henry getting injured that I think happened before we were going to record anyway, but then certainly now to have a little bit more time to reflect on that. Thoughts on that. And how big of an injury is that for the Stampeders? I mean that's just a devastating injury for a whole host of reasons. Football being important obviously as Malik was a thousand yard receiver when he was healthy last, it looked like he was about to have a breakout year last year when he went down with his Achilles tear last season. So he was gone from week three throughout the rest of the year. And so to lose him to patella tendon tear, it is awful for a guy to work his way back and be ready to go only to go down with a different injury down the line. It's just incredibly difficult to see for Malik as a person, let alone his impact on not only the team but the league. The guy's a great dynamic receiver and he was the guy that was putting up highlights on a weekly basis so that the league loses Mochen I think is a bad thing and it's especially bad for Calgary. Well and especially preseason is always kind of the worst too of that. And was this in practice I assume right? Coming out of the preseason game? Yeah, it was in practice the other day. Honestly though, you never want anybody to get injured, obviously that's not what I'm suggesting, but the timing of the injury is probably better for the Stampedes than it was last season. Last season it happened in week three. Rosters are kind of set around the league. There's not an opportunity to go out and find somebody, get them into your system, get them up to speed before game action is taking place. So there wasn't kind of that built-in replacement. And while I don't know that there is an immediate replacement for Malik Henry on the roster, they have had two guys in Eck, echos and Brooks that have looked really good in the preseason so far and in their preseason action whether or not that can translate into regular season play, we'll have to see. But both of those players have shown that they're able to catch the ball and run routes and that's something that you need. Whether or not they're going to be able to do it in game speed, I think we'll have to wait to see on Friday and then again throughout the course of the season. I think that's a good point. At least now you can pivot or figure out what you need to do here going in. I was curious and just thinking about you coming on, because obviously here teams revamping going into this year and with Edmonton with McLeod and BC was there last year, obviously didn't make it all the way but enough to, I know Calgary made the playoffs, but it was one of those really limped in with all that. That's not in quotes, they just made the playoffs. There's no air quotes around making the playoffs. You do or you don't and the Stampeders made the playoffs. Were they the worst playoff team in 27 years? Yes, but they were still a team And that's my point. So I'm curious going into this year, what is the expectation for that? Because obviously that's not good enough to get in and be etched out, but I think there's also a lot more what can happen with Bo and Hamilton? What's going to happen when they you like what are the expectations I guess for the Stampeders right now? I think the Stampeders are still in a good enough spot that they can make the playoffs again this year. I don't think that it's out of the realm of possibility for them to be better than Saskatchewan and Edmonton in Sask. You've got a brand new coach in Corey Mace who will make that team better, but it takes time to instill a culture that's not something that you walk in the door and you just have on day one. So it may take a season for Corey Mace and all of the new coaches there to really instill that belief in the Saskatchewan rough riders. I think Edmonton is still a dumpster fire. Their problem last year was that they couldn't protect the quarterback. So what they've done is they've gone out and overpaid for a barely mobile quarterback. I don't understand how anybody thought McLeod Bethel Thompson was the answer behind an offensive line that can't block. Yes, he gets the ball out faster I suppose, but that's still not going to be any good. I mean at what point, I mean you've got Gino Lewis there, but is he going to be able to get downfield enough or fast enough for McLeod Bessel Thompson to hit him without Thompson being just run over by defenses and blitzes and everything else? I really don't understand the thinking there. It's obvious that Chris Jones doesn't believe in Trey Ford, which is crazy to me. I don't understand how you saw what that guy did last year and not thought that, hey, with a little more time and a little more experience, he could really be something. But who knows? I mean the way that offensive line is, Bethel Thompson could be injured within a couple of weeks and you can only take so many sacks on an aged body and who knows how long the cloud Bethel Thompson will be behind that line. So I think when you look at Saskatchewan and Edmonton as two teams in the west that aren't very good, you've got Hamilton who did not look good. You've got Ottawa who hasn't been good since they stole a Great Cup championship from the St. Peters, and at that point, those are four teams that are questionable to make the playoffs and six out of nine teams make the playoffs. So is it unreasonable to think that Calgary could be one of those six? I don't think so. I think if they get improved play from their own tackles, which was the issue with the offense last year was Jake Mayer had no time to throw the ball. If they can improve play from their tackles, the stampeders are due a rebound season. So I'm glad that you agree. I mean everyone with this McLeod, beyl Thompson, Trey Ford thing, and like I said, we had Dave Campbell on, and not only is it this, but now you're hurting Trey Ford's development. Now he's going to be at the end and approaching the end of his rookie deal. How does he, and then you can be all, oh, McLeod's the locker room guy and comes in and dabs everyone up, but it's still like you're delaying this. I remember the beginning of the last season preseason, I'm like, I want Trey Ford on the podcast. He's going to be the starting quarterback and then the season starts out, I'm like, what the heck's going on? I just was baffling to me just, I always remember this, his Rey Ford sitting in an empty commonwealth like beautiful sun behind him, so excited for the season and then I mean it finally came around to that, but it was just like, so you agree that I don't know why you don't keep trading and pay the money to get some other people in there versus dump it all on McLeod and I love the cloud. I get it. As a southern American, maybe Chris Jones just hates Ford like most of us do. He's a Dodge man and the question is whether or not Bethel Thompson will be able to dodge his way past Tacklers and get the belt down the field because I'm baffled with the idea that you spend that much money, just spend that money on blockers for Trey Ford, spend the money on the offensive line, spend the money on the defensive line. Why are you paying McLeod Bethel Thompson to come back to the CFL and be ahead of a guy that has that kind of dynamism? That is rare. I don't get it. I don't understand. In terms of Saskatchewan, and I think it was Rod, I think it was just him and Darren talking this week. I saw the clip. But yeah, people can believe in Corey Mac. I think you said you're still going to be kind of a train wreck there. I don't know Trevor Harris coming back and he's older than I am and I feel like I couldn't play anything or do anything of any sort of athletics in terms of, we'll circle back around to Calgary, but yeah, I don't know with Saskatchewan any other detailed thoughts on that. Again, it's going to be whether or not they can keep Trevor Harris upright. He's another guy that's not very mobile back there and it cost them last season because they couldn't block for him. So did they improve the offensive line enough? I mean they did go out and spend money on free agents. They plucked Ryan ve out of Calgary, he's going to be there and he's been a solid contributor. I think there were people in the media here who suggested that Ryan Sever should be getting the votes for the most outstanding offensive linemen out of Calgary the last couple seasons. So we'll see whether or not he's able to kind of step forward and be that guy to protect the quarterback. But again, if you don't protect Trevor Harris, he's going to get eaten alive. He's not an escapable quarterback. He's not a guy that you're counting on to be on the run. In terms of mayor here, and I think I saw, was it photos? He's really slimmed here coming into camp. I think I get one of our Calgary fans posted about that. What's the pressure on him kind of here with Calgary because it's really kind of been an up and down and obviously make or break, but I felt like that was the way last year. But then again, I feel like it's make or break and then you make the playoffs like, okay, well that's fine then it's good enough. But I don't know what expectations for him. I mean he had guaranteed money this year, so I think there's, that gave him certainly an advantage towards playing in the number one spot. It's been very, when he had Derek, Dennis and Julian Good Jones, who since went to the NFL and has retired at tackle, he was statistically comparable to Zach Calleros, who everyone will suggest is the best quarterback in the league right now. That's maybe not suspended. You've got those two guys, you've got Calleros at the top and Jake Mayer with much of the Calgary offense that's there currently was statistically comparable to Zach Calleros. That's why he got the job and kept the job over bowl Levi Mitchell last year, he came out through a ton of interceptions in the early going because he wasn't getting any blocking from his tackles. He was having to make decisions faster. He was throwing the ball out. Those interceptions dropped off towards the end of the year. The offense got better towards the end of the year, even though you lost probably three or four of your best receivers in Calgary last year, and Jake Mayer was still having a better offensive showing in the back half of the year than he was in the front. Can he carry that momentum into this season? Can he eliminate his mistakes? Can he take off every once in a while to remind linebackers to stay home and not just be able to drop into coverage? Those are the questions that Jake Mayer has to answer this year and we'll see what he's able to bring. But I think it starts and ends with Jake Mayer with whether or not he's getting good protection from the tackles. I think he's got no problem with the interior of that offensive line, but the bookends are going to have to do their job or Jake could be in some trouble again. I mean, do you believe in Jake or you still all in on this? I mean you've watched him every week. This is the season. I mean, again, do you get 2022 Jake Mayer, or do you get 2023 Jake Mayer and all of that comes down to whether or not you've got protection. And I think if you don't have protection, you might start to see shilts sooner than later because he is able to scramble. He is able to go on the run. But in that preseason game last week, I thought I liked Jake's ball a little more than I liked Shilts ball. It didn't hang up as much. He was throwing the ball deeper than he did all of last season. Almost a third of his passes were more than 20 yards, which was unusual for last year. He completed a couple of those. He had those middle runs last year. He was very effective under 10 yards as a quarterback should be, but beyond 10 yards. He wasn't great. He only attempted out of his 12 pass attempts last week, he only threw two, I think that were below that 10 yard mark. So they're looking to push the ball a little further downfield and we'll see if they're able to continue to do that here on Friday. Well, that was the thing, right? Yeah. Jake would come out and he'd have 30 or 40 whatever completions it would be for like 180 yards. It just wouldn't be. Yeah, he was averaging five or 60 yards. His depth of target wasn't that deep. So whether or not that changes this year, I hope it does. I mean, honestly, I think in order to be successful, he needs to be in that eight and a half, nine range that everybody else is from a depth of target standpoint. We'll see if that's what the offense brings this year. This also, let's not forget, you've got changes in the offensive mindset as well with Mark Mueller moving on to Saskatchewan. So that's changing some of the offensive discussion and offensive conversation and bringing in that new coach from eastern Washington. That was the thing, because never we don't trust Jake, are we not doing the offense the correct way is he doesn't have enough time. I just never know what it is because obviously you've seen him do it in the past and he came out, I mean, what was that debut game it feels like forever ago and he's throwing all over the yard and he was like, I never understand that. We just don't trust him or the offense just isn't working in the way that he needs it to be done. Yeah. Again, this is the year, right? You've had a year that did work. You had a year that didn't work. So now we need to find out, this is the year where Jake Mayer either becomes a full-time long-term starter in the CFL or he doesn't, You mentioned, do you have any hot Chad takes? Do you want to say anything while you're on here about that? We've covered it a couple of weeks ago with I think Dan, Ralph and all that. Anything with Chad? Do you want to get off your chest? It's okay if not. Nope. No. I mean, here's the thing. I think the league eventually did the right thing and took their time on an investigation and set it as a minimum of nine games. Whether or not we ever see Chad Kelly again is a question I think that is somewhat in the air. But From a purely team standpoint, I don't know what happens in the locker room if he does come back and whether or not it's not to track even on X that when things are being said about Chad Kelly in a negative light, some of his former teammates are among the first to those tweets on X. And so if some of your former teammates are liking disparaging things about you and you've spent nine games away, what does that do to the locker room presence? And I'm not in the locker room and I don't know, again, this at the moment is the league found enough evidence to justify putting that suspension on, but the matter is still in front of the courts. And until there is a decision there, I obviously won't assign innocence or guilt innocence until proven guilty in fact. So you have to, it's in the court and when that's resolved, it's resolved. But as far as the league is concerned, I just don't know how positive an impact he would make coming in off a nine game suspension if his former teammates are out there very readily to publicly call him out. What does that mean for who he is in the room and everything else? Nevermind the fact that he's the league's highest player. I think that's also a highest paid player. I think that's also a difficult road to hoe. So I don't care for the way the Argos have handled the situation, but I think the league eventually got it right. And I mean, they had time to do so. Everybody was very quick to jump on the league, but they did take their time. They did do an investigation. It's not like he was playing week in and week out while we were waiting for this decision. It was the off season. So I think the league eventually got it right to start to put that out. Yeah, well, I think, I mean just with him being gone half the season, I mean to me here, the east is totally, I mean, it just totally flips. Not a script. Just any thoughts of the wider, and I want to circle back to the Calgary going into the weekend here, but just thoughts on the east and just feeling a lot more open now where you have the, I don't know, it felt like it had this suspension not happen. It's Montreal and Toronto again and everyone else trying to kind of figure it out. Does it feel like it opens up that second spot a lot more? No, Toronto still talented This that good. Okay. Toronto's still talented. Toronto's still a good team, and I don't think Hamilton showed last year, they spent a ton of money and free agency to bring everybody in and it just didn't work. And I'm a huge, and will always be a huge bull Levi Mitchell guy. But I mean at the same time he went golfing and the next day needed a walking boot. I don't know how much of his body is ready for the rigors of a season. And I don't know that Hamilton has an answer if bold, Levi Mitchell's not the bold Levi Mitchell they're paying for. I think if they're not, I wonder about the longevity of his career. I'm kind of surprised, quite frankly that it's still going on. But I mean, who knows this year he could come out and throw for 6,000 yards and make me look like a moron. I'm fine with that too. I'd be perfectly with him being ultimately successful. And we're going to see what Bole Mitchell has here week one in Calgary. When we get through the preseason, the first game for both of those teams is here at McMahon. It feels to me a little like wwe, EWCW, kind of like this season. It's kind of the last you bring in the guy for the pop, right? We got to, okay, we're bringing back McLeod one more time. Okay, we're rolling back. We got Trevor Harris coming back. We got Moz. I feel like it could be oh, for four on me is very honestly. And then the next year we've tried this and then we really, maybe it's a down year next year while we try to redevelop some of this stuff. But this feels like kind of the last hurrah here. We're like Trevor Harris. I mean, this is it. I mean, Bo Levi, it's either you're going or you're not. And I don't know if any of 'em can go. No. And that's part of the problem is we don't really have that. All of these guys kind of look at guys like Henry Burris and Anthony Calvio, guys that played until their late thirties as kind of this benchmark. But those guys are outliers. When you look at careers, they don't extend that long typically. And again, most of the guys you mentioned are behind suspect offensive lines. There's not, the Elks are not good on the line. Sask was not good on the line last year. Now again, I think they brought in Hardrick too, right? That was the other guy they brought in. So those are great players. And so I think their offensive line is better than the one in Edmonton. But I mean, Hamilton, Bo didn't play last year because he got beat up, he got run over, over and over and over again and he ended up getting injured on a short yardage situation of all things. I agree with you. I think there's another generation of talent coming. It's very much the, if we want to go deep into our W-C-W-W-W-E days, this is when Hogan and Macho are running around WCW, still winning the ratings war and it's about flip on its head with the guys coming up behind are establishing themselves as stars and we'll see how fast that torch gets passed. Last thing here today, Winnipeg preseason game this weekend riot. I think that they're not playing a lot of their people and I presumed as much, but what are you looking for out of this one coming into the weekend? Well they are taking a lot of the offense with them. They're not taking a lot of the defense. So Vadder, rose Haer are all staying home on the D line because they have an opening on D-line. So you got to get those guys as many reps as you can against a good offensive line in Winnipeg. So you get the D-line as much as he can. There's judge and awe are both staying home as well. So we'll see what linebackers are able to bring The defensive secondary is pretty, there's some vets in there but they're all vying for spots so we'll see what they're looking at. But I think for me the big question is the battle on the outside between Brooks and Eckles to see which of them really steps in and makes their mark at the wide side because you need to see who of them will be the first candidate at replacing Malik Henry. Jake is going out there. Jake's starting, according to the depth chart, they did leave Tommy Stevens at home and said, but did say he will be on the roster week one. So there's one other quarterback spot on the roster and there's three guys that are currently in camp fighting for it. I think that Schultz is going to be the backup, but I think you've got Logan Bonner and Tric. Those are the two guys that are fighting for that practice roster spot and both of them looked really good against BC I thought in their opportunities Logan Bonner has got some zip on the ball and so does vane. Those things come out low and hard and fast and we'll see. Yeah, it's going to be very interesting some roster construction down the roster in some of these spots. Well Ryan, I appreciate it here, getting back in and all of this stuff. We'll figure out CFL coverage going in through the season, but I appreciate your time today and hopefully we can have you back on here. Yeah, anytime man. All you have to do is reach out and I'll try not to show up from my car. No, I appreciate it man. Take care. Huge special thanks to both of our guests today. The professor Andrew Murray always taking lots of time to come on. We do the weekly Monday or Tuesday UFL recap shows, talk football on there. We do attendance and all of that, but I like doing a deep dive today, getting the UFL set for season two, avoiding the drop the survival guide and all of that. I know a lot of homework and prep work was done by Andy, so I really appreciate that all the time he's spent on this podcast and not only just this season of the UFL but really here for the last couple years all the way back to the USFL kickoff in Birmingham. Certainly appreciate that. And then Ryan Valentine as well coming on three donation. We do have some friends over there. Appreciate Ryan taking time as always, wealth of knowledge talking to Stan Peters and everything else heading into the CFL season. Quick programming note, I would look for some sort of live CFL pregame show next week, Thursday, June 6th is the kickoff. What is it? Montreal at Winnipeg should be exciting. I need to figure that out now. I need to get my ducks in order with that. I think Andy had talked about wanting to come on. We'll see if Hussy and then potentially Evan, I know some of the guys over at Cliffy and Tim with the ette slide deck podcast, they talked about maybe doing something so I'll figure that out. And then not quite sure what we'll do on Friday the seventh. We've kind of done the UFL playoff previews. Maybe we can get a John Lewis or something on. We can do kind of q and a here heading into the end of the season. I'll figure it out. But look for live CFL content here, Thursday, June 6th before that game and then the seventh we'll figure it out. But TBD, we'll post everything will be on next week. So just be visa, follow us on Twitter, whatever. Be subscribed on YouTube. I'll post updates on there as well. And also as we now go through our 3,500 subscriber giveaway, keep in mind here, I think we're going to do two free UFL season ticket packages when we hit 4,000. So if you get that spoiler, you get us up to 4,000 a year before the next UFL season. We got a year two free season ticket packages. Doesn't matter what city you're in, we'll figure that out. As you'll see with our UFL championship tickets today, spare no expense, got the best tickets available for Andy and the two lucky winners here, they're going to be a part of that. So get us up to 4,000 like and subscribe. Become a member. You can also join the channel as well as being subscribed. It's 99 cents a month. Spoiler shipping on all these jerseys isn't cheap or free. The UFO championship tickets, it adds up here. The YouTube ads don't do a lot to offset all that. So I like and subscribe, share the video. That's a number one your best way to kind of help support the channel. But then 99 cents a month, click that join button and that would certainly help in the slightest way offset some of this stuff. But alright, here we go. As a reminder, we have our four jerseys here courtesy of Royal Retros. I have them off and then we have our UFL championship, game tickets, two free ones. City with the professor Andrew Murray here. I've gone through, I've taken everyone that correctly. You always get people that incorrectly submit but took everyone that correctly submitted for all the different prizes. We have five different prize wheels here spinning. I'll pull them up one at a time, show the item, we'll spin the wheel. I haven't done any of this so hopefully, but try to keep this legit and if anything goes off the rails here, but we'll do this as fair as we can. Like I said, took the usernames everybody you were supposed to comment on the video, one comment per each. If you wanted PJ Walker Jersey, you wanted the Jordan Temu jersey, you wanted the tickets, took all those. So here we go. First prize here, look that. Look at production value here. This is for our Kante Turpen, Turpen jersey from Royal Retros. Here you see number five, the New Jersey Generals. Let me get, I've lost a lot of my screen real estate here, but this is a hot one hot item here. I know Mike Mitchell was curious about this. I don't think he submitted. I think there was one person that said that they would donate theirs to Mike. So Mike, hopefully, I think it's Chris said if he won that you would get his winnings right. Here we go, we're going to spin the wheel. This is for the Kante Turpen jersey and here we go. There we go. Looks like Done here. I hope the sound works at Defending Football. You are the winner of the Kavante Sherpin jersey for all the winners of this. You will email me at the Mark Cast podcast@gmail.com. For the jerseys, I will need your name, shipping address and phone number please. The Mark Cast podcast, all one word@gmail.com as well as for the championship tickets. Those will send me just your name, email and all that we'll correspond because we can electronically deliver those. But for the jerseys I need your name, your name, address, and phone number because they always ask for that. But here you go. Congratulations defending football on that. Keep in mind only one winner per each. So if someone else wins defending football, because some of these people put in for multiple ones. So if you get more than one then we'll have to have a joker. We'll split a pool cue and you'll have to fight over it. So here we go. Brandon Silvers a F legend Brandon Silvers. This is a Seattle Dragons jersey, one of the XFL ones on here. I posted on Twitter, I was curious to see which Jersey has got more submissions than others. I think Brandon was near the top, so that's great to see. We will switch over to the Brandon Silvers jersey here. Look at this. Look at this production value here we are going to, here we go. Give away the jersey here. There we go. Scott Staler, whatever you see your username at Scott Staler EU tg. No, there you go. So email the mark has podcast@gmail.com. Give me your name, all that kind of stuff, address, phone number, all that so we can give it to you in case it gets lost. They can track it. Here you go. Alright, next one up here. This was one of the hot items here. People really wanted this. PJ Walker, Houston Roughnecks. Not quite the same franchise we remember now, but this is a hot one. The Sidearm Slinger I saw on that. So we are going to pull up the PJ Walker one on here. See a lot of submissions for this one. All right, here we go. And this plays way better if you're watching the YouTube than listening to the audio. What is that? John B. Jenkins, there you go. John B. Jenkins. If you are Johnny B, wanting to get this jersey, there you go. Send your stuff to Mark. Has podcast@gmail.com and I think this was the most popular one. This is the white Jordan Temu jersey here. Battle Hawks Legend. Now DC Defenders not quite as much success this season, but here we go. We got the Jordan Temu one on here, let's get this pulled up. And then we also have our championship tickets as well. So let's get the Jordan Temu one up here. Alright, here we go. And this is all live, so hopefully this all plays okay on here, but I thought this was the most fair way to do it. Here we go, Kevin Cotrell 4 1 2 9. There you go, buddy. And I randomized all the names going into all this stuff. This is literally as fair as we could possibly do it. Really appreciate that. And now here is for the grand prize, which obviously not as many submissions just because people getting to St. Louis, but this is like Row M. You're right, 50 yard line right up from the FL bench. We got three tickets. You'll be with the professor Angie Murray. We'll electronically transfer all these. You should be good to go. I'm going to be in the press box or trying to be credentials open today, but trying to be there just to save some money. So we will get our UFL championship tickets here and here is the big spin. Here we go. There you go. Bond Wolf, 1890. There you go. You are the winner. So send me an email. The mark has podcast@gmail.com. We'll get it all up on there. And there we go. What do you pick our big 3,500 subscriber giveaway. I appreciate Dustin over at Royal Retros for sending those over. Have been in my box for quite some time, ready to give those away. And then the UFL championship tickets we'd ever have to talk about it again. That's really exciting. So like I said, like subscribe, share the video. That's the easiest, cheapest way you can help support the channel. It doesn't cost a penny just two seconds of your time. But then consider joining the channel 99 cents a month. Give us a little support. You get little icons by your name, emojis, it's a whole thing. But appreciate everyone getting to this point. I think we put a lot of work into a good original, thoughtful content on here, unlike some of the all football channels floating around these scapes. So really appreciate it. A lot of work goes into this and so anyone that enjoys or gets a chuckle or finds information on any of this, I appreciate it. Like I said, we'll see you next week, a live CFL show probably on Thursday. And then we'll figure out stuff for Friday as well. Thank you guys all again. Have a great weekend and take care.

UFL Week 9 Results + Reactions! Winner and Losers From UFL Week 9!!

Well here we are. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the Markcast. hope. Everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. I know I did. Got back from Dallas, Texas yesterday, went and saw the Arlington Renegades game. Can talk through that. The big victory against the battle Hawks. Not a lot of cock high there in Arlington. I thought that was a good one. The professor Andrew Murray is going to be a couple of minutes late and then we're going to hop off here right at six. I'm going to go see OSA tonight. I'm going to go do that, but we have a lot to get to today. We actually have a lot of breaking news to get to here coming up. We have the Tank Bowl updates, we have coaching changes in Birmingham. Lots of stuff to get to here. Philip's checking in. I saw Philip put his name in for the giveaway here. We will get to that. Yes, Chris checking in here. Chris will go back and rewatch an episode seven, eight times I think and just comment new interesting thoughts every single time. So I would like to meet Chris at some point someday. I don't know if the avatar, if that is Chris or not, but that would be interesting. Let's get to a little bit. Like I said, Andy, you'll be coming late here, but first and foremost just let me get my thing shared here. I want to make sure everybody knows obviously the episode I did a little do-do over the weekend because of the Memorial Day weekend and we're kind of previewing the playoffs and they're not here yet and we're not talking expansion, we're talking football as much as people think they want to talk football out here, you talk with Emory Hunt for 40 minutes and it's like the algorithm just doesn't care, but we are still doing our giveaway. So you have until Thursday night when I record the intro and outros at four Friday's episode to get involved. So go to Friday's episode if you haven't watched it yet. The UFL playoffs preview show. We have all these jerseys to giveaway. These are all courtesy. Royal Retros, a Jordan Temu, battle Hawks Jersey, Brandon Silvers, Seattle Dragons Jersey. I got Kante Turpen here with the generalist and then PJ Walker with the old school about Houston Roughnecks. And then don't forget, we have the two tickets to the championship game. So you got to go back on that video. You need to comment which ones you want. Comment if you want the temu one, if you want the K de tur one, whatever. Oh I see Andy's here. Lemme just get through this. We'll bring on Andy. We're breaking but we're going to get through anyway. So comment. So if you want all five, you'd have five, whatever, but kind of help. Let's get that video up. I want to get at least over a thousand views here just because like I said, Dodo talking to real football on here. Andy and I might not talk real football on Friday's episode. We'll get to that as well. But anyway, so get on this but comment, I was just surprised I posted on Twitter today. Not a lot of people, people had done it, but I'm like I'm going to mail out. These are four brand new brand New Jerseys here and then we got the two tickets to the championship game. I might try to see if I can screen record that and pick and figure out how I'm going to do all that and kind of figure that out with the giveaway. But anyway, so make sure you do that Andy, we have a ton of stuff to get to today. When do we, not honestly, but in this regard, yes we do. How are you doing ma? I'm good. So like I said, so you got home quick. That was good. Christina's checking into here. Christina's a member member. You can be a member. Join the channel 99 cents a month because you'll get all that. Maybe in the future we'll do a special raffle and kind of do all that stuff. But yeah, we have the Anthony Blevins news we'll talk about, we have the tank bull updates we'll talk about real quick, just a preview for Friday's episode. I think Andy and I are going to do the article came out, Darryl Johnston here with Michigan newspaper I think talking about the UFL attendance and kind of blaming the UFL for the UFL. Andy has a game plan here. We're going to put together a survival guide for us UFL next season. Anything you want to tag and we maybe talk about at anything because this will be good. And then we got plenty of CFL stuff. I got Ryan Valentine coming on. We're going to talk Calgary St. Peters and get a couple more CFL guests as well. What do you think there Andy? I'm so excited. I really am. I love that we are starting to get closer to the CFL season, but for the blueprint, I mean it is just kind of a nice tail end to what we've experienced these last nine weeks and now going into week 10, I kind of just get really giddy talking about this stuff all the time. So the fact that we have this really smooth transition going on is really nice. Yeah, so this is good because we're already kind of talking about next season all that and for branding purposes. Yeah, I think it'll be the survival guy, the blueprint's been trademarked by Todd, the murk house, whatever thing. My internet is starting to die hopefully so weird here. I'm sitting on my deck. But anyway, so we'll do all that stuff. We'll get to that. First and foremost, let's talk. This just came out, they did this in the, and I guess now it's legacy USFL, season one here, the tank bowl, the game here, the last game of the season, the roughnecks versus the showboats. The winner will get the first pick in every river round of the draft here coming up. I said I didn't like the change of the rules back in season one. I have to be consistent with that. This isn't fan control football. I do think this is a good idea. It gives a little bit of stakes to that, but I just have to be consistent. What do you make of this? Well, I mean they've proofed this concept already and it worked, right? They did the same thing. I think in some ways people almost kind of sad statistically like having this in sports where there's two of the BO teams as people lovingly like to call these kinds of matchups, they call them the toilet bowl and I think people really like that, but I think the idea is that the team is trying to lose more than they're trying to win. This is a little bit different where it's incentivizing you to try and win and there's nothing like that really that I can think of. Obviously there's lottery systems as in there are in the NHL and the NBA, but again that encourages you to try and lose to improve your odds. Whereas this is more, hey look, we know you're both bad teams, but if you really want to not be as bad next year, you're going to have to try to win this week. Which I think makes a lot of sense, but I mean I think it's a cute little promotion for people to try and watch a game that really has no bearings on anything as far as the playoff picture or maybe who knows? I mean the rosters might be completely clean by next month. So that's the other aspect of this too. These might be the last time you see these players either in this league or maybe in another league or maybe playing ever. So I think that's another incentive as well. Yeah, so see Philip already Rev deck need to tank. No they don't. They need to win now. You got to win now. Yeah, so the rough going, I don't read too much into that kind of stuff. Like, oh, does that mean that the showboats are going to be here next year? Am I wrong in that? I don't read every day is a, it's like you're the guy in Memento every day is a new day and then later on if you do something that affects whatever, we will figure it out at that point. But I do not read into that. Well this confirms the Showboats are back, which he did talk about in the article, we'll get more into that in Friday that they would like to keep the markets or current plan is to keep the eight markets, but I would not read this disc confirmation. I would say this more as causation versus correlation or however that saying works. I think this goes in line with that, but I wouldn't say that that confirms it. No, to rephrase what I was saying, I meant more in terms of the players actually being on the individual rosters. I'm not talking about the teams going away, I'm talking about the players being on these specific teams in general, and we've seen this, right? We saw this with the dispersal draft. We saw the players get redrafted into different teams. So there may be some players that you recognize from last year trying to remember, oh they were with that team last year. And that's what happens with I guess whatever semblance of free agency there is or maybe player trades or somebody goes into another place or a coach goes to another place. This is going to be the same thing. This might be the last time you really get to see these guys in heavy duty action for a while because if they make a playoff, or excuse me, if they make an NFL roster for example, who knows what their impact's going to be? They might just be on a practice squad. So for you, if you're a fan of one of these players or one of the combinations of these rosters, if you want to see somebody really bad, I think this is the last chance maybe to see them for a while or ever. So to me that's kind of how I like to pitch it too. And I'm not saying these guys are never going to have a career after this. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is as life takes them to different avenues, there might be different ways that they are able to bring their talents and maybe that's on the football field and maybe it's off the football field, which the public never sees And so like I said, gives some juice to this. I think there's also, this is the UFL season two dispersal or whatever they want to call this one supplemental draft or whatever they're going to do this rookie draft, whatever. This isn't, we're getting Caleb Williams here for the Bears is like we're going to get someone that could potentially maybe play on the team here if we, just to be fair on that, Ron, no. So we got some comments here, we'll get to that. I wanted to get to the Birmingham News. Like I said, I think it feels there, I would not take this as confirmation. I would not take anything the same way that they're like Nick Novak's doing the specialist showcase ahead of next year. It's like, oh karma we all, it's one day at a time with all this. I don't think we get any team announcements till at least the championship weekend if not after they want to have some pop in that. I think we're trying to get through this right now when they get through that. What I say real quick, make sure you're subscribed, like I said, do the Jersey giveaway and then I think we're going to do, if we can get, God it took us however long we get to 4,000 subscribers, I think we'll do a season ticket pack if you FL, so that's confirmation right there. UFL season two, I'm giving away season tickets. But anyway, so get us up 4,000 subscribers like it subscribed, share the video. You see it on Twitter, it doesn't cost you a penny. Really appreciate that and giving a thumbs up on the video as well. We got 66, you should have at least that many thumbs up right now. Doesn't hurt. And if you're watching on Twitter, make sure you bounce over and watch a YouTube so you can give a thumbs up, help the algorithm that way. Alright, Andy, big news coming out today. Birmingham stallions lose defensive coordinator on eve of playoffs. Now he had not been around John Chavis here the last couple weeks. Don't read into the loss here of the stallions playing into that because at first I'm like, wait, what's going on with all this stuff? So what do you make of this? And I want to make sure I pull up that, don't let me forget to talk about the braus injury as well with Cody. Right? So let's talk about this first Ben coordinator, what do you make of this Anthony Blevins coming to help the staff week 10? This is pretty crazy. It is, and honestly it can create a bit of concern for the Birmingham stallions in a bit of ways now. Two weeks ago they played the roughnecks, they gave up a lot of points at home and they gave up 27 points at home to the Houston Roughnecks, which is a lot to a team that really doesn't score that much. And at the time I thought, well that seems to show a little bit of defensive inconsistency and maybe them not having a true leader in the middle of that defense. Well last week obviously they, or this week they play the San Antonio bras and they have a couple of lapses but they don't give up too many points. But still there's kind of holes and inconsistent points there and to me this just shows that obviously they didn't have their ringleader there as far as calling plays John Chavis and look, we don't know what the speculation is. I don't know why he was gone for the team. There's not really any clear picture as to why that is. What is more clear to me is that this is a transitional point for this team and they need to figure it out fast because you have a big game coming up against Michigan and then you have the playoffs coming up right after that. So timing wise it's not great. I'm not saying you'd prefer to have a time for this to happen, you never want to lose your defensive coordinator, but if there was a better time for it to happen, it would be earlier in the season or before the season. Now you have to try and scramble and figure out who's going to run the defense, which is going to be Anthony Blevins, but the question is can he blend in and create the consistency that they're looking for in terms of running a defense? I don't know. Can skip Holtz use his powers as a leader to be able to coerce everybody and to work together and have a game plan involved here to kind of keep everybody in line and as I said a couple of weeks ago, I don't know who the defensive leader is, the retirement of Scooby, right? Earlier this year I'm trying to kind of figure out who's that guy on defense for them to really lean on. They obviously have a great defensive line, but I'm sort of worried now about what the identity of it is going forward and with the offense struggling a little bit this week, you kind of want to see them start to bounce back, especially with these big games coming up. Yeah, like I said, this is, I dunno if you've seen, like you said, part of this kind happened over the last couple of weeks with him not being there. We lost Andy there for a second, but it is good to see them have a little bit of adversity here. I think that the common thread has always been with Birmingham, they had the season one and they're in the hub and all that kind of stuff and was the thing rigged for all the whatever and then here to have 'em come out and they'll really go through some adversity. I'm curious if you guys had tracked this yet. I know this came about here earlier today, but certainly interesting to hear with all that stuff. We'll get Andy Bear connected back on here. Let's go to some comments here while we wait for that. We'll get Andy back on here. Yeah, Ron, if Memphis comes back, they better get their fans ready. Well they got to build that fan base up but we'll go to attendance here in a minute. Yeah, we're already 20 minutes in the show here. We've still got build that stuff. Did Blevins contract with the ex? I would doubt that it sounds like he's not named officially like the defensive coordinator. I think the wording was he was brought in to help the defense. I would imagine that he probably was just on the speed dial there. What do you think of that because it is like Blevins had come in, he was going to get the Vegas Vipers thing, they went away. Is this just a make good here? Hey doctor, we can give you a paycheck for a couple of weeks and maybe figure something out at the end of the season. Well first of all, sorry about that. I got ambul by some fans I guess in my analysis of the team, but no, it's interesting, right? Because he was supposed to come in and take over the Vegas franchise, which already was on thin ice. It was kind of the elephant of the room as far as what was going to happen to the Vegas Viper. So Mr. Blevins I think kind of got the rug pulled out from underneath him to use it for lack of a euphemistic term. But for him to be able to get this opportunity I suppose is good for him because I know a lot of people have spoken glowingly about him in a lot of spring football media I know has talked to him in the aftermath of him not having that job with the Vegas Fier. So for him it's a great chance to come in and at least be part of something. I mean what a fantastic organization to be part of. I mean this is probably the best, one of the best if not the absolute most fantastic opportunity for him to have as far as being part of a coaching in this league to be in the Birmingham stallions locker room. But how much is he going to factor into creating the game plans? I'm sure he'll do some sort of defensive analysis. I don't know, as you said, I don't know if he's really going to be able to call plays necessarily. This is going to be kind of maybe a piecemeal situation so late in the game. I mean you have to come in here and start to really factor into what you have piece wise, what kind of plays are you going to call. There's a lot of moving parts here so I think this is going to be, in my opinion, I'm not saying that Skip is going to run defense, but he's going to have to try and oversee what's going on on this side of the ball a lot more because of the sudden departure of John Chavis. It's like I say that when you were off, it certainly adds a kind of layer here of adversity and where they feel like Birmingham's kind of had things laid out for them the last couple of seasons here. I think it'll be good. We'll talk about that game. Let's talk about the Cody Lamore with the bras getting injured done for the season. I don't know if we had an article about that but we saw that in the chat, right? Yeah, unfortunately the poor guy just had an ACL injury and it's a shame because he said that this was going to be his final season and this was going to be the last of the Cody Latimer run and for that to be the end of it, especially for a playoff team, that's devastating and I really hope that's not the way he has to go out. I mean maybe he tries to make one more go round of it and not go out this way or maybe this is just kind of the last of notch in the belt and just say, you know what, that's really it because it's the worst way to end your career and getting hurt that way is the worst way to end it all, especially after such a long prolonged career that he's had in so many different leagues. And as a really solid tight end, I really liked him as an addition to this offense really did. I just thought he brought a new element in their passing game that they were lacking obviously last year as the Brahmas and I thought he was horribly underutilized with the Orlando guardians last year for this to happen, especially for a veteran leader like this really just, it sucks. My heart goes out to him and for me, I hope this is not the last that we see of Mr. Latimer, but I fear that it is In terms of here now the tens, right? Bras battle, battle Hawks playing for Home Field advantage, big game and then obviously the playoff game with that. We'll talk a little bit more like game planning for that, but how much does this hurt the Brahmas offense here because they're really going to need everything they have here against the Battle hawks. I mean that's the thing, it's going to really hurt their ability to attack the seams. I do think it hurts their vertical passing attack. Obviously you had Chase Garbers coming back into the fold and he looks a bit rusty to say the least was coming off that wrist injury. I do think that for Mr Latimer not being there, it inhibits their ability to really push the ball downfield and because of that they're going to have to lean more on the run game. John Lovett, Anthony McFarland, they're going to have to have those guys step up and they did make some big plays in this game against the stallions, but if you don't have them, I mean you're going to have to really start to lean more on guys like John Trey Kirkland who again has made plays all season, but the less you have, the more it hurts your chances against a team that does have a deep arsenal like the St. Louis Battle hawks do. And when St. Louis is running on all cylinders on offense, obviously they can put up 50 points if they want to. So not having that kind of fire power really kind of puts 'em behind the eight ball and it really stresses how important they're going to need to not only lean on the pieces they have on offense but also their defense, which we can talk about more going forward. Which they obviously seem to have a calling card with because of how they played against the stallions, but they really are going to need other people to just continue to step up. I know that's cliche but it it's unfortunate because it means that they're not really equipped to get into a shootout. They really are not. They're going to have to make it a low scoring game if they're going to win against the Val Hawks. Alright, I think that's it for news. I think we'll get to attendance here. Anything else I'm forgetting from today? It was a lot of stuff going on here with the Tank Bowl and everything else. Anything else? I mean just kind of noting how the transition came with the stallions again, the week of is interesting. We'll get more into that with the game itself, but there's just a lot of moving parts obviously we'll get more into the Daryl Johnston commentary later this week too. But yeah, I did not expect, like I said, honestly, I know there's always a lot to talk about. I did not expect there to be this much to talk about coming out of this weekend particularly It worked out and then someone was asking off The Radiance will be tomorrow delayed, delayed because of Memorial Day for all that stuff. Looking to hear at the comments, see Chris, this is what I'm talking about, these comments like Dr. Blevins hair is fake, he wears a rug. What does that mean? What does that mean? I want to know. I go back and I read these comments, I try to respond to everything and it clears my notifications. I'm really OCD, I'm like Andy, what do I respond to there? What do I respond to? Alright, let's go here. We have attendance coming up here and then I'm excited to tell little tales about my time in Arlington as well here. But there's week nine numbers Arlington 8,500, definitely distributed, not nuts in the seats. San Antonios 12,000 and then Memphis, Houston, similar numbers on that. Anything else jump out to you with this Andy? I have to say that Braus crowd sounded a lot louder than what was seen on tv. I'll give them that credit. I know it's a dome stadium obviously, but they were vocal, they were definitely ready. They expected that stallions team to give them a rousing fight until the end and they really performed very well against that team. But I really just wish there was just obviously numbers wise, there were more people in San Antonio, but I liked what I heard from the crowd. I did like what I heard on TV As far as the energy goes, I mean Memphis and Houston it sounds like high school games. We're starting to get into some really low hanging fruit territory here with these two teams and it's kind of sad to be honest, especially with how they perform this weekend. So for me, I mean those two markets are going to have to go back to the drawing board. We'll get into that more on Friday. But Arlington, yeah, we all know it's a bit of a farce as far as what maybe the paid attendance and what the actual attendance shows in the stadium, which is a shame because that's probably the best game they played all season that they played on Saturday and our dear colleague Anthony was not actually present for that exact performance. So it's a shame but it's, it's not unexpected. The team's not making the playoffs and only have two wins in the season. I'm not surprised by that. And again, that goes the same for the other two teams. Of course Memphis and Houston, they don't have anything record wise to show for, but you got to not start off with such a low floor in the first place because if you start losing that floor is going to just continue to sink. Yeah, like I said, and I'll segue this into my time in Arlington. Yeah, definitely not fans in attendance and we've talked about this, the tickets distributed and what they've handed out and season tickets that didn't go and people that bought tickets and didn't decide to go and all that kind of stuff. So Andy, so I was there and we had, wasn't really planned our trip around the UFL game, but we were going to go, this man I wanted to see in flames was playing at the House of Blues in Dallas and it was the last day on the tour, it was as far west as they were going to go. And so I said, well let's go down Memorial Day, it'll be hot. And I said, man, if we go a day early then we can get and go out to the Arlington Renegades game. Interesting. Because we attended obviously as fans normally the last two seasons or earlier this season last year we do the show and then sprint to the press box and that's kind of my experience day to day where this we got there, we didn't even go to our seats, really just walked around and kind of saw everything and just some quick observations and kind of in retaliation a little bit of what Rick Sarah tell said a couple of weeks ago when he really dogged the situation outside of that stadium. There is absolutely no acknowledgement at all that any of this exists, which I think is the biggest missing point in the world. You have Texas live right across the street. I would have that plastered. They did not even have the Braas game on until about halfway through the first quarter. So I watched the game, I didn't hear how good the crowd was, I saw the game, but it was on, they've got a million different games on there, but they didn't even have the game on at Texas Live the Brams game. And God, I bet you depending on the time that the Rangers game started, because we were obviously at the Arlington game, I don't even know if that game was on the screen, which is there needs to be some synergy there. You have people there, you have a lot of tourists coming in there. We've talked about this, having tables and stuff outside, signage, everything. There's always people around that. That being said, inside that game, I think they do a tremendous job. They have that guy, they have their in stadium host is a little annoying. I know Anthony mentioned about that. Really wants to be the Rock has the shoulder tattoos, shaved head sunglasses, but they're always giving stuff away. They're giving away whether they have a Dwayne Johnson jersey from last year, they gave away the people that won the kind of the helmet, follow the ball with the helmet. They had a band perform at halftime. They had tons of stuff to do walking around the concourse, you could win stuff. They had Army information, a lot of things going on. And then what I thought was really cool because basically you know that stadium's not used for anything. Now they've devoted a whole section of it to a really awesome renegades merch store where they have, I could actually see the jerseys in person. They had stuff that I hadn't seen online before, six people helping to check out, which you would never need for the number of people that were at that game, but I thought that was tremendous. So I think they've got the game in game really good and I was really enjoyed doing that. I haven't been even the championship game last year, I was upstairs, but being able to experience that and walk around, I thought they did a tremendous job. So there's kudos for that, but everything outside of the stadium was just horrendous And I mean that's the thing, it feels like a secret world and that's not how you should be added. That's not how you should be advertising it. Great if they show up, but clearly not enough people are showing up to make a difference and people can talk about all they want. The attendance doesn't matter. It does matter because people are there. Then they talk about it and it's word of mouth and then people talk about, oh, this is the experience I had going to this league. This seems really fun. I mean you have to be able to get that word out and you're right. I remember that too, Reid, when I went down last year for the Brahmas and the game, which was just a slug fest. There was no of offense to speak of in that game. This was before Theise pre trade. You really did not get a sense of what was going on outside of it. I didn't have any feeling myself. There was no indication it was happening, but the game itself was, I mean the atmosphere was great. I had a good time and people seemed to care what that showed up to the game. It just didn't feel like people knew what was going on. And so that is a huge disconnect point that needs to be rectified if they're going to be able to create more synergy between not only the community but just people that are not in the know that have to be in the know or at least be aware that it's existing. That's the thing that has to change if they're really going to get those numbers increased because when people do show up, we've heard many times accounts you myself, other people have had a great time in some of these games and we've been, you and I have had the experience of going to multiple venues, so we have a good idea of what it's like. So that has to change. You're absolutely right and I am glad that you were able to experience that side of it as opposed to being a media member is different. It's different than what you experienced when you're just in the press box. Yeah, yeah. Inside choc and it's weird because it's Arlington, it's disconnected. There's not a ton by there, right? It really is like I'm going to the Cowboys game. I'm going to the Rangers game. Six Flags is near there, but they just built a brand new hotel across the street, another Lowe's kind of caddy Cattycorner from the stadium. You have so many tourists coming in and out of that there was the college baseball something was at Ranger Stadium that night. I'm not big enough into college baseball to know what it was, but I'm like, you had all these people there for that during the day coming in, why wouldn't you? Hey, come in here, it's $10, come in and buy because you had tons of kids in there. We went to Texas live for lunch. You know how it is. There's always a line of people. It's always a 20 minute. I'm like, get these people to come across the street, come in there and watch the game. I didn't get that. Chris, this is good coming us FL United Secret Football League. See that go. That's a good you that Mandy. Well that's the thing. I think you need to bring in more groups. That's really my biggest thing. Why aren't you bringing in kids groups? Why aren't you bringing in teenagers? Why aren't you bringing in college students? Why aren't you appealing to different groups? And here's why Reid, let me give you an example here so I know different sport, but let me just bear with me here. I go to Padre games, been going to Padre games for my entire life. Every Sunday is military. Sunday, this is a military town and up in the way in the rafters and the third road bleachers, they used to always put military members up in those seats. Every Sunday they would be honored, they'd stand and that would happen every single Sunday. Guess what? That's not happening anymore at this moment because that stadium is selling out constantly on. They just set a new three day record for attendance in a three day span against the Yankees and it's because there's just this throng of people that are coming to the stadium. They don't do that anymore. They don't have to because they don't have to. They have patronage. This league does not cannot afford that luxury. They have to have people in the stadium that they promote to specifically and bring in for that purpose and they have to do that because that's just the reality of the situation right now. They don't have the luxury of just saying, well, people will just walk up. Are you sure? That's just not the reality right now. They have to be able to appeal to some of these groups. I agree with you and I think that's something they need to appeal to more. Especially kids. They say, can we hire some college kids, man outside because that's the thing, and spoiler, and we'll get to the games here because it's not obvious. I get to go to these games and kind of talk about this seventh person, but walk right in the door A there's no whatever. But then, yeah, like you said, they always talk like, well, ticket sale, you always see online ticket sales are lucky and slow, but there's the walkups not if people don't know the game is going on, you do not know that there. You would think that there was, you have no comp of that. Even if the USFL, even the protected stadium, you had that damn football in front, the big football and the USFL, you at least knew that, okay, this is the home and I don't think they have that stuff this year. I've heard that the branding isn't quite the same for all that, but you need to let people know this is going on. What was that? I thought I had one other comment here. Oh yes, because you talk about them. They were doing the military thing and now they don't have to. It's the same thing with the media and everything else with this league. When you get to the point where you can deny the sports gambling podcast or whatever credentials for the Braas games, then you do that. But right now you are not at the luxury to do that and I don't know because we'll get into this on Friday's episode, but Daryl, well, we know the problems. I'm like, if you do not have people on staff full time now from the second this league is the second everything's done until next, you don't understand the problem because you cannot hire people in December and get enough momentum to go to this. You have to have people working all the time and having an established existence in these markets and you can't just disappear. The CFL barely gets away with it. They really go dark for part of it, but that's an established 110 year brand here that people are used to that. You can't go dark here at these leaks. People just don't understand that. Look, I don't mind this league acting like it's a big league, but you have to at least address the problems that exist within your league. And if you're not the NFL, every league seemingly has a problem, or at least individual teams may have a problem because they're not making as much money as the NFL does. So that is what it is because the NFL doing giveaways, not really. I mean they're just like, yeah, you're paying $200 for a nosebleed and you're going to like it. That's just how it is. But that's few and far between, so there has to be more incentive built in for this to happen and you have to be able to bring in just appeal to college. College. I cannot believe they're not getting more colleges involved here and getting more promotions out to the colleges. That's really the biggest thing. One of the biggest things for me, I remember there being college nights when I was going to PO games in 2000, I want to say 2011, 2012, because the team wasn't that good, but they were like, well, we got to get people out here somehow, so let's sell a section where college kids are going to go sit up in the rafters and have cheaper tickets for them. Okay, cool, awesome. They can do that. They don't have to anymore, but that was the thing that they did and that's something that I wish that these teams did more of to be honest, because I think that's an untapped market. They're not going to spend a bunch of money. I get it, they're college kids, but at least give them something fun to do and give them a promotion, give them entertainment, give them something that they could do in the town. I think that's a really big thing that they have to start looking at. Then the last question here, and then I want to talk about the Arlington game. How was concessions? Because Rick was complaining that stadium set, right? I mean you can't control that. I was a little hungover. I had bottle of water, so I bottle water, did that coke, but they got options there. They got mac and cheese and they've got Mexican. I mean that, yeah, Rick really, really was crazy about all that stuff. Alright, so let's get into this. I saw, I think we'll do a little bit more on the Braas, the bras, excuse me, the stallions and then the one that I saw them the Sunday affair, but this Arlington HeNe games Hawks game. I told Dorothy this game could have been total ass and it was actually really, really, really good. What the heck happened here? Anthony missed a classic. What he missed was the Arlington Renegades exposing a lot of problems on the Bow Hawks defense because they had not a lot of answers for this team and I think the Arlington Renegades honestly, again, could have scored more points if not for drops, if not for certain miscues. But look, I'll say it again, Luis Perez is not the problem with the ton renegades. He has been making some absolutely pinpoint passes this entire season and it showed up again. He has been really, really good this year. In fact, I think this is the best year ever as a pro. I'm just going to say it right now. This is his best year as a pro better than Statistically isn't it? Isn't Pat tracking physically? It is, But even so, even not even just statistically I'm watching him. He's in full command of the offense. He knows what he's looking for. He knows the checks, he knows what he has to look for. His damn team just has had the worst lock in closing out games. They've lost by three walk off field goals. That's horrendous luck to have as a team. But this to me shows more that the battle hawks have a lot of problems on defense and they need to start addressing them. They looked lost. They looked completely lost on Saturday as far as their offense goes. I'm not surprised that it went south. Manny Wilkins, I mean he's a runner. He is not much of a command. He's not going to be able to command a comeback like AJ McCarran is. I know he did win against dc that was great, but the way that it was going, clearly things were just starting to break down offensively. He was starting to miss throws. He definitely overthrew his receivers and I mean he lost it in the fourth quarter. But again, I think this offense just, they need their general back. They got to get Adrian McCarran back that they're going to be fully operational. But this defense also has to play better and it shows me that again, their defense has been very opportunistic. They don't get turnovers. They're not winning many battles because they just don't really have, I'd say outside of their edge, rushers man to man. They get kind of beat up, especially in the secondary, and I don't think that bodes well for them going forward. They have to figure that out or they just have to be able to generate more turnovers and they absolutely could not. Arlington just did what they wanted. Again, I think this Arlington team is better than the record that they show. They've just been horribly unlucky this year. I also think their defenses had lapses and again, their special teams really let them down, but now you saw Perez being the Spring King again. I mean you saw it in full form. He is just always in command of this offense. So that was my thing. I saw a lot of, I posted no cause for here because I didn't get well known. Now I'm not the biggest fan of the battle hall, so a fan base at this point. I think I would kill my Twitter base if I want to put out the tweet, who's the most annoying fan base? The stallions in the Ba Hawks because at least the stallions have won, right? You have something but someone like, well this just Neman because AJ and because yeah, Manny just played like absolute dog trash that last quarter here. I was like, oh my God, it's another interception. Because we were in the chat and it was kind of fun to be like 30 seconds at Heather, whatever the delay was because I like, oh, that's game or that's whatever. Seeing you guys react, but do you take anything away from the wind? Because it was not AJ McCarran, but hey, you got to play the game. It is, but it's not the total same kind of win, right? I mean I will say for the Battle Hawks, they kind of preserve themselves for bigger games coming forward. I wonder if they just hoped to go one-on-one in these two games without aj, because obviously coming up they have a big matchup. I think they might just at some point just realize maybe this is not going to happen. Of course they want to steal it up in week nine, but that just wasn't going to happen with obviously the Brams winning. That changed a lot of it too, which they didn't know at that time. So for me, they got to keep leaning on the run game. Jacob Sailors has been awesome this year. They need to keep leaning on him and I don't think that's been much of a problem. It's just they really need to be careful about how they play with certain leads or are just not really lapsing on their assignments. Again, on defense, it's been really a really big struggle for them and I'm not surprised that they can lose to a team like Arlington. It's more disappointing just considering what was at stake for them. But for Arlington to play well, I'm not shocked by, it's just more that they were able to kind of hold onto a lead and not give it up in the fourth quarter. They have so many times of the season. We had a question here. Did Reed stay after the game for the Marquette King performance? No, I was too hungry at that point. We went and got lunch. We went and ate big, played the nachos at Texas Live, but that was, hey, it's value, it's something else. I don't know how long the delay was between them getting done with the game and then him coming out perform, but it's something, I don't know. I think that's cool. If you're our king fan, do we know the timeline for a J'S return? It's still kind of TBD, It seems to be TBD. I have to double check the injury reports, but he has been practicing. It's just, I don't know. Again, it's a matter of how much he's going to give it a go against the Braas this weekend versus next week. There's so much here to talk about with the St. Louis Battle hawks, what their strategy is going forward. We need to discuss that further. But do they put as much stock into this weekend as they do the following weekend regardless, they're both going to see each other next week. Do they care that they play 'em at the dome? Do they care? They say, you know what? I think we can play this team on the road. They can play in a Alabama dome, but I think it would be so disappointing for their fans if they just came out flat and lost in the battle, do the week before the playoffs. I think mojo wise that doesn't serve very well. And then to lose that momentum and then go to the Alamo Dome the following week, I think that would just be bad mojo. So if I'm them, they got to put their eggs in the basket and try to win this weekend And we can touch on that right here. I mean the Saturday games here are a little bit more at stake here than next, except we have the big tank pool. But yeah, I think that Coach Beck would say we want to win. And winning is what's most important. And I know that we talk a lot about the home field advantage, and I know that they talk publicly a lot about the home field advantage because it helps the league and sounds good and all that. I think at the end of the day they just want to win a football game and that's what professional football players do. Do you take it any different there? I think so too, but also how much are you trying to show too? How many offensive play sets is Bruce Gradkowski going to show the Brahms this week especially? I mean, just watch what they did against the stallions. Clearly this defense has improved significantly and they can take the tendencies of the team and use it against them. And how much do you really want to show this Braas team if you're going to play 'em back to back weeks at home, are they going to come out with a better defensive game plan? The second game, that's really the tricky part here. The same thing goes for the stallions Michigan Panthers game. It's like how much are you willing to show here? I mean, for the stallions, they can just do absolutely nothing because basically they're not going for an undefeated anymore and they're playing at home regardless because Michigan got screwed by their schedule. So it doesn't matter if Michigan wins or not, but for the Battle Hawks and the Braas, it's a little more tricky there because you have to figure out how many players are we putting in there? How much are we really going to show this team because we're playing them next week and there's real Homefield advantage stakes here, so it's just a really fine line to balance. But I'm sure as you said, I think Anthony Beckton is going to be all foggo and he's going to want to win this game no matter what, and he doesn't care. They're going to do whatever they need to. That's my thing. I mean, I think any coach, but especially Beckton, we're winning and we want to do that because Eric, I'd rather have healthy AJ than have Home Field Advantage. Yeah, I mean again, you want to win the games. It doesn't matter. I remember what it's always like baseball and hockey. Well, would you rather win the World Series at home or would you rather, it's like, we want to win the World Series. We don't care if we don't care if we win it at home or not. My baseball team has a 300 point difference between winning at home and versus the road. I don't care. I'd rather just play all the road games now instead of playing at home, to be honest. Yeah. So let's get into, let me pull up the stallions Bravo here. This was surprising that kind of a defense I guess. Anything else? Arlington Battle Hawks at this point? Again, if this is closing in on the end of Bob Sos, I mean I like what he's done, at least with this team overall. I know it hasn't always been the most prettiest site as far as watching this Renegades team. We'll see. Well, I'll get more into that next week. But again, the talent wasn't a problem on this team. It was just lapses in other departments and it's been a shame because I think this Arlington team, to me it's kind of a what if season a little bit. Could they have been that second team? I know the Braas obviously were tremendously improved. The Battle Hawks had a huge ship on their shoulder. They wanted to prove something, but this Arlington team, it does make me wonder, they did have some good pieces going from and they had a very significant advantage with Luis Perez, but they just couldn't bring it all together and it's kind of a lost season One prediction Ray and tomorrow will be down and there will be a lot of it's because the games didn't mean anything this weekend. No, it was more day weekend and it was nice and people were outside. That's what it is. I mean the ratings will be down tomorrow, but I do not think it has anything to do with, but like I said, this game, the Saturday games had way more than they had any right to be just, I said we just were going because I bought the tickets. I'm getting something to do for, and that's what I don't get to these people that buy tickets that don't go, I'm like, what else are we going to do from 11 to we'll just go and then go get lunch. I don't know. There's nothing else to do with that. Alright, let's go. So surprising here, and this made up for the Mariners. I'm losing the series against the Nationals. I was very, very upset about that. We won the last game, but here it at least made sense. This made it better here. My Braas, the mark has brass here. I've taking on the stallions, holding them to nine points. What the heck happened here? Shocker of the season? You think So? I think so. But honestly, now that I think about it more because of San Antonio's defense, I'm not shocked by that, but the way they were just able to control the stallions the entire game. Adrian Martinez was running for his life. That pass Rush was out to get him. Devonte Beckett and all these guys were just fantastic. I loved this defensive game plan. They were bum rushing him left and they took away the slants. They could not run the ball, the stallions could not run the ball with any semblance of consistency. They really were basically telling Adrian to win it for him, and he threw that pick at the end. But really, I don't think he had much of a choice because this team was just completely overwhelmed by this Braas team. And there were also a couple of miscues as far as some of the passing routes go. They're still figuring out some things there with the stallions, but what a defensive game plan and for the offense, I mean they did just enough. There was also a humongous penalty, obviously that one with Kenny Robinson coming over and taunting and then that leading to, I think it was third and 25 or 26 of the double check, and they gave the first down to the Brams when they could have been a field goal and they made them go out by nine points. That was a huge swing in this game, but just a bad mental lapse by the stallions, but just an absolutely dynamite game plan by the Brahmas team, which this game was significant because it kind of cracked open the door for a couple of teams. It cracked open the door for the Panthers and it's cracked. Open the door a little bit for the Brahmas. Now you have to really take them seriously if they're going to be able to do things like this. I think, who knows, this might be a game changing, season changing kind of game here, really. It's kind of amazing how this whole thing played out every time I kind of thought, well, the stallions just need to get it going. They'll get Pearson going or they're going to get Maribel or somebody going to get going here or Martinez will run out, was like, no, nobody did. And they just never could figure it out on offense. And that's a huge testament to the San Antonio Bras team. Well, I think you always hear sometimes, okay, maybe they figured out the code to do this, and then other teams, what'd you kind of learn and see what was going to happen with that? In terms of, you said at the top of the show, Garber is a little rough coming back from injury. Overall thoughts on him? Because I mean, you presume they ride with him, right? Injury, barring injury, Yeah, I mean he was okay. I think his accuracy is somewhat intact. It's a bit rough with him coming back, but you need him get him to play better, especially if you're going to be able to expect without Latimer. Now, obviously we talked about it at the top of the show, you need to expect some of these other receivers to sort of help him. But this bra team, again, they can play good halves, but then there's just times when they disappear. They played a decent first half. Anthony McFarlane was running around like a madman and was doing really good things in the secondary, just running loose against the stallions team. Again, if they can continue to lean on John Lovett, that's great. This Braus team just, they have to play a complete game, I think if they're really going to be serious contenders. But if that defense plays like that again, if they chase down someone like Adrian McCarran like that, it could be a completely different result than people might be expecting. We have a question here about the bras getting into the championship game. I mean, I think the league really wants a battle hawks in there. Not that they're going to bring the game for that, but I think that that is definitely, I would, Hey, put your money where your mouth is. Battle Hawks fans, you love the U, you better come and show up no matter what team's in there, right? I mean that's the thing. There's an attendance thing. If you're the league, you're just praying for the Bell Hawks to get in there, but if they don't, are they going to show up and support the league with their team not showing up? I don't know. That's the thing. We got to see it. So I'm looking here of course, and I lost the schedule here for next week, so we're going to write, I just want to have it up on here. So Panthers stallions, does that change anything here? If you're Birmingham going into this, because we've talked in the home field and all that kind of stuff, but we workshopped a little bit of the Battle Ho's bras, what would you do here? I think it changed the calculus slightly. I do think the Panthers have a good enough defense that they can at least maybe stymie this stallions team, but they got to get the pass rush. That's the thing. They got to rush the passer the same way that this promise team did. I don't know if they can do that necessarily, but it creates an opportunity, and again, this goes back to what's going to happen with the stallions defense because of all the turmoil that they're having on the coaching staff there, are they going to be able to maintain any sort of consistency on defense? I know that Panthers offense outside of the run game isn't a huge threat, but I have to at least start taking them seriously. I think it's changed the equation. It's at least made the game intriguing. Whereas if you asked me a few weeks ago, I would've said, no, this is going to be stallions on a walk. Now it's starting to get a little intriguing. And that's with Adrian Martinez still playing. I still think he's obviously your league MVP, he's still making some tremendous plays. He was just asked to do I think a little bit too much on Saturday, but it does, I think it closes the gap just a little bit. And again, the same thing with that Brahmas Hawks game. I think it closes the gap just a little bit and it at least makes these two matchups very intriguing going into championship game weekend. But again, we have to see how much they're going to show their hands this weekend. First Comment here, does it matter when the tickets are already paid for? The league wins? I'll say as someone, I was at the Gray Cup two years ago when Saskatchewan was not in there. The game was in Saskatchewan and a lot of those fans did not sell their tickets and did not go because Winnipeg was in there and they were very upset that they were not in there. It was a lot. I mean it was very, very noticeable and I think if you are someone like the UFL, you want to have a lot of, they don't care about the money coming in from the championship game. To me, we've talked about this before, attendance is never about money. It's about the optics of it and it's about having it look like this is a big deal. We have 50,000 in the battle dome and is people are just, I mean, like we've said, stallions, battle hawks in there. I mean that place is going to be, that roof could explode. I mean I think that's going to be a really, really hot environment. So I do think that that's what they want, but hey, good for the promise. Play spoilers on that. Anything else on that we'll kind of touch on these last few games and then get out? Well, I mean once upon a time that happened last season, we had no idea that the Renegades were going to make that run and then they did and they spoiled. We all were sitting here being like, well, it's probably going to be Houston dc. That's kind of what we're chalking up. I actually gave the Sie Dragons more of a chance to upset DC than I did the Renegades to upset Houston and the opposite happened. So you just never know. I mean, you have to play the games. I know it's cliche, but you have to play the games and that's happened in some of these championship games. The US F LS had that happen too. The stars beating that pretty good New Jersey generals team that first year. That was an upset. It can happen. This thing can happen. So you think that everything's aligning and you want the two matchups. It's kind of like how in the NBA, everyone's like, well, the NBA just wants the Lakers in the Celtics to play each other every year. That'd be great for ratings. Oh, this is going to bomb the ratings. And it's like, no, just show up. The teams are going to show up. The players are going to show up. I don't care. But I think this league optically, yes, I would very much like to have Battle Hawk stallions just for the camaraderie of team that's trying to threepeat versus this team that has the best attendance in the entire league and is the modern marker for spring football. Enthusiasm. I just love that. We talked about this the last couple weeks. The announcers is the crutch for every like, oh, stallions, I'm the beer snake ride, all that stuff. Hawks, they got a lot of fans, man. They got a lot of fans. Their identity is, they have a lot of fans. AB robless Panthers would be the end times. That would be the end times. But hey, didn't the mallers upset last year? Wasn't the Mallers come in and up second to the Championship? They upset the Panthers? Yeah, they did. But I mean, I don't know as far as attendance wise, I dunno if that was going to really impact the Ken attendance to be honest, but let's be real here. That would be a completely nuclear, it'd be like two, six seeds going all the way in the playoffs. But then again in the NFL, it doesn't matter because it's just like, well, there are qualified teams, whatever. That is what it is. But yeah, having those two teams in the finals, man. All right, let's get over last couple here. We will get out of here. Like I said, go see OSA defenders here, Schack the Showboats at home. Again, you would've liked to see DC have this game flipped and give Outie Field something to cheer about here after the last whatever. What'd you make of this? Did you catch any? It was because it was the double header right on Sunday was the two at one time. Yeah, I did. And look, I don't know Memphis, they can just keep throwing things at the wall. I mean Case Cook is the whole case. Cook has trained, obviously it's been derailed this season. You keep throwing random guys in there. It's just not, their defense is just completely giving up. And that's with Tom with throwing two more picks. Again, he has a bit of a propensity to turn the ball over when things aren't going according to plan. Things can get a little bit hairy for him and at least they were able to get enough from him. Chris Roland is great and I think Chris Roland should be the team MVP for DC Defenders. His return ability is fantastic. His ability to factor in on the offense is great. I love him. I think he's my favorite player from this team this year, and I think he should, if they have a team MVP award, he absolutely should win it. He's been nothing but fantastic for them, but again, for DC I guess this is their best offensive of showing the entire season. But I just think it's more that Memphis is just soul crushed as a franchise and just doesn't really have much going for them on defense anymore. And just again, in front of this Memphis crowd is just again, pretty listless. Some of these are tough and like I said with the Saturdays, had any no right to be as good as they were and kind of the Sundays a little bit of a slog on that. And then obviously Panthers here eking that one over the roughnecks. We've talked a little bit. Panthers going in here, but I don't know, I don't know if they have a shot to go all the way to the end here, but at least they took care of the roughnecks. But man, this Roughnecks fan base has to be a little upset How this season has gone. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean this has been, you move stadiums, you're in a really subpar venue, no offense, right? Stadium. Not really. You don't have an identity at all on offense or defense. I don't know what you really do. It's going to be a pretty pun intended rough off season for them. But for the Michigan Panthers, I mean they got to settle on a quarterback. I really want to believe that Bryce Perkins is the guy. I know he's not perfect and I know he doesn't have the greatest time as far as his accuracy and as far as his timing on some of these throws over the middle. But I do think he offers an element that someone like etling and someone like Perry doesn't really have. I'm sure Pat's in the chat right now are ready to fight me about those two, but I just don't really care for either of their skill sets. I would rather see Perkins in there personally and then continue to lean on their run game. Not having West Hills I think is going to start showing and it's kind of been showing in this game, they got to be careful about how their run game goes. They had such a great one-two punch. I really loved him and Colburn, but I just dunno how it's going to work going forward. We'll see. Obviously they have to think about resting guys next week. Again, there's nothing really to play for them. It doesn't matter if they win the regular student title, they can't play at home anyway, so for them, I think they're just going to rest all their guys and take it into the following week. Well, there we go. That was UFL week nine here. A couple of comments and then we'll get out of here. I appreciate it. Like I said here, Lauren, yeah, big Panthers fan here. Don't count you out. Talking about Michigan defense and that last year, and that's why AJ Smith and the Renegades, it should be good. Like I said, I really thought this weekend was going to be disappointing. That was really worked out overall for that. Everyone in here, like I said that make sure you go on last week's video, give it, make sure you're subscribed a number one here. Give it a thumbs up, give this a thumbs up. But I'll do that. We'll do the giveaway because I'm excited for that. It's always funny, I post 'em on Twitter and oh yeah, and then I'm like, oh, I look at the comments and it's like all you have to do is write a word and you could win a jersey and I will mail it to you for free. So that's always, it's like you do the expansion episode and then that's all anyone wants to talk about. And then you talk about actual football and it's like nobody care. It is what it is. And maybe we should just, like I said that upload that UFL games and then call a day. Andy, any other general thoughts from here as we kind of wind this down? I mean, it made week 10 a lot more intriguing than I expected. I'll say that. But I mean reality wise, I think really your biggest game here is the Brahmas and the Bow Hawks. That's really a-list matchup and this is really huge for the home field and playoff advantage. How much are they going to show? I'm really excited to see that for the rest of 'em. I mean it's kind of just a curtain call for a lot of these other teams, but I just want to say it's been really good so far riding out the season. We're almost through it, man. I can't believe we're almost through 10 weeks of this. This is incredible. Yeah, like I said, so Andy and I'll be back on Friday, do what is it? Yeah, the survival guy for next season, whatever. We'll work on the branding of that. We've done the blueprint. I'm like, how can I say the same thing without saying the same thing? But we'll do that. Like I said, lots of CFL talk, Ryan Valentine talk with him. And then I was trying to get a TAC guy hadn't heard back today, so maybe we'll see if Jamie and I can talk a little Saskatchewan here coming up and yeah, we were saying that, yeah, the ticket giveaway. Yes. Lauren, like anyone else, I talked about this off the top, but we got the four jerseys, we've got the, and then the UFL championship game, Andy, they're great seats because I bought, because they were the best seats available when they went on sale. We didn't do the presale or whatever, but they're like row M behind the XFL bench, so they should be right center 50 yard line. So they should be pretty good if you're in the St. Louis area. But otherwise, then yeah, get on and do that for the jerseys, because then that doesn't matter where you are and we can mail them to you for that. Andy appreciate it. Making fighting traffic every time to come back and do all this stuff. We'll see everybody next time I give a thumbs up to the video and thanks again.

UFL Playoffs Preview, CFL 2024 Season Primer

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast Reid here. Well, here we are. We have finally done it. We have succeeded. We have eclipsed 3,500 subscribers on YouTube as of this week. Thank you all so much for your support. Long time coming here, lots of hard work, lots of smart, passionate people taking time out of their days to come on the show, to talk with us about football and TV ratings and attendance and everything else in between. Really appreciate that. Like I said, really a collection of just everybody's time and energy here over the last three and a half years. Got us to this point. Didn't have to buy at any UFL games, didn't have to steal anyone else's content and repurpose it as our own. So really appreciate it. A big testament, a big milestone today. So we will be announcing our big 3,500 subscriber giveaway at the end of the show. The rules how to enter, so stick around for that. Remember your chance to win two free tickets to the UFL championship game. They've already been purchased. I got 'em today in hand and then I kind of forgot. We have a ton. I got a bunch of these jerseys that Dustin at Royal Road shows had sent over to me, so we're going to be giving those away too. Raffling those off. So even if you aren't going to be able to make it to the St. Louis championship game, you still have a chance to win a prize. So stay tuned at the end of the show we'll be doing the rules about how to submit your name and kind of get involved with all that stuff. But like I said, thank you all so much. A lot of hard work from everybody involved, all the guests, everybody, listeners, viewers getting us to this point. So thank you. Big show today. Basically previewing the UFL playoffs, a couple weeks of gameplay left. But for all intents and purposes here, we're really kind of solidified here with the conference. Could have a little seating changes, but if Birmingham takes care of business and the battle HOKs take care of business, we kind of know where we sit. So Emery Hunt joining today, it was with us for the UFL kickoff show remotely here when we were in Arlington for that Emory Hunt coming on the show, sharing his thoughts of the season, what worked, what didn't work, what coaches he has succeeded, exceeded his expectations, which coaches didn't, what changes in store for next year. Standout players is the UFL working, all that sort of stuff. And then a deep dive into the playoff matches and between the Battle Hawks and the Braas and then the stallions and the Panthers. So really appreciate Emory coming on. And then we are in a CFL season here. Pre-season games happened earlier this week and then this weekend. So we have Ted Wyman on the men's here coming on. Ted's got some stuff going on. Appreciate him taking the time to come on. We are previewing the blue bombers here who are playing this weekend and then we got old friend of the show, not an old friend, but he's a long time friend of the show. Dave Campbell coming on, we're talking the Edmonton Elk. So lots of UFL playoff talk today football after kind of our big expansion episode last week, we'll see how this episode performs. And then Ted Wyman and Dave Campbell coming on talking CFL. I'll let you get to the interviews here. Like I said, tune back in at the end. We'll give you all the details for the giveaways. Hope you enjoy like and subscribe. Thanks. Well This is exciting. We might have to get you back on for ELF talk as well here. I didn't realize that, but yeah, Emory Hunt here talking. We know Anthony Miller's involved in that with the season four here come up. We have Emory Hunt back here again. Had you on for the pre-game show before the kickoff and now we're here. It's basically the playout previews. We're going into week nine here. How are you doing sir? The UFL season. Sorry, I got all my acronym. I'm doing fine man. It's always a pleasure. Big fan of the show. Listen every week, multiple times a week with the different shows that you do and I'm glad to be on again. Well, I appreciate it. So we did our big expansion talk last week. We had John Lewis on for that this week. We're going to do a little bit more football stuff and Emory's always great for that. I know Emory watches all the games. General thoughts here going into week nine, what do you think about the UFL season? I love the fact that we are now focusing on the football part of it and that's the biggest key. That means it's going to be sustained. Obviously all the other stuff matters, but the football has to be good. And if the football isn't good then nobody's watching, nobody's going, nobody cares. And I do feel like I tweeted this out last week where even though you kind of like how they sold, we consolidated the teams so it's tougher to make the rosters. It's not quite WNBA tough, but they kind of got the best of the best. But then you lose some of those little idiosyncrasies that are involved with different teams, like how you knew the Pittsburgh Mallers defense was going to be the reason why they would be in a game or perhaps win a game. You knew New Jersey was going to come in with their unique two quarterback system and be the only team running that system and you knew Philadelphia was going to air it out and just kind of go balls to the wall with their passing game and in the XFL, you knew how DC had their two quarterback system and it kind of worked when one was struggling, okay, we'll take him, I'll put the other one in and get the offense jump started again. So you kind of lose that. I think that's why I always want more teams to help one, get more players opportunities and more jobs, but also build that uniqueness that we see in the college game or even in the NFL game when some teams are zigging, other teams are zagging and it makes for fun brand so people could tune in. Oh yeah. I think what happens, people get kind of stale in terms of man, we watched this team already three, I kind of want to see somebody else play. But when you only have eight teams, you only have that at your disposal. Are you surprised because you talked about that, the consolidation of talent and they're like, oh, these are all going to be all Stars super teams and all that stuff. But then the renegades haven't been great, right? The USFL conference has a couple really the showboats, right? Are you surprised with that, that there wasn't more parody this season? I mean we're approaching, we have two weeks left of the season and I know home field advantage is kind of up even though I guess the Panthers couldn't even play it for field if they wanted to for the playoffs, I found out, but except for that everything's kind of locked up. Were you surprised that there was so much disparity between the teams? Yes, because you kind of thought it would be everybody would be three and three and three right now. You know what I'm saying? Four and four with two weeks ago it was like man who's going to, but like we talked about before, whether it was the XFL 2021 or last year or USFL 2021, it really comes down to quarterback play and a lot of teams pick the wrong quarterback and not saying that the guy can't play, but sometimes it's just, Hey man, if you're in a secondary league where the focus will be on can we protect the quarterback, you better have a mobile quarterback back there to help that offensive line. If you don't, you get left in, left behind. And I thought, hey, if you're going to cut eight teams, your depth chart at quarterback is probably going to be super strong to where we wouldn't see a one in seven team going into week nine. We'd see a team that's four and four. So I felt that's the biggest shock. And then when you notice some of these teams don't even have, some teams are explosive, some teams lack speed and you're like, man, why are we traveling down the road of the 30-year-old running back or the 33-year-old quarterback? Yeah, you want a place for guys that still want to play to play, but man, this is supposed to be the league of opportunity, which to me sounds like a league of 22 to 27 year olds, you know what I'm saying? But I think a lot of it really boils down to teams hitching their wagon, two quarterbacks that can help play above the Xs and Os. Yeah, and I remember famously you're advocate for getting the younger talent in these and you don't want to see year seven of whoever. Are you some of these, I know obviously McCarran has done well with the Battle Hawks. We've seen Temu struggle, it hasn't been a hit for all these quarterbacks coming in. I know that the Martinez thing with the stallions has been phenomenal. They really at Skip holds it seems like can plug in whoever there and kind of make it work, but are you surprised, I guess specifically with the defenders in Temu specifically that really haven't reached, and I know they had injuries and people moving on and stuff going in, but kind of a shell of its former team it looks like. Yeah, I mean you really start to realize how much they missed the king in terms of what he brought to the change of pace. He was the one that kind of helped get the run game started and that's when you started to see Abram Smith have his success, then it switched back to Tama and now you have the play action passing game and he's able to make some throws deeper down the field. Now granted, you're right, they did lose a quartet of receivers. They don't have Abram Smith because he got hurt in the preseason and they don't have Derrick King and I was surprised it didn't go back to that model that worked for them, that bathed them such a formidable offense. But man, a lot of their defensive pieces are still there and they stink defensively to be completely fair and honest. They can't stop anybody and that was the hallmark last year. Their defense was strong and tough and they turned the ball over to high clip. I know that's a high variance where you can't depend on turnovers and count on that week, weekend in, week out, but man, to see DC's defense look like it looked this season has been a big problem. And I also feel like with Arlington, yeah, we love the Luis Perez story and I'm glad they've leaned off the bowling part of it during the broadcast. I think we got that part, but you got Lindsey Scott, this is somebody that everybody wants to see and I would like to compare that situation to what we'll potentially see with Pittsburgh, the Steelers where you should have the freedom to start the young guy, the guy that's still ascending because if he doesn't do right or if he fails, you can lean back on the Russell Wilson, the veteran or the Luis Perez the veteran to stabilize the offense, but give those young guys that runway to go out there and try to perform. Because if Arlington had Lindsey Scott, they could have recreated what we saw the Houston Roughnecks do with PJ Walker with it made it exciting to watch. You know what I'm saying? And that's why people tuned in for roughnecks games in XFL 2020 like man, PJ Walker balling and so nobody's tuned into Arlington to watch Luis Perez 1, 2, 3, get the ball out. Nobody wants to see that man. And I just feel like that's where some teams have faltered. Well, and there's something even on, I think it was the third string that Holton Aler or whatever where he was talking like, yeah, they're all in on pe, they're all in on Luis and it doesn't matter and all that. It is funny you talk to bowling and the broadcasts have been hit or miss kind of across the board, but there is Luis Perez with the bowling. They're like, DC's got the beer snake, battle Hawks. They have a lot of fans. There's one or two crutches for every single one of these teams. It's funny how I can't, and I don't know if you guys brought this up, but it is funny because you say that, think about it. I want to say it maybe got to week four where we stopped seeing that damn map where the teams are located. If you're born in the United States and you don't know where Memphis or St Louis or DC is, then we got a whole nother conversation. Well I also, when they post that map, and I had sent that over to Sam Schwar team, we'll talk every once in a while, I had during the rest of the United States there and they're like, well, I'm over here so I'm not, that's where I'm rooting from. It's not even, and God forbid you don't have any international viewers as well. It's only if you live in Birmingham, Texas. That's all we care about. We don't want to do any of that stuff. Some of these you talk boring football, some of these coaches, the Arlington, I feel like Bob Stoops is on his way out. I'm curious here, when we get the pay structures next year with some of these XFL coaches, are they going to take a pay up? Curtis Johnson feels like we're moving on. Any of these guys that you've been kind of disappointed in from a head coaching perspective? It is fascinating because if you look at what we had with Kirby Wilson in USFL 2021, for all of his faults, it became part of the brand in terms of like I got to tune in to see what they do and then they moved on from him and then they bring in Horton and you're like, alright, well this team kind of plays, they have an identity. I feel like we haven't seen the identity yet for stoops or especially him being a college coach and also Curtis Johnson being a former college head coach as well. The identities aren't there. When you tune into a Birmingham game, you've seen an identity even with Mike Nolan who has taken another step forward in his second season, has developed an identity and he had to use multiple quarterbacks. And so I think those two, you haven't really seen the identity. Now to your comment toward pay structure, wouldn't this be the perfect time to kind of lean in on younger coaches like AJ Smith, right? The coordinator for the San Antonio Brass, wouldn't he be primed for a head coaching job in the UFL or Anthony Blevins who should be the head coach of the Vegas Vipers? Wouldn't he be primed for a head coaching job if it's the league of opportunity, let's get these younger up and coming coaches opportunities to lead a football team and also give these young up and coming players to have a chance to get some fresh tape out there. And I know that I get why they go with the agent and the way Philips and all I get that because you got to have recognizable names for the lay person. But man, I would go aggressive this off season starting with the draft, and we talked about this before where you have a futures draft like listen, if DJ Ule bro, listen, you are like your seventh year in college, your third program NFL is going to treat you like an afterthought. I would've gone heavily after Talia Al Loa. I said this when we talked before, I would've gone heavily after Stetson Bennett before he had that last year where they won the national championship. That would've been the guy that you thought that league would be like, yeah, he's only 5, 9, 5 10, whatever. We don't need that. Right? So you earmark some of these guys that the NFL will if you really competing with day three, late day three. So if I can get the guy like a Lindsey Scott and say, Hey man, once you're done in November or December if playoffs or whatnot, how about you just come play for us for a season or at least four games and let the league reevaluate you in those four games? You still can get drafted. We've seen this before happen with, we just saw with EZ stickers Toronto, although he played a full 18 game season plus playoffs, but we saw it with Kenny Robinson in the XFL, you have a chance to still get drafted. But man, I think that needs to be the aggressive approach. Get some young stars both coaches and players and really try to cultivate an interest from the college fan and also the football fan For some UFL fans screaming in the comments USFL 2022. I also lost that year because of covid. It was 22 and then 23 and then I spent, what was it, 21 was the Fanger show football spring league era. That was Ah, That's right. That's right, that's right. That Was the indulgence of the show we were doing. Zoe Taste says, but make sure in terms of standouts, obviously special teams have been across the board anything else because like that, and that's always great and you want to see the Brandon Aubrey's of the world and all that, but anyone from a, I don't even know quarterback, anyone else that you non-special teams stand out for you as someone that's worth a shot in the NFL here. I do think they've strayed a little bit away from every single comment is this guy's trying to get back to the NFL? This guy's trying to, but obviously that's kind of the goal. So what do you think about that? That's a great point, but it's funny because you see the guys that you think that the league would be attracted to, but then when they do the sideline interview and they show up to the lower third, you're like, wow, he is 28. Like geez, I forgot the Derek Roberson's. You know what I'm saying? Number seven for Tamino, the pass rusher for the battle hawks, those guys get after the quarterback on a consistent basis like man, the league wants pass rushers but then the age may age some of these guys out. You look at a J Sternberger who had that opportunity but didn't really get the opportunity and I hate that we're now seeing Alex Magoo move the receivers like what are we doing? You know what I'm saying? But you look at a sage sirat and how he's played at tight end, but then when you start to see the age and the time and if you're the NFL, you're kind of like, hey man, we have the luxury of getting young cheap talent. Why would we want a 28-year-old number three tied in or a 28-year-old situational edge guy when we can just get a 21-year-old situational edge guy and pay him next to nothing? I think that's why you haven't seen a lot of these guys make that jump or they'll get an opportunity in training camp but they won't stick because of that. So to answer a long-winded way to answer your question, it is hard because the guys that are performing really well, I thought we was going to get one last year with the kid from Arlington that I think it's Harvey or whoever had a lot of the sacks. He was a rookie, he was a part of the 2023 class and bypassed the whole process to go and play in the XFL was a killer on defense and didn't get a sniff in the NFL draft despite producing at a high level on a team that won a championship. So that kind of got me to thinking maybe this is what it's going to be for some of these guys. I want to get to the playoffs of here, but is that sustainable? Is that for a viewership for people that wanting to participate like hey, I want to play football two months out, three months out of the year and make 50 grand. I mean is that a sustainable thing here? Therein lies the rub, right? Because in order for that to happen, the salaries are going to have to increase, but in order for the salary increase viewership and you got the demand for the product has to increase, right? If you can get to a hundred K, people might just be like, you know what, man, this ain't bad man, I can do this. And then you may have to cap your, as much as we love to talk about expansion, 10 teams may be the max if you're going to pay everybody a hundred K. You know what I'm saying? So I think that ideally that should be the goal, increase the salary. So where it's a, I hate to say livable wage because 50,000 to some people may seem it may be a lot, but $50,000 in some areas may just seem like lunch money based off where you live. But I do feel like that's where it has to be. You have to create a second where people can earn a living just playing bulk because we know the NFL based off how they are and what they are, they have the luxury of bypassing what they've already bypassed, put it that way. Looking forward here, playoffs, like I said, most things in stone here, presuming Birmingham host here, the USFL conference, they're just head and shoulders above everybody it feels like. I know they had the close back and forth with the battle hawks and that came down to kind of the wire, but is it just them and the credit to them or are they doing things so much better than everyone else or are team's not catching up to them? How do you view where they've just, it's three years now. I mean this is kind of an incredible run they have going on with multiple quarterbacks and all sorts of turnover and everything else. What it shows you Reid is the value of one coaching and two continuity. They played together for the most part three years, a good portion of that football team combined with the coaching staff. So that continuity is almost like a cheat code. Like okay, we understand the system, we know what to expect and Skip HOS has shown, I know how to coach in this league under these situations and therefore we can make it work. And we've seen it with different quarterbacks, we've seen it with different pass rushers, we've seen it with different people in the secondary, but for the most part, a core of that team has been solid and I'd be interested to go back and look at had they had the same offensive line coach from 2022 to now, Yeah, they had Heinbach the first year and then because he's with Arlington now, so I don't know who their OC is Because their offensive line hasn't been an issue. But a lot of it, Matt Caskey has been on this team since the start the tackle out of Dartmouth who played with the Rams for a little bit. So the fact that they have a lot of guys that have played together in the spring, that's what we're looking for. Continuity. If we can get continuity like that, then I feel like every team can be a Birmingham stallions but with so much turnover. But that's why you have what you have in St. Louis, right? Even though this is just year two for them in this iteration of it, they've played together a lot. So the continuity is there, the passing game is work, the offensive line is better. The play callers, I tweeted this out back, I want to say maybe about a month ago. Gradkowski now just has a greater grasp of how to work with this offense and what he has. And so him and McCarran are even more so on the same page and we're last year. So I think the continuity is what's been king for the two teams that are really at the top. It's interesting here, just that you bring that up. So I'm going to butcher this gentleman's last name, John, Dave dig gmo. He was with the Giants back in 21 and then he's the first season here with that. So you had Heinbach and then someone else last year. So you've had three different offensive line coaches for Birmingham, so that's remarkable. Yeah, he was with the Giants back under Joe Judge and then he had Covid and Miss Scams and stuff. Anyway, interesting. Yeah, very interesting. But it shows you Skip Holtz once again, man, give him a statue. And you know what, I like that Skip Holtz, Anthony Beck and even Reggie Barlow, they've embraced the spring, they embraced the Spring League coach. So they are the perfect, I feel like champions for the league. They could have had especially Skip hols. I wonder if he had an opportunity, I remember he was a consultant, he he get calls and he's like, yeah, I'm comfortable. We'll see if how comfortable he's going to be if they cut salaries for the coaches. But for the most part, if we can get continuity with DPPs head coaches and some parts of the roster, then I think we'll see teams entering week nine, four and four. I do feel like Skip Holtz is kind of the big jock on campus right now. I feel like he's in a very comfortable world. I'm the man is I got my team, I know how to talk to everybody. I think Skip's probably living pretty comfortably. I mean I know he is got to do the other hub now in Arlington and all that, but I think he's pretty good for him if he wants to kind of continue doing this. That's what I buy it. And these coaches, listen man, these former head coaches at the collegiate level, they're not hurting for bread especially Stoops Stoop probably has that little piece of Oklahoma that no one knows is going on out there in the panhandle. He probably owns that for the stuff he's done, how long he's coached, how much money he's made. So these dudes are sitting pretty well. So in terms of that matchup here, stallions and panthers here, they've maintained, right? I mean, and everyone else have kind of fallen off, but I mean is it the one not, I hate that. Is it the one horse race here with the stallions or just the Panther 70 shot here? They do have a shot man. And you know why? Because fundamentally they're built the same way. Their oline and D-line is pretty doggone good, especially their D-line, their defensive front seven in Michigan. To put it even more specifically, they really can slow down the run game. They can get pressure, they impose their will when they hit you, Breland speaks and all these guys play a physical brand of football so they can match physicality with Birmingham. The question and what is going to come down to is one who's going to be at quarterback for Michigan, I feel like every other week somebody's starting new that somebody's banged up but they come in and play well, right? And we know they've lost West Hills for the season. Corbin has done a fantastic job running the football. They're going to need a secondary back to emerge because you can't just hand it to him 30 times and hope that's going to be your game plan. But who's going to be quarterback and who's going to help them make those plays that needs to be made benefit for them? We know they only have to cross a 50 to be in field goal range, so they can kind of play nip and tuck that way, but I think their defense and their run game will give them a chance against Birmingham. And it is about possessions. It's almost like you can't, we saw the Knicks go through this against the Pacers. It's in their name, Pacers, they set the pace. They are 24th in defense. Why are you trying to run with the Pacers, slow it down, expose their defense and make them play consistent basketball, but they want to go back and forth and now you're out the playoffs. So if you're Michigan, you got to look at this like, hey man, if we just limit the amount of possessions Birmingham has, we could raise the stakes on Birmingham to not make a mistakes. So we've seen this quite honestly at times throughout the season for Birmingham. They get bored, they're dominant, but then they'll go through a quarter where it just like they can't complete a pass or they'll have a mental drop here or somebody will just jump off size or just like they'll play with their food a little bit. And if you're Michigan, you got to try to exploit that and the best way to do that is shrink the ball game and play keep away and force them to be consistently, fundamentally sound all throughout the game. Yeah, I've been tracking this, the east coast bias with the Knicks and everything and it is been a lot in the Stephen Aver. It's been a lot this week about that. The past guys, I'm not an NBA guy, but that's been interesting. We don't, maybe we'll get the socks back here. And then the other side here with the battle hawks here looking really good, came down to the wire against the stallions. Braas is our team coming in. Obviously right now you've got Normandy, but they're talking, Garbers might be coming back here. What do you make of that? To me, that's a little bit, I think stallions steamroll the Panthers here, but what do you make of the XFL conference? That's another one where it's the same argument I made for the panthers and stallions I will make for the battle hawks and Brahmas. Because fundamentally, yeah, the Brahmas defense has done well. Yeah, you could run on them a little bit. Is St Louis disciplined enough to run the ball consistently on them or would they, Hey man, we got to throw it here because you got former quarterback as the OC talking to a veteran quarterback. And so that ego is there like, Hey man, we got to go out there and win with our arm. Like bro, you better run the ball because you can't, you know what I'm saying? And we know the quarterback situation over there in San Antonio. It is funny to see these guys be six and two or whatever their record is, I believe, and it's like, bro, y'all should be three and five. You know what I'm saying? They've eed out some. Houston comes to mind when you're guarding against, they have to get into the end zone, a three point play and you got your heels on the goal line and you backpedal why? How about you force them to make a tight window throw? Don't let them catch at the one and fall into the end zone, right? So they've been getting by, I don't want to call it luck, it is you have to really come back and skill talent, all that stuff. But they be getting lucky man. And so this will be a game where they can't make mistakes and you're going to require dormant to protect the ball because he tends to be, he puts the ball in harm's way and if it's Gober, is Gober playing particularly well before he got injured. So there's some questions about their passing game. We've seen them drop a lot of passes at receiver too, so it's not like they have those receivers that'll make you pay where you, oh, this guy may drop the ball on this play and then he may catch it on the next one. That type of inconsistency, you can't have that going into a game against a battle hawk. So if they're going to have a chance to win, if they win, that means they would've played their cleanest, most consistent, most fundamentally sound game of the year. And that's hard to say. I just think that that's a tougher battle in my opinion than the stallions and Panthers. Last thing here, real quick, just call your shot here. If it is the stallions and of the battle hawks at the dome here, we will be there. It should be Raus presuming the battle hawks are there, but do you think they have enough of what's your early predictions for potential championship game? I think the stallions can win that one by double digits. We saw them play with their food in the fourth quarter. What was that play called? And then you have the block, but just what we was talking about, that game should have been double digits Birmingham easily. But again, red zone playing with their food field goal field goal. Then at the end of the game you trying to run, you get a block punt of all situations, you're not ready for a block punt. So I feel like, I hate to use the cliche, they've been there before, but they have been there before and so they kind of understand the stakes are high at that game. And so I could say they could win that one by 10. I will say I am close to making the poll, but I don't want to destroy Twitter. Who is the most annoying fan base? The stallions are the battle hawks. It is getting to that point, but at least the stallions have won, right? I mean at least the stallions have won. So that's to me they at least, okay, giddy up and buck up and all. At least you guys have won where the Battle hawks are screaming like Beat the Sea Dragons last year at home and you're in the playoffs. We're not even going to point spreads and point differentials and all that stuff. So it should be exciting. Emory, I appreciate it. I will look forward to your elf involvement and everything else. It should be fun here. Listen, I'm looking forward to it man. I expect my first game is June 15th. I had the Barcelona Dragons at the Helvetic mercenaries, they changed their name this season, so that's a great name for a football team. But the Barcelona Dragons has the best quarterback in the ELF and he hadn't even taken a snap yet in the ELF and is yours truly from the University of Louisiana and Levi Lewis? So I'm already calling him as the best quarterback in the game. He should be playing in the UFL, but we'll see him in the ELF and dominate for the Barcelona Dragons. So I'm excited for that one. Well, I appreciate it. I tell you years ago we hitched our Reagan to the wrong. I'm like, oh, this USFL thing's going to and the accident like you ELF going into year four here and they're crushing it and selling good and everything else. So yeah, we hitched our ride wrong. So Emory, I appreciate it. Busy guy as always. Thanks so much. Appreciate re Well we have Ted here today. Ted's a little on the men, but he's taking the time to come on here. I appreciate it. Ted Wyman here. Winnipeg Sun. How are you doing sir? I'm doing great buddy. I always like it when the CFL season gets going. It's just that's my time of year. I love training camp. I love doing a job that you're sitting outside for most of the time, getting to know people, hearing great stories from guys that have great stories from all parts of this continent and even overseas. So that's a lot of fun. And Bummers had a very early preseason game already this year too, which is a little strange, but I guess I think it's good to get started a little earlier because the league really wants to move up the gray cup and rightly so. The better chance of doing every game played without a lot of snow and cold is the best plan you can have. And this year in BC anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter. Well, I was surprised. Yeah, I looked and I'm like, oh God, okay. I was like, are more, do I got to hit up some more people this week? I'm like, well no, the rest of the games are this weekend they had the early game. Any indication why? Just kind of getting things rolling? Well, the bombers start on the sixth, so if you're going to get in two games, you have to do it over three weeks for two games for each team. So someone had to start just one game on the Victoria Day holiday here and riders like to have that game because they think it's a good day to have a football game on a holiday in Regina. And so that started out pretty early and a lot of backup players played for the bombers and we learned a bit about them, so I think that was really good. But when they get out there for their second preseason game, which is on May 31st, we're going to see a lot more what the real bombers will look like. Yeah, pre-season always and especially the CFL and kind of work and a lot of the guys and yeah, I guess what major takeaways did you have from the preseason game? They won right against Saskatchewan. I know it's preseason, but They didn't win. And really after the, so they didn't even start calleros. They didn't start a lot of guys that you would deem as regular starters. So the guys that were out there as starters, even those players really only played a quarter and they were in pretty good shape. Then Chris Reer was doing a good job. He was doing everything that he did the last time he was here running the football, he was seven for eight, passing for I think 65 yards, three runs for 25. It's typical Chris Reer. And so I think people are happy to see that. He still looks like a guy who was a good CFL quarterback. He gave it a pretty good run in the NFL too, but just didn't quite get there. And then when their second and third quarterbacks came in for that game, it was a little uglier and when a lot of lower on the depth chart guys as well, guys who'd never been in a game together communicating, et cetera, it didn't go so well. Eric Barrier came in as a backup, the first choice at backup because I think that's the player they want to see most. I really think he's the most likely to be heading out of town soon anyway. But he had a horrible game, which didn't help. Two terrible interceptions, barely got any offensive yards at all and just nothing went well for him. But Trey Wilson, Terry Wilson, the other quarterback who has a nice pedigree, looked really good. He played well. He threw for over a hundred yards, threw a touchdown pass. It was late, but nonetheless it was, and he looked pretty calm and cool in there. So that's probably going to be your third street quarterback here in Winnipeg and a guy that I think it looks like could probably step in and help them if any of the one or two get hurt. In terms of Reer, is this a bit, I mean is this a fan move? Is this, you think he's still got a lot of juice in this tank here? I mean I know people were really excited when they posted all that stuff in the off season. Well, he came to them, man, he decided he wanted to keep his journey going forward in the CFL, still got lots of years in him for the game and he loved his time here in Winnipeg. So he came to them and they did show interest right away, but then when Word got out in the league that Streiber was definitely coming back. There was a few other teams that started to throw their hat in the ring and basically what they served to do is get the salary bumped up. The bombers thought it was a pretty good deal for them because they're going to pay this guy non-starter money and he was willing to do it. He made a lot of money during his time in the NFL, so that's kind of good on him. And eventually they got the deal done and he's sure enthusiastic. I'll tell you, you're losing leaders from this team, right? You're losing JaMarcus. He's one of the biggest leaders this team's had in a long time. He is a longtime defensive captain, Adam Big Hill's going on the six game injury list, which I don't know how long he's going to be out, but going to be starting without the veteran presence that's been in the middle since 2018. They're going to have to find some leadership in this group for sure. And I think that Mike Oche would tell you that Chris St. Traveler's the best bet to make up for what they're lacking because just a great leader, a great motivator In terms of, I guess weight on the chip on the shoulder here coming into the season. Winnipeg, are you sensing a lot of that? I mean just after last season or what's kind of the mindset of the locker room? Oh, chip on the shoulder for sure. It is pretty tough, man. This team could legitimately be four time in a row. Great Cup Champions. I think anyone who watched the last two Great Cups could say Winnipeg absolutely could have or should have won those games. And so to lose last year to Montreal was heartbreaking. They felt they were a much better team and they blew it basically. And so obviously they come in with that chip on the shoulder that they want to get back there one more time and prove it. And that if you can get three out of the last five, that's still in dynasty territory, isn't it? Yeah, you're kind of stretching out the definition, but I agree, I agree a hundred Percent well territory, so there's a chance there, but I don't see the same level of quality of team right now that they had last year or the year before. As it goes, they've lost some really good players and they're replacing them in camp. It's what you're supposed to do. You can't just assume that a rookie is going to be bad. There's a good chance that rookie's going to be good. Not long ago, the bombs brought in, Dalton shone as a number 23 on the depth chart guy and he ended up making the team became rookie of the year. He's been one of the best receivers in the league for two years and managed to get him back. That's going to be really helpful. And they've still got veterans in the right places like Willie Jefferson Big Hill when he comes back. Brandon Alexander at Safety when he comes back, he hasn't practiced yet. And then of course you've got arguably the best quarterback in the league in Zach, ROS, and I'd say definitely the best running back in the league in Brady Oliveira. And they love their receiving core. That's still pretty consistent. They're just basically looking for one guy. And as I already mentioned, you only have to look so far as Dalton shone to realize that sometimes you can find a gem and have somebody that really impacts your team. And that's what happened with Shone. And of course they'll look, hope that that'll happen again With the Avera thing. And I know he was kind of testing the market, right? And I think bc, I'm trying to, because this was ages ago, I got a whole UFL season here, I'm trying to remember it back to, because that to me would've been a really game changing signing for a lot of teams. I mean it thought with him being back now and happy with that, do you sense that if you had gone to bc, I mean that's turning the tides in a big way, Dude, I would not even be able to remember which league I were covering if I were you. There's been so many evolutions there, but Brady loves Winnipeg, he loves representing Winnipeg, he loves being a huge part of the Blue Bummer organization and it is what he wanted all along, but he wasn't going to let them walk all over him. He wasn't going to let them just say, well, you love Winnipeg, we love you, so why don't you just take 200 grand or whatever. He wanted more. He wanted to get two 50. That was his target. He got offered more than that. He got offered two 50 from one team, I think, and 2 75 from another, and he chose to come back here for, I think it was something like 2 36, still the highest paid running back in the league and rightly so. When you're the most outstanding Canadian, you were the runner up to the most outstanding player in the league. You deserve that. And now he's just in his happy place, but he hasn't even practiced yet. He's been injured, so they didn't put him on the six games, so I'm assuming that's okay. They got a little time. They really need to evaluate players this year that they don't know. So they had a full week before their first game. Now they have a full week before a day off and then they have a full week to prepare for their last exhibition game or preseason game. And I imagine we're going to see Brady back next week, Demsky too probably, but it's hard to say for sure. We just haven't gotten much of an update on their health situations In terms of the west here, I know that Edmonton's making the big swing with McLeod and everything else, and I mean Calgary made the playoffs and kind of everything, but to me the road kind of goes through bc, right? And obviously a lot of pressure on them this year with the Gray Cup and everything else. Do you sense that? What do you sense of just the rest of the west here, generally speaking? I don't know about pressure. I mean it's interesting because it is a home great cut for the lions and man, won't that be fun? You can wear your lion shirt everywhere. Yeah, you have a situation there where you've got a chance to win at home and you really want to do that. The bombers want to do it next year. They really, really want to do that. They want to keep building this momentum that's gone really well in DC in terms of attendance last year and the great atmosphere outside the stadium and all that kind of stuff. So they've loaded up a lot. They lost a couple of guys too, but I think I would pretty much peg them as first place in the division to be honest. I'm not sure there's pressure there. Just think there's a lot of desire there to make sure they finish first in the West and get through to the Great Cup, but second in the West would be good too. And then Winnipeg I think is right in the mix. I feel like they're going to be a drop off there, but I think they've been, they haven't lost very many games the last two years. So if it was a drop off, is that 12 and six? Is that 11 and seven? Those are both going to be good enough to make the playoffs and I think they're going to recognize that just because one of the two times they did win the Gray Cup, they came from third place. So it's not that necessary to completely kill yourself trying to win the division when you end up not winning the Great Cup. Saskatchewan I think is my third favorite in the West. I think they've got a pretty good team, good depth at Quarterback Man. We saw a tiny bit of Trevor Harris and Mason Fine. Sha Patterson was outstanding. He had a tremendous game and they threw Jack Cone in there as well. So they had four different guys in there, but they all handled themselves pretty well and I really was impressed with what Shaef Addison did, so I could see it being Harris. Oh, they also had Antonio Pipkin in there, I would think him and Harris, the original idea would've been maybe Harris and Mason fine and Antonio Pipkin, but I think she, Patterson has made a great case to be one of the three guys on that team. Former number one USFL 2022 draft pick there. Sha Hatterson came in and was not Great. Those numbers, Huh? You pull those numbers out. Yeah, so there you go. Last question here. I won't keep you too long. I know, like I said, you're on the mend here. Biggest questions you have here for the bombers to figure out here in the next what, two and a half weeks here before the season kickoff? Yeah, who's going to be the fifth receiver? I thought it was going to be KJ Hill, but apparently he just wasn't very healthy and so they let him go. I like Myron Mitchell this week. I liked Aaron Crookshank this week. I think they really want to get a guy in there that can, maybe there's room for two receivers because one of them is going to be the primary kick returner and the other one's going to be the number five receiver in that lineup. So that's a pretty good battle spot. The defensive line, Doug Brown said before the broadcast the other day that that was the biggest area of concern for him and he's a all-star Hall of Fame defensive lineman, so I think he knows, but they've got Willie Jefferson and then they got Cam Lawson and Jake Thomas there as veterans, but then who's going to handle the inside And that'll probably be an American and who's going to handle the outside opposed to Jefferson that is up in the air. And I think the candidates are Celeste and Haba who was here last year and Chauncey Rivers, he's got some NFL experience and he looked really good in his first game. And Taiwan Garbe who was here last year as well a bit, he got a sack last game and he looked really good. So that's pretty important. Who's going to start a middle linebacker if Adam Bake Hill can't go, nothing jumps off the page for me completely there, but they're going to have to make sure they get somebody competent in there. They really rely on him. So that's going to be an interesting one. Defensive back. Will Tyrell Ford get a chance to start in the CFL? Is a big question for me. I think he's got a really good shot of playing at Field Halfback or maybe not field halfback, but Field Corner I should say. So that would be really exciting I think. And it would be even more exciting if Edmonton hadn't not given Tre Ford his opportunity and signed McLeod Bethel Thompson. So I'd love to see those two guys playing against She Feather in a game and it would be a lot of fun. Real quick last thing because Dave Campbell's going to be on this week as well, but are you just baffled by this straightforward thing with McLeod? We all hear stateside just can't get over it, but I'm just curious your thoughts real quick and I'll let you go, I promise. Well, it just doesn't make a ton of sense to me. How are you going to develop Trade four? But Jones doesn't want to be in a developing position. He wants to be a contender for the playoffs right now and they might be. And MBT is a good quarterback. He showed what he could do with Toronto a couple of years ago. They got great receivers there that could make a real difference. But I hope they give some reps to Trey Ford. I think there's a good opportunity to put him in there to just run the football, use Trey Ford like the bombers used Chris Reer and then that might work pretty well. But as long as nobody's taken away this guy's opportunity, I think he looked last year like he was on the fast track to becoming a star and I don't like that now he's had a little of that shine taken off. Well there you go Ted. Go get some rest. I appreciate you making the time today means a lot and we'll get you on here when you're back up to full speed. I appreciate it. You got it buddy. Thank you very much. Enjoy the season. Well I'm excited here. Familiar face probably in better Spirits. And I think the last time we talked you was like a therapy session about the Elks at the end of the last season here, but we have Dave Campbell here at the City of Buzz, but probably not with CFL more NHL right now. But how are you doing sir? I'm doing great and you are correct Reid, and it's just nice to see you. I know you're a big Oiler fan, not No, you're right. I mean it's Fever pitch here. Just a great series against the Vancouver Canucks and the Dallas Stars. It's interesting because the last time these two played, I think it was 2003, so that's 21 years ago, there's a lot of people that are oiler fans that wouldn't remember really the Oilers and Stars rivalry, let alone the five Stanley Cups from 84 to 90. Right? So there's a lot of, for a lot of Oiler fans and someone from myself, it's just kind of cool to see these two teams meet again. It's great. Well, no and so mean, first off, and I was just reading, we had fights at training camp, we'll talk about here, but I want, because the Elks are in a really tricky situation here where the last couple seasons in here, I mean even if they do an even deeper run here with the Oilers and then the Elks come in trying to get those dollars from the fans, what's your thoughts on that? I mean, I know it's good for the station and everything that way, but if fans trying to get these people back onto the Edmonton Elks bandwagon, Well, I think it's mean. It's out of their control. They can't do anything about it. And I think you have to enjoy the ride, support the Oilers. I think there are a lot of fans that are fans of both the Oilers and Elks, but no question, does this maybe affect the bottom line initially for the Elks might? I mean, we will see what the attendance is on Saturday and how well the rider fans travel to a preseason game in Edmonton. But yeah, I mean there's nothing they can do about it. And it's possible that they're, both their preseason games will be inside the confines of a conference final because the game on the 31st against the Lions in Vancouver is potential game five. And there's potential that there's a Stanley Cup final that they have to compete with the Oilers being in it, but there's nothing they can do about it. And it's probably, again, it's just circumstantially. It's not a great situation because they're coming off of another bad season with some optimism coming into this year. But I would say extremely cautious optimism as well. But I think you just be supportive of the team down the street and they're supportive of them as well when they'll get going and you just enjoy the ride. There's nothing else you can do. What's the vibe right now? I mean, obviously Alex have their first preseason game this weekend with Winnipeg and Saskatchewan had theirs earlier this week, but what's the mood? And we will get into this fight kind of stuff, but that's always just kind of funny, salacious, whatever, but what is the general vibe here going into the season? Well, I think there's a lot of intrigue about McLeod, Bethel Thompson coming in as a new starter, Trey Ford now the number two quarterback. There are a lot of Argo flavor on the team with Curley Gittens coming over and Jevon Lee and Boris Beatty and others. And the ownership situation as well. The 75th anniversary. I mean that first week Reed before the season opener, it's almost like another home game for this organization because so many legends and greats are coming back and they're going to do their annual dinner again, which is usually in late September, early October, but it's going to be two days before the home opener. And I think there's a good reason for that because you want to have it celebratory before the season starts instead of, okay, potentially another bad season and oh, come out to our dinner and people are kind of turned off by the team. Right. Yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of pressure on Chris Jones to win this year, and that doesn't necessarily mean Great Cup, but to show that this is a team that is finally ready to win, ready to take the next step to make the playoffs, to maybe get to a division final. But I think there's a lot of cautious optimism and there is some pessimism of course. I mean this team has to earn their stripes, I think, and we'll see. I mean there's things like the Upper Bowl being closed, which is unfortunate, but I think we all understand that probably it was a move that had to be made and hopefully fans give them a reason, the Elks to open up that upper deck at certain points of the season as well. So yeah, it's a combination of excitement, but I think there's a lot of, okay, I just don't want to see more losses again, we got to see something different now This has to, and we've talked the slow build with Chris Jones over the last few years. I mean, this has to be right, make or break. It's all on the cards on the table here, right? Yeah. I don't think he's foolish to think that it's not any other way. This is make or break here, you win or you're done. And I think he realizes that, and I think every football season you think that way, but at the same time, when you have a team that really, you go back to the 2019 season, the middle of the 2019 season, even though they made an East final that year, we haven't seen a lot of wins. Even 2018 was a struggle at nine and nine, so this is a fan base that is starving for a winner from their football teams. But I agree, this is it for Chris Jones. If we have another season we have seen the last two years, he's not going to be back for a fourth year of that contract. For sure. Well, and just even where we were talking about the Oilers here, and obviously it's different but similar fan bases and haven't seen a lot of screenshots posted of when it was the Vancouver, their side of the playoff tickets and how expensive they were and all of that. And I have to imagine if I'm an Edmonton person and I've just spent a lot of money or either going to the games or watching the games support and then you roll into the season, there's only so much, and we deal with this with all the spring football all the time, and people only have so much bandwidth and money to do all these things. And if I've just supported the successful hockey team, it just really does put the pressure on for that way as well, only so much money to go around. Yeah, absolutely. And it's tough right now. And even the Oilers, they had trouble selling out playoff games. It was mostly sold out. It was 99% sold out. But yeah, there's only so much money to go around, and I think the Elks have done a good job of coming up with price points to bring people in that at an affordable rate. And I think they don't have a choice really. And there's always the debate of whether you should do that, how much, what is too low basically. And again, when I say I hear people say the CFL is expensive, I look at them weirdly and I go find out what an oiler ticket costs and nothing against the Oilers, it's the National Hockey League. I get it. But you are right though. You get kind of consumer fatigued and well, how much more money do I need should I spend here? Right. But yeah, so we'll see what happens. I mean, I'm cautiously kind of walking into the season and kind of waiting to see what happens, right? But attendance wise, we'll see. But the Elks have done a lot of work to try and bring people in at an affordable rate. Last question here about non-football stuff. We'll get to that I promise. Looking at your article here with the loss kind of from the meetings coming out and then in terms of ownership and all of that stuff, any sense, does that heighten or damper expectations on any of that stuff? I know that that's outside of your purview, but just thoughts generally on that? No, I don't think so. I mean, at one point they had 20 non-disclosure agreements signed with various people or groups. To me, that's remarkable that an organization that has struggled financially and has struggled in the public eye over the last few years has garnered that much interest. That's impressive. So even going through a name change, there's some power in the brand, still a lot of power. So now they're down to the short straws and they've really whittled that list down. There's a mixture of local and not local and that sort of thing, and it should be all wrapped up sometime in the summer, I believe. And I know that the board chair, Tom Richards was putting a lot of runway to this and he said by the end of the 24th season, but for sure by the start of the 25 season, we'll see private ownership. So I don't think the results on the field are going to affect the ownership, and I think that they're pretty confident that they're going to have a good group to come in and inject some cash and hopefully get this franchise in the right direction. Football here now, and this is coming from, we are all big MacCleod, Bethel, Thompson fans, all of us and kind of tracking his career, but we got to talk this straightforward and everything because we saw last year the spark he gave. And not only that, but we kind of curtailed at the end of Ted Wyman's interview leading into this. And just even just from a tray forward developmental standpoint, what does this do? I mean thoughts, and again, big fan of McLeod and I get that this is a make or break gear for the Elks, but I'm really curious your thoughts on this situation. Well, I mean, let's go back to last year. Trey Ford finally gets to start a game in the ninth game of the season and then starts the rest of the way, but goes through a stretch where went four and two under him, and if you look at even further or deeper, they went, they won four or five games and got themselves kind of back into a playoff race. Then the final four games happened and they faced the four best teams in the league, the BC Lions, the Toronto Argonauts, the Montreal Hollows, and then the Winnipeg Lu Bombers. And I thought Trey Ford kind of came back down to earth, and it's not all his fault, of course. I mean there are other factors involved here, but from the quarterback specifically, we saw some really dynamic things from him and I think it really defenses and they couldn't handle what he was bringing. And then all of a sudden they play the BC Lions on September 22nd, the start of that four straight losses to end the season. It's a home game, and the lions adjust to Trey Ford by sending defensive backs this way. Okay, fine. We're just going to get speedy defensive backs to run right at you and to trap you and confuse you. And it worked, right? Look, Trey Ford is exciting, dynamic, athletic, but really raw is a starting quarterback, I believe. Now there's an argument, I've heard this as well, what if Trey Ford started earlier or started week one, which I don't think was realistic, but what if he started week one in 23? Could they have made the playoffs? Could they have found a few more wins and could they have made the playoffs? Because remember, Calgary made the playoffs with six wins, so all you needed was seven. So you got to find three wins somewhere. Could they have been found? I think there's a good argument to that. But you go into this year where the pressure to win is so immense, this is make or break for Chris Jones and a lot of people within the organization from a football side of things. Can you really trust Trey Ford with that at this point? Is it fair to Trey Ford? No. If circumstances were different, might be more fair for Trey Ford to take a flyer on him, but you bring him Acle, Bethel Thompson, who is an experienced quarterback who's been part of two great cups, he was behind Ricky Ray for one in 17, and then he won in 22. I know he didn't play well in the Great Cup game, but he was very good in that season in 21. He was a full-time starter as well. And we saw him in spots in 18 and 19 as well. But he really came into his own in 21. Then he left for the USFL because his wife is really big up in Marvel and he plays in the USFL and look, it's the USFL. I know a lot of people. It's the USFL, it's the USFL, it's a pro football league. And he played very well and then he got the itch to come back. And I can tell you, I mean Chris Jones and Roy Simon had their eye on McLeod after the USFL season, but that's a lot of football for one man to play, right? And I think McLeod comes in and we've seen the leadership that he brings. We've seen the fact that he talks to everyone, he talks to the other quarterbacks, he talks to the running backs, the receivers offensive line. The defense takes notice of him, and that's good to see. His mechanics are good, his decision making is usually good. He's going to make mistakes every quarterback does. For Trey Ford, I think this is important for him to take a step back and to learn from a veteran how to prepare, how to read defenses, how to lead that, all those sort of things. Trey was upset when McLeod was signed. I don't blame him. Of course, when you're told you're going to be number one going into camp at the end of the 23 season and then they changed, basically changed their tune. Management does. You're going to be upset. He wants the football. If he wasn't upset, I'd have more concerns about him. But McLeod got on the phone right away and started building that relationship with Trey and they talked constantly and you could see it in camp that Trey and McLeod have a really good relationship and Trey is learning a lot. And I think his camp has been pretty solid. McLeod is far and away the best quarterback there, and I think it gives the Elks more than a punchers chance to have a good season. It is interesting. Yeah. And no McLeod, I think he was undefeated in the USFL until he came on the show and then I think they lost Three. It was you, I think it was. Well, so Ben Holmes famously no, showed the show and then went on and won a gray cub in the CFL, and then McLeod came on the show and then, so it's kind of the inverse relationship that way. But because to me and absolutely and the way that you phrased that is really great where if Trey had started earlier and what ifs and all that, and there's certainly no ill will towards McLeod coming in. I mean, everyone wants to play and lookout, but I mean McLeod be, Thompson is two years younger than me. I mean, this isn't exactly like a spring chicken here, but to me, besides Nathan work being Nathan Wark, what made that BC Lions team so cool was we could spend so much money on everybody else because Nathan Wark was making a penny. And here you could have had TRE four and his rookie deals ended up here. And so I just surround that where they dump so much money in McLeod. That to me is the concern where it's not like we're getting them for what you say, like five 50. I mean it's a big contract, right? It's big. Yeah, absolutely. So they had to make decisions in other areas, and I think it affected AC Leonard wanted a lot of money to come back and they couldn't do it. They let him go, they let Ed Ganey go, they let Adam Konar go. He was making a good coin as well. Yeah, it does affect other areas of the football team, but it's the pressure to win and they trust him and they've worked with him because a lot of this coaching staff, including Chris Jones, including the offensive coordinator, Jerry Jackson and Marcus Howell, who's the receiver's coach, who has a big hand in the offense as well, they all know him and McLeod knows them, and there's a trust there. So I think that's why they went out and did it. Looking here, like I said, first preseason game coming up this weekend, and then you've got a couple more weeks at camp, what are the big kind of questions you're looking at here? I mean besides obviously McLeod, but anything else team wise for that or how they protect him or anything else that you're going to have your eye out for? Yeah, definitely the offensive line for sure. Now, McLeod gets the ball out fast, which the O line will like, so that's going to help the O line for sure. But beyond that, I mean McLeod's limited when you compare 'em to Trey, right? So it'll be interesting to see how McLeod handles some pressure if the riders are able to send some blitz and see what McLeod is able to handle. And McLeod's going to want to know what he can handle. I look at the deal line. The deal line has all kinds of question marks. Robert KCI has come in former first round pick in the NFL with the Arizona Cardinals and has been underwhelming in his pro career, especially in the NFL. He's come in hungry and determined and has been a force on the inside. Jamon Pelley who's had an interesting camp where they spent a lot of time with Jamon, trying to have him more in shape, but they still see him as a starter and we'll see what happens there. Elliot Brown's coming in to kind of be that AC Leonard replacement. Noah Curtis came in and he's 30 pounds heavier, one of these American Canadians. And to me it's all about the D-line. And after that, the secondary, you got Kai Gray coming back West nominee for most outstanding rookie, Darius Bratton's back. Marcus Lewis in a limited time had foreign receptions before being hurt. And they look like they're more confident, but they've lost leaders on that team. Like I said, gaining Konar, resident traded lender, not brought back. You got Purefoy and you got Niles Morgan as your established leaders on that team. So it'll be interesting to see what happens with this young defense. The return game Jevon leak is going to be exciting, but they got the Antes Alexander who had that kickoff return for a touchdown in the final game for the Elks in Winnipeg, and you got Malik Flowers back and we're going to see them in the receiving core too, because Dylan Mitchell's not going to play on Saturday. So can an American receiver maybe bump Dylan Mitchell off the pedestal? Right? And he's coming off a tough year too. But for me, that D line is going to be very interesting to see how they perform because that's probably the biggest question mark for the team. I think the whole defense is a big question mark and they have to be a lot better than they were last year. But no doubt, the D line, it starts up front and it'll be very interesting to see how they can handle the game situation. I was just tracking, I guess I hadn't realized that Rena got traded there over to the Argo. So yeah, that's a big, I think they had sent him on the show here a couple of seasons ago, but certainly, right. He had some kind of injury stuff where he was hurting people. I mean, he's played very well. I mean that's definitely a big standout loss there. Anything else from you? I know you're bubbling it with excite me here for the oil ish night. Anything else about the elk before we get out of here? Yeah, well you don't want to talk about the fights. Oh yes, we got to talk about the good. Yes. Well I, because I then, yes. So what happened with the big kerfuffle here? I saw the article read down, had it up here. Yeah, was altercation wise it was a little more than what you normally expect. Usually it's two guys, one on O, one on D, they don't like each other, so they tussle for a few minutes here or a few seconds. And yeah, there it is. Love it. Great headline. And this was a little bit different. You could see that this was brewing there. It was a 12, 1 12 drill. It was between the A group offense and defense. And you could tell there was some tension there and then all of a sudden it just boiled over. And I am trying to remember who the principal people were. I can't really remember because everyone just kind of got in there. But Jevon Lee ended up throwing a helmet, not at anyone, but just threw it open field. And Pier Foy was getting at some people and some other members of defense and the offense, and Chris Jones put 'em all to the sidelines and made him run with wise of the field a few times and had to change the whole schedule. Or he chose to change the whole schedule, practice schedule. So he wasn't happy. But at the end of the day, it's 11 days in now, it's 12. They haven't played anyone yet but themselves and they're sick of each other. They were sick of each other by day two or three last week. And people got to realize in the CFL in any league, I mean training camp's, grueling, it's 6:00 AM to almost 10:00 PM at night. It's brutal. It's long days. It's basically hotel to facility, back to hotel, sleep as much as you can and go back and they need to play against someone else. So I'm not overly concerned about it at all. I remember one year, it was oh seven or oh eight when Danny Macha was the head coach here in Edmonton. I think in the first seven days of camp there were six fights and there was real Donny Brooks and just real concern. And there was a lot of tension and a lot of bad feelings. And I don't think Danny handled it well. Chris Jones has done a good job of handling that stuff. It's like you get that out of your system now because in the regular season you can't do this in the playoffs, you can't do this. And I think that's important to note too, when the days are long and your emotions are fray and your body hurts and your mind is tired and all you are is playing against your teammate, and that's another thing about campus, you're teammates, but during camp sessions you're not, you're enemies. You're enemies. It can get to you and get it out of the way now because when the regular season comes, we don't really see that. So I think camp is really good at getting all that flushed out, but you just got to be careful. The line has to be, it's a very thin line between, it's no big deal to, boy, we got a problem here. So I think Chris Jones knew that and he dealt with it yesterday. I'll tell you, I think you guys made a tweak last year. These jerseys are fire. I really like these. Right? They tweak. Tweak a little bit. I do. Do you not like them? Some people don't like them because of the white numbers. Oh, I like it. I think that's really clean. Yeah, I can't invest it. I have too many jerseys investments I can't get back. I have my one BC Lions jersey that someone sent me. I can't get in any more leagues. My wife will divorce me. Well Dave, I appreciate it. Like I said, you certainly have a fan with me with the Oilers because Stars took us out last year, so I have no really interest in that. And Anthony Miller covers them and he can just go to heck. And so I appreciate it. Like I said, taking time to come on. Hopefully the season starts better last year. We can get you back on here doing non therapy sessions. But no, I mean I think people are excited, at least mla, at least it's a story. I mean it's a big story to track in the west. And so I think if nothing else, they should attract fans for the first few weeks because of that. No question. Yeah, it's good to talk. Alex. This is the best time of the year to talk about the football team you cover because everyone's o and o, right And optimism is highest. So hopefully the next time we talk we're talking about good things. That'll be good. Dave Campbell, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thanks Reed. Talk to you later buddy. Huge special thanks to all of our guests for coming on today. Emory Hunt, taking time out of his busy week here at Covering Giants training camp, and then obviously Ted Wyman coming on, taking time on the men. Dave Campbell busy with Edmonton, the Oilers in the Stanley Cup playoffs and everything else. So really appreciate everyone coming on this week. And like I said, it is all the collection of voices and people taking the time out of their day to come on. That's what makes this program whether this, I really appreciate that. I hope you guys enjoy. And now drum roll please. It is time to announce the rules here to get involved in the 3,500 subscriber giveaway. Two free tickets to the UFL championship game. And then I have a cavalcade of Royal Retros Custom Jerseys here. I'll show them all off here. But here's the rules to enter. Remember big grand prize, two free tickets to the UFL championship game. I've already purchased them. You'll be sitting with the professor Andrew Murray. I'm going to try to be in the press box just to save some cash here on the back end. We have flights and hotels and all that stuff on my end to get to the championship game. But two free tickets. It's like row M behind the XFL bench here at the Battle Hawk Dome. Basically it was the best seats that were available today once kind of the pre-sale wasn't, we didn't know if we were going to hit the thing and all that stuff. So two tickets, I think there are one 10 a piece. So it's like the best, basically the best tickets you can get at this point. Basically seats 5, 6, 7, whatever RO m you'll be, like I said with the professor Andrew Murray. Hopefully he guys' get along. Andy was posting funny gifts about that, him and the Joker makeup. And Andy's good to talk to at a football game. I think you'll have fun. So that's the main gift, that's the main prize. We will announce everything next week so you'll have time to figure out all that stuff. But like I said, make sure you're subscribed, get involved with all of that stuff and get you got to be subscribed to win. That's grand prize number one. I'll tell you how to enter. And then all the other ones, I have a bunch of these royal retro jerseys. I kind of forgot. Dustin had sent me all of these and it was right at the start of, I think there was some Jersey merch issues last year with the XFL and I was like, oh, I better not talk about these right now. But now these are all custom. Dustin doesn't sell XFL 2020 jerseys. And I have A-U-S-F-L one here as well. But if you want any of these, I think they're all S size large, but we have a Jordan Temu look at this. Battle Hawks Battle Hawks Jersey XFL 2020. This is hot. It's kind of hard to do when I'm sitting, but hopefully you get the idea. Brand new tags still on. Jordan Temu, battle Hawks Jersey. We have old Reliable, we got Brandon Silvers here, Seattle Dragons, Jersey number 12. Again, Brandon Silvers here and I can certainly post photos of any of these if you guys want 'em. I posted one on Twitter. We got old PJ Walker here, Houston Roughnecks, old school here, XFL jersey. Hopefully the mic's picking all this stuff up. XFL. And then we have A-U-S-F-L. We have a Kante Turpen, New Jersey General's Jersey. This is hot. This is a hot one. Excuse me, I broke my microphone. This is a hot one as well. Even Mike Mitchell said he's interested in that one. Maybe Mike wants to win. Certainly there's no rules or regulations against that. So this is what we're going to do. Like I said, make sure you're subscribed. And how you enter is comment on the video. You do one comment per each item. We're trying to, let's boost the algorithm, boost the comment. So if you want the Jersey comment, want the jersey, which one want the Brandon Silvers jersey, PJ Walker, Jordan kte. Turman want the jersey? And then if you want the ticket, do a comment for that. So if you wanted to enter into all five, you would have five comments like what? And then I'll go through, we'll do kind of a collection of everything here. The Thursday night before this will be all legit. I'll randomize all of this. I know it's a big time gift here, a lot of money going into the grand prize. And then I'll pay for shipping for the jerseys for ING else. And then we can etransfer the tickets. But comment, like I said, if you want all five, you would have five comments each one that you want. If you only want the Brandon Silvers one, you only want the whatever, comment that, and I'll search through and be able to kind of filter all the comments and keywords that way in the YouTube. But again, remember we got these four awesome jerseys here and then the two free tickets to the UFL championship game. So I think when we get to 4,000 hopefully, and maybe we could do a season ticket pack next year. I don't know. Let me know also in the comments, what do you want for that? What should be the next gift? Because spoiler, they're supposed to be the pre-game kickoff. Last year we were supposed to give these tickets away. So championship game tickets, the jerseys submit what should be of hopefully lots of comments on this drive, the algorithm share. We really appreciate that. A lot of money going into all this, giving all this stuff away. So appreciate that. But you comment which ones you want. And then also then separately, let me know what should be the next giveaway. Happy to do a two ticket pack season next year. Maybe we get 4,000 subscribers. Yeah, it would be 4,000 subscribers before the next UFL season. That would be pretty cool. CFL stuff's harder to do giveaways just because some of the international and all that stuff. But we always support our CFL friends as well. But it's a little bit easier to do the U-F-L-X-F-L-U-S-F-L stuff. So like I said, appreciate everyone. Lots of time here, energy, everyone watching, and all the guests, everything else. Be subscribed, stay subscribed, get subscribed. Anyone that's subscribed, if I could say that enough here by the end of this video, by the end of the week, you're all eligible. As long as you comment, just let me know. There's no restrictions of any of that stuff. We'll send that over, Mike Mitchell, Anthony Miller, get your comments in everyone else. Even Andy could win a jersey. Andy could win a jersey, I could bring it in and he could be aware it to the championship game. So anyway, we'll see you guys next week, like to subscribe, but take care and thanks again.

UFL Week 8 Results + Reactions! Winner and Losers From UFL Week 8!!

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast Reid here. Happy Monday coming off of UFL Week eight, a big episode last week talking expansion and everything else. Got a lot of new subscribers. If you're checking out one of these for the first time, we're standing by the professor. Andrew Murray is coming home from work. Give him a few minutes to get logged on here. So if you have any questions, comments, help me out here, fill a little time until we get Andy on. I got some news and notes and then we can talk attendance and everything while we get Andy on playoff. Matchups are set. F as well fan. We'll talk about that as well. Big show coming up on Friday, getting that all set up as well. Excited to tell you guys about all that. Jenna checking in as well. Good evening, Southern California. Appreciate that. Mariners here at Yankee Stadium, taking on the Yankees down currently two zero. So thoughts and prayers there as we get set for that. I know Paul is a former co-host, Paul watching this well and giving me a crap via text, so it should be fun. But appreciate everyone if you, like I said, new subscriber checking this out like 40% of the people that check out these streams aren't subscribed, which is baffling to me. We're trying to get to 3,500 subscribers before the UFL championship game, which is taking place in St. Louis. If you get us up there to 3,500 can give away two free tickets. So you could sit with a professor, Andrew Murray if you would like as well, if that incentivizes you, if that doesn't, but like and subscribe. I think we're like 13 away from getting there. We did a big drive, a big drive campaign, 12 away, a big drive campaign here, getting up with our big expansion talk with John Lewis Sports last week, so appreciate that. Yeah, if you're checking this out like and subscribe, we did. If you don't want to go to the game, if you're not interested in that, it would be very much appreciated for all of that. Previewing the show here. Coming up Friday, a big show, we are going to have a Emory Hunt joining us. The playoff picture set could be a little sleepy here in the last two weeks of the UFL season, so we are going to have Emory on Emory Hunt coming up this Friday to preview the UFL playoffs and the potential championship, get Emory's thoughts on the season and all of that. We had Emory on for the pre-game show here before the kickoff. Haven't had Emory on since. So really excited to hear from Emory, get his thoughts and then we'll do a big deep dive. I made my own playoff bracket because that's not even out yet for the UFL, so graphic design is my passion. Spent a lot of time this morning putting that all together, so that should be fun. And then CFL pre-season kicked off today. We had Winnipeg and Saskatchewan, I think here I had it on for a few minutes. CFL plus running around, going to have Ted Wyman coming up on the show. We're recording talking blue bombers and then trying to get a couple other CFL guests on this week as we are getting onto that. So if you are excited for the CFL coverage as well. Well, I of subscribes, we'll have that along with Emory for the Friday show. One other thing to note, yeah, foosball is talking about this. We added a couple more members here, a dollar a month subscribe, but helps support the channel. Super appreciate that. I think it's 99 cents and I think I get a quarter of that or whatever YouTube needs, but makes me feel good. Makes the analytics feel good and certainly set for all of that. So yeah, you hit the join button there, get subscribed, that's great. That's free. That doesn't cost you anything. Get us up to the 3,500 that just looks good for the numbers. But yeah, if you want to support give a dollar a month, that would be awesome as well. Let's check out the comments here. Like I said, Andy coming home and then we'll talk attendance here if we need to before Andy's going to break down, I watched a lot of the games yesterday, kind of deep dive on all of that. I had a wedding Saturday. It's a little bit more checking in and out. Abdul, I'll get your comment here in a second. I did see Mark's video. Jacob here, the league must be ecstatic that St. Louis made it to the playoffs. I know Mike Mitchell pointed out that the St. Louis Battle Hawks did not make it last year because of a playoff technicality. Tiebreaker. And I said, no, they should have beaten the Seed Dragons at home and I think it was week eight or nine would've gotten their way into the playoffs, but the Seed Dragons got there and said I was at Outie field for all of that. But yes, definitely a dream for the St. Louis in the championship game. That would be, we'll see, I'm a big Ramas fan, but I don't know if they have enough kind of skin to here to get through the bow hawks, but we'll see. I think that'll be a very good, very competitive, probably a little bit more competitive than the Birmingham Memphis, excuse me, I always do that. The Michigan Panthers playoffs here. We'll talk attendance and stuff with all of that. But yeah, I think the XFL championship game might be a little bit more competitive, but we'll get your thoughts. Let me know in the comments too. Which playoff game are you more excited for? I mean, I think stallions are just on top of the world right now, so I certainly see them kind of rushing through. Yeah, Jacob here, the league is probably salivating at the idea of St. Louis in the championship game. I can't imagine. And that's really all the announcers talk about. I noticed that here. Obviously with DC beer snake, beer snake, beer snake, beer snake, and then for the ball HOKs games it's like, oh my god, did you know there used to be an NFL team here and they don't have an NFL team and they have so many people here and look at all the people. It's great, but I think it will be good. Yeah, I think the St. Louis Birmingham championship game certainly wouldn't be the fan games this year. But yes, I think that will be the most. Speaking of the renegades, I will be in attendance here Saturday. I'll be at the Arlington Renegades hosting the Battle Hawks and hoped when I had purchased those tickets that the Renegade season would've been a little bit more competitive and that game would've had a little bit more meaning. But we will be there. Dorothy and I flying into Dallas Arlington area going to the Inflames concert at the House of Blues on Sunday night. But I said, Hannah, if we fly in today early, we can go see the Renegades play. So I'll be there as a fan walking around eating and drinking and all of that stuff. I'll be there with my wife, so I dunno, the Renegades will even have, I'll give you the accurate attendance report though. You count on that. I will give you, I'll be the man on the street giving the accurate attendance reports and letting you know how many people at the Renegades game, but excited for that. Excited to see the Battle Hawks in person. Oh, Dorothy's checking in here. Dorothy's at school. Yeah, Dorothy, I don't know if she's more excited for the Arlington renegades, the UFL game or with the, what is it, one in seven Renegades or the Inflames concert, but one way or another we'll do all that. Yeah. What was it? Florio going to the, I don't know. I think Florio, I think he just likes that clickbait. I've tried to get him on because he's super good at responding to emails. I've had back and forths in depth with Mike Florio about like, Hey, we'd love to get your thoughts. We'd love to have you come on. It's like, oh you, I got to do this. I got to do that. I understand, and obviously doing the podcast and his website and everything, but really likes to do it as long as he can get the clicks for it. But we'll see. I mean, if he's there, I'll be in the press box and maybe Floria will be in the press box, so I could be excited for that. Really glad my neighbors decided to mow their lawn right now. They never outside, but super glad. We'll do all that. Yeah, Jenna, hopefully decent crowd. Like I said, I'll be MOS there. I'll be the man on the street getting, and Anthony Miller was going to see him, but he'll be out of town the one weekend. I'm going to be back in there. We'll do it via, we won't be able to see that, but let's see what other comments here. Mike G. We're talking the USFL championship game, or excuse me, the playoff game. Michigan picking it up. They'll give it back this out. Yeah, it will be good. I think the next two weeks are going to be a little sleepy. Sleepy, but then I think that both playoff games as compared to last year when it was SFL, what was it like the Mahler and the Stallions, whatever, that some of these playoff games got a little sleepy for that. So I think at least that the conference playoff games will be excited for that. Let's see here. Roughnecks had the stallion sweating this past weekend. Yeah, Philip giving some good comments on our YouTube video this week talking about expansion and relocation. If you haven't had a chance to check that out with John Lewis Sports, certainly go check that out. Got a lot of views. It's amazing how putting an expansion in the title really brings out all the boys to the yard here. But yes, Dorothy excited to swim and drink margaritas. Appreciate that. Yeah, we'll be having fun and yeah, I did. I did see Brady. I wish they would have promoted that more. I saw that. I saw that on social media. That's a good look for the league, right? Tom's going to be doing the Maine Fox broadcasting and all of that. Well, I'm curious, right? He's like with the Browns. It's the Browns whatever. That first week. I should be excited for that. I see the professor logging in here. I'll just do a couple more comments here. Zach, saying hi to Lady Marcus. Yeah, Dorothy, we'll do an X video or a Twitter video. We will post something. But yeah, if you're in the Dallas Fort Worth area, come to the game here. Andy, my neighbors decided of the mow and blow and edge, their lawn in the world. I dunno how loud it is, but how are you doing, sir? How the heck are you? I'm great. Just fighting traffic as I always do. Well we appreciate it. Denzel. Checking in here. What up Mark Cast? Yeah, Andy, we're less than, I think we're 12 subscribers away from getting to the 3,500. We can give away those two tickets and I said that they can either sit with you or not because I might incentivize them, might not. I dunno, Based on how this season's viewership is going and some of the commentary we've gotten, I'm going to say that people are maybe less inclined to sit with me, but you know what? That's their jurisdiction. They can do whatever they want. Yeah, I tell you, we got a lot of flack last week talking. He praised at Birmingham the entire time and then the first comment I get off and it's like, you guys, how do you hate on Birmingham? I'm unsubscribing. Which is totally fine. I mean it's totally fine. You do what you need to. I'm like, we just talked how great Birmingham was for 40 minutes. I don't understand. It's not a reflection on you. I don't internalized Seattle. People don't like Seattle. I don't like, oh, they don't like the liberal Seattle, whatever. I'm taking that. But people Birmingham really attached to that. I mean, I have this thing that my parents talked to me about when I was growing up. It's called selective hearing, and I do think there's a little bit of that goes around. But anyway, everybody does that. Everybody has things they want to hear and other things they don't want to. So that's up to them. So we'll get into all this here, Andy. Like I said, we got Emory Hunt coming up this Friday. We got Ted Wman coming on. We'll do some CFL stuff as well. Should be exciting. Get a couple more CFL guests, playoff previews here. General thoughts coming out of the weekend. I'll get, let's do attendance first as we normally do, but thoughts, general thoughts on the weekend? It was some competitive, some not. I'm kind of trying to remember which the games I saw at this point. Well, the playoff picture is set. That's really the biggest takeaway from this weekend. Everything is set. Everything is decided as far as who's in the playoff picture now, who's hosting? We still don't know that yet. For me, I think it was finally the nail in the coffin for a lot of these teams. DC being one of them, obviously they finally just couldn't hold water against the battle hawks even without someone like a Adrian McCarran. San Antonio takes care of business. There goes dc your champion from the East division last year, a nine in one team that had all the aspirations of winning an XFL championship game being dashed by first Arlington in the championship game and now the follow-up year where things just didn't go their way. Bad injuries, the same cast not being there, the same semblance of attack on offense not being there, A lot of defensive miscues just it didn't work out. So for me, a lot of changeover, I think in the XFL, you're seeing a lot of change. The USFL is kind of standard. I mean it's Stan Pat, it's kind of like what do you expect? Birmingham is rolling along. Michigan is continuing the momentum they had last year. Obviously you don't have the breakers that exist. They're not there to sort of be in the playoff picture. Again, same thing with your dragon. Sorry. They're not there to sort of be part of the picture. So part of it is the picture was going to change this year. You just wondered who exactly it was that was maybe going to drop out of it of the returning teams and Arlington and DC are just by the wayside. They're gone and obviously the roughnecks are gone. So the XFL and the SFL pictures have changed pretty significantly here. I just responded to a couple of comments here. No, that's my question. Biggest disappointment. I mean we've talked to Renegades at nauseum here for weeks. I mean DC here has got to be, especially just with how passionate it'd be like if the Battle hawk stunk, right? I mean you want your hot markets to do well and I really thought that disappointing overall for dc even though I think Temu looking better this weekend, but just clearly not enough and Hawk's defense really good as well. I think my takeaway, I finally made my determination on how I feel about Temu overall. I think he's the quintessential spring football quarterback. You know what you're going to get from him. You know what he's going to do well, the things he's not going to do well. I think ultimately you have to have a team around him in order to be successful. When he was younger, when he was in the XFL in 2020 with the Battle hawks, they had to do more to supplement his game because he just didn't have the acumen as a pastor yet. He's developed a lot as a pastor. He makes some really good downfield throws. To be honest. I thought he played well enough, especially in that fourth quarter to win that game. He really did. He beats them outstanding throws, but what got him in the end, their offensive line broke down, protections broke down. Again, just pressure in his face, which he's gotten all year, they can't run the ball consistently. They don't have as many weapons as they did last year. You need to surround him with talent. So for me, I'm starting to see what the limitations on some of these guys are, right? Luis Perez has not had a bad year. Luis Perez is leading the league in passing. He's having a very good year. Statistically, it's just everything around him is not working. You need somebody, if you're going to have somebody that's really going to elevate your team, you're going to need somebody like Adrian Martinez. That's just going to be the fact of the matter. The stallions have had that the last few years. Magoo and Martinez were both outstanding and elevated the level of play around them, but some of these guys, it's no fault of their own because I think you understand what they have. They need to have support around them and Perez and Tom just didn't get that this year. All right, so let's get to attendance here and then we'll do the game by game. It's like what time is it? Five 15? I get all because I just start rambling at the beginning of the show and I'm like, what's going? So let's talk through all this Week eight coming out here, Michigan second highest attendance since week one. That is good. I mean John Lewis and all that took a lot of shots kind of at Michigan on Friday's episode. Good to see that support with that, especially in, I tweeted that especially with their team, it's a long shot to think that they're hosting, and I didn't even know Mike was posting in the group chat that even if, and I don't think it will happen, but even if the Panthers were to be the home field team for the playoffs, there's like a commencement whatever and they couldn't host anyway, which is, wow, I don't know. Did they post that news? Did I miss out on that news? I missed out on it too, but maybe that's something that Mike was able to get a hold of and I wasn't. Yeah, so I have no idea, but Mike had said that today that there's a commencement or something at Fort Field today would be the home team in Protective Stadium, which if we know what Birmingham looks like as a home team in Protective Stadium, I don't know what, but again, I don't think that that's, I mean a lot of things have to happen here, but we're really weird that way. Anyway, so good to see that Birmingham here and coming down from 14, right last week with the Battle Hawks, kind of the bump that I had with AJ McCarran and all of that St. Louis holding strong and that was opposite the Cardinals game as well, same time. And people said they had 39,000 people San Antonio holding in there. I think if they were the better venue, it's just the Alamo Dome and I watched that game. It's just the hardest. The same with for Field, it's just such a hard venue to watch. You could have 11,000, there is still just like nobody's in there. Yeah, dome. I actually really like the venue. Maybe it's just the fact that there's nothing specifically immediately surrounding it. Maybe that plays into it, but it's a short walk from the San Antonio River Walk. It's not that far away. So for me, maybe, I mean it doesn't look as great on TV when it's cavernous like that. Obviously we've seen it more filled up and it looked great. I think it's still a great venue, just you have to get the people in there. I think the same thing would happen with the Edward Jones dome or the dome as they call it now with St. Louis. I mean it would look the same way on TV if it was not as filled up and obviously it is getting filled up most of the time, so it's not a problem for me. I mean Michigan, it's good that they've rebounded a little bit here. Maybe the Michigan ends are starting to realize they have another playoff team on the Gridiron. They've been spoiled with the Detroit Lions and the Michigan Wolverines and now finally they have another playoff team that's pretty decent and you can go watch that team. You obviously want that number to be baseline like 10,000, but at least they're starting to rebound a little bit. They still have another chance to get people in there. So for them now, I don't foresee them hosting the championship game obviously that's going to be really interesting. So that's something they have to look forward to. Birmingham. Let's talk about Birmingham for a second, and I know we talk about Birmingham every single week. My friend got into it with some people apparently weather the great debacle of the weekend for the Birmingham's, which is interesting to me because I think their primary argument, if I'm not mistaken, was that there was rain two hours before the game and that scared Everybody. Yeah, it really looked like it was going to rain. It really looked like it was good, but then all I hear about is walkup traffic. All I hear about is walkup traffic and I'm like, okay, well, but then, because you always see the feeding charts, no, but you got to wait for the walkups. I'm like, I can't. And that's what I finally tweet out. There must've been an state sale two counties. I'm like, there's always an excuse. There's always an excuse. Like you said, we had a comment here, San Antonio Alga Birmingham and I know because then it's the city size and then it's the population. You got people from all over Alabama going everywhere for this college stuff, but then it's only metro size when it's related to the, there's always an excuse. I got to say, Reid, I actually, and I can't believe I'm saying this, I found coherent conversation about this topic in actually the comment section in your video with John Lewis about the expansion. I actually think they had some good points in that conversation. There were people who were saying like, look, Birmingham has been burned numerous times as a spring football outfit and maybe people are just tired of this and they don't want to invest until they see long-term investment because there's been plenty of other events in Protective Stadium that have sold out and been fine. And you know what? That's a fair point. That's the most fair point. I've heard about this the entire time. None of this excuses about whether or parking or there's a concert going on, none of that. None. This was a finally legitimate point that I can side with and I say yes, I think that makes sense When there's burnout and there's people that don't believe in the product because it doesn't stick around for that long, that's legitimate and that's fine. I'm okay with That. It's been three years now. It's in three years. I think it's more burnout than It is. It has been three years. I think it's more burnout than it is three years of they need to see more. I don't know, Maybe, and again, I think I really stress this. I think the USFL side could have done a much better job of putting that out there and really stressing like, Hey, the Birmingham stallions are back. They are back and they're wildly successful. I cannot believe they're not trumpeting that more often. I know the stallion fans do. The numerous stallion fans that I see online trumpet that, but clearly the people of Birmingham don't seem to know that because they should go watch this team. I would watch that team every week if I could. I I think seeing someone like Adrian Martinez in person would be awesome. I'm looking forward to seeing him in person because, sorry, Michigan fans, I really believe they're going to be in the championship game in a month from now. I really look forward to seeing that. And so that's a whole thing of can you get that message out? And I still think the league doesn't do enough Good job of that, but I finally think there was some discourse on the topic that I actually sided with or at least coherently, combated with instead of hearing all the other excuses that we've heard over the last few weeks. Yeah, I just, in the last three Years really, Oh, sorry, are we synced up? I think one of our internets was lagging there. I think we're synced back up again now. I said you have a new nickname here. I agree with Dr. Abraham Miller. I dunno who that is. How many different names am I going to get this season? Yeah, well, so we have Anthony Miller who is not a doctor, and then we have the professor Andrew Murray who is here all also knows Andy Murray. Hey Ann Miller. Oh my god, I can't be Andrew Andy anymore. I've lost that name too many times. I might have to legally certify my name to be something else. I clearly am not. There must be some celestial force that doesn't let me have that name anymore. My last, we will do this here a little bit more about attendance and we'll move on here. I have some comments we'll go through, but that someone in the comments as was like, yeah, I live in Birmingham. I'm from here. They don't even have any marketing around there, which is crazy. Again, it's the same thing with the Choctaw thing we talked about. I mean, I would just have this huge sign on the side of Choctaw Stadium like football is played here every other weekend. I don't understand and I know now we're getting to it and like I said, I'll be at the game here this weekend again, I bought the tickets before. Obviously we knew that the Rene games were going to be terrible, but I don't understand because doing this paid attendance, if you've already bought your season tickets and then you're just not going to the game, I don't understand that either. We still went to the cracking games at the end and we weren't in contention. You've already spent the money. Why not? Is it $10 parking outside of Choctaw? That's really crazy. I don't know. That's the other thing I get with that. Anything else? We'll do some comments and then we'll move on. Yeah, I mean it's a shame we get those paid attendance numbers and maybe there's just apathy because the team's not as good as you thought it was. And let's be fair, that happened in Audi Field this year too. That happened in the last game. There weren't nearly as many people as it looked like on pay the tense number versus the people on tv. I'll admit that maybe people are starting to really feel fatigued by this, but also we do need to talk about the calendar situation because I mean now we're past the point where it was last year with the Exfo championship game, the USFL. There weren't that many people really to begin with at the attendances and obviously their season went later anyways, now we're starting to see that effect and I think that is a legitimate thing that needs to be talked about when we're talking about the calendar going forwards. Yeah, it's true. People are starting to do other things. I mean, this weekend I started to realize there's graduations going on, right? There's graduations for colleges that are going on. You're going to start getting graduations for other schools. People are going to be out of school and then they're going to be like, I'm traveling. See you later. People are going to start going on vacation. I'm not sure if that's the case for your wife Dorothy at all anytime soon, but that's the reality of mean. I've seen comments about people saying like, look, I really just don't have time now. I can't do it anymore. Life is getting really complicated at this very moment because it's spring and the weather's getting better, but not to paint an excuse here, but that is starting to become a factor for maybe the more casual viewers, let's say that not the nut Headss like us who are still following this religiously. No, it is a hundred percent here and we have a Carmine, I'll get to your car here. I just thought this is good as well. I'll star these. Calendar is a huge issue and that was the big issue with the SFL as well, that it gets May June and people, it's hot. People are going out and then it's too hot at the stadium and the people don't want to go to stadium because it's too hot. And then you have other, yeah, I've had events every weekend. We're out of town next weekend and I have an event every Saturday through the June 29th. There'll be the first Saturday that I don't have, so obviously that's past the championship game at that point, but I would've had an event the championship weekend and then they canceled. It was a wedding and they canceled. But you get into that thing and like you said, there's baby showers and there's bridal showers and there's engagement things and there's all this kind of stuff and there's graduations and there's barbecue and it is just, you fight a lot about it as well where it's really hard to get my wife to sit at home on a cold Saturday or we go to the bar and watch than it is the hotter it gets. It's really tough, and I think if we do these Friday games next year, I think that's great. You do the Friday, Saturday, Sunday, start after the Super Bowl or even go the week before the Super Bowl, do that Pro Bowl weekend, whatever, and then hop. I know that that's, but I think there's finagling that can do the rolling by with March Madness, but I think that that February kickoff is a thousand percent what makes sense. I still really believe in the rolling by. I do. I talked to that actually with our colleague Evan a couple days ago and I think I really believe in that idea. I do wonder now the thing is about when the championship game would happen. I've started to think about that. I was looking at the calendar and I think it's funny that last year the expo championship game happened the day after or the day before Mother's Day, that was the case this year it's happening on Father's Day and then the SFL championship game obviously had the whole thing about it being July 4th weekend. I'm not sure if it behooves the UFL to be around holiday weekends. I don't think that's what people prioritize. I mean, look at Memorial Day weekend. You could say logistically you could be like, well, it gives 'em another travel day to go. I'm like, I don't know if people are prioritizing that as part of their travel schedule. Let's just be fair here. I don't think that's really the case. So people don't want to miss these important holidays. What you should do is try to end the season on maybe a non-significant weekend someday where it's not part of a holiday weekend and you can get people involved in that way. I do think if you can start, I still think starting the week after the Super Bowl is important. Would I love to have meaningful football games during Pro Bowl weekend? Yes, but do I think you should sandwich that with Super Bowl? I have to think about that. But after the Super Bowl, I think that's a little bit more amicable, but I believe in the bi-week, which would allow you to maybe miss that Mother's Day weekend or at least Mother's Day weekend would be the championship games for example. And then the actual championship game would be the week after that. There's your season. I think that would be true, authentic spring football. Then people are going to go out and do stuff and also think about this past weekend and we'll see what happens with the TV ratings tomorrow. I mean there was two game sevens by the NBA in one day and then there's NHL game sixes and then another NBA game six. You start battling that crowd too. Those are significant games. Those are games that people are going to start prioritizing because they're like, oh, the series is really ramped up and this is do or die right now. That's part of the reality. I know you're trying to say that's not a relevant audience, but it is. It's the sporting viewing audience. So I think trying to get around that is also important too. Well, and like you said with the Mother's Day, father's Day this year, Easter weekend, right? And then the US L two years ago with the early or with the later start, it was Easter weekend too, right? And I know because the schedules have changed and Easter bumps around and you can't always count on that, but it was both Easter Saturdays and I'm like, obviously we are not a super religious, I sorry we prioritize that, but it's still a thing. A couple comments here and then we'll get to the game standings and all of that stuff. Carmine here, start last week in February, finished by mid May. Jose here, and we've talked about this, I think the teams do the practice in their home markets so they can do more community events to build. I know. Then you walk the balance of like, well, if we're putting 'em up for two nights in the towns and then okay, we still travel, there's still going to be the sweet spot, but I do agree. I think they've started flying in the day before. What was it? The bras were going to fly in the day before and then they were having metro issues that Kerwin their PR guy had sent out that they got caught. So I mean then you're running into those issues as well. Philip here says the league must show some stability with cities. You have to keep fans moving and they won't trust him to stay. It's kind of going back to the relocation and all of that and then let's see here, and then Denzel was saying here, I wish that Birmingham would sell more than one side of the field. I think they would if they could. I don't think it's an issue of wanting that Abdul Ford Field hosting St. Francis Cabrini Festival. There you go. I assumed it was like a graduation. We do graduations here and then last thing, see the C WM buying my championship game tickets tomorrow or just get us a 3,500, get 10 more friends of yours, get us a 3,500 and you could win them yourself here. I think we've added a couple more on here. 11 to go, 11 to go the push, like I said, 40% of people, I'm like, are you hate watching? Are you watching on this fight? Give us to that. Alright, so let's go to standings here real quick. We'll kind of get a picture of this. This all solidified here, battle hawk's Promise. We've talked about the tops, stallions and panthers on that. Any general thoughts as you look at how, I assume there's not going to be a lot of movement here moving forward, but thoughts on how this all wound out? I mean rays are thin margin right there between the BA Hawks and Braas. I think if you're the BA Hawks you are thanking are lucky stars you won on Sunday now I think it looks very favorable them going forward, especially with that head-to-head coming up on week 10. That's really the biggest, that's could be a gargantuan matchup, but we'll see if maybe one team, if the hawks win and the bras lose, then you kind of maybe settle that out. Stallions again, I don't see them dropping any these last two games. I think they're going to win Now the key is that they try to run the table and how long do they keep playing Adrian Martinez because that's really their biggest thing is health at this point. That's all it is. It's health and same thing with the Battle hawks in a way. I know they obviously Adrian McCarran wasn't there last Sunday. They were able to win with Manny Wilkins, but they're kind of managing 'em too. You got to be careful about that as well. The top two teams are worried about their health promises. I mean you did your job honestly. You did your job with flying colors, you improved tremendously. You have twice in the number of wins you had last year. Coaching staff did their thing. You survived Garber's getting injured, you survived dorm up and down play. You were able to really manage your way through this and I think that's a tremendous credit to them and turnaround that that team has had at Michigan. I got to give a credit to Michigan, really good team on the ground, defensive identity still there even with Frank Enden on, there're not as solid as they were before his injury, but I still think they have a lot going on and I'm impressed that Michigan is a solid team, a really good solid team now. And so I mean for me as far as the Bottomer teams go, the showboats man, man, what an operation Keith Cook is playing with basically. I don't think he had broken ribs. I'm not sure if he did. He had a chest injury. I'm not sure if you heard it one point, but in the audio he said, I'm having trouble breathing but I think I'm going to be okay. No, he's crazy. My guy just sit down for a minute. I'm really worried about his long-term health. He just cannot keep taking these beatings. I really believe that roughnecks, like I said, Curtis Johnson, his tombstone is being erected as we speak right now. I mean in terms of his head coaching tenure with the Houston crop. Next, I am sorry, but he's going to go back to being a wide receiver's coach here pretty soon. As far as would Just to jump in for you, you I would keep flip and get rid of Kurt this next year. Would you do That? I think that's going to be the play and again, I think deeply Bo's coaching is not the problem. Again, I said it last week, it's the roster. The roster has a lot of holes. David Davis is great, fantastic second lead receiver. He's been great. You have some interesting pieces on that team, but they just cohesively cannot get it together. I think you keep the felipo around and I think they had the premonition of keeping him around, especially after moving him from the New Orleans franchise. I don't think they want to pull one over on him, honestly. I see three out of the four eight coaches we're talking about here moving as we talked. I think we talked about that a couple of weeks ago, but just to recap, I do think it's Curtis Johnson. I do think Bob Sos walks away from the renegades and I do think actually the Bravo staff is going to change because not because of the lack of success, I think because of the monetary cuts that are coming. What is interesting though, I do wonder if you have someone like Arie Smith, does he get a head coaching job and does he get a head coaching job in the league? Does he get promised a franchise? Do you keep him around in a way? So maybe just reshuffle some players around there. I wonder if that's part of the process too. But as far as everything goes, I mean it's pretty much non-competitive the next two weeks. The only thing that you're really worried about now is seating and really the biggest question mark is the XFL conference. So I love AJ Smith and I friend of the show he's been on sometimes and I'm not the football guy, but they were trying to, it was the game this weekend and they were trying to get into field goal range and he ended up doing a short run. Sometimes to me it feels like his play calling doesn't fit the situation or hasn't always been. It just feels like there's been a lot of question marks from the announcers. Like I'm watching like, oh, I think we're going to do this. AJ does the complete opposite, and then they're like, well, it just feels like AJ has it and I don't know if it's the quarterback injuries and all that. It just feels like he hasn't had it all clicking this year like he did last year. Well, even last year I thought there were times that it didn't work out. Now I know there was also injuries in the quarterback position, which didn't help. I think some of it may be situational awareness. I think AJ is trying to always put up points and he should, but sometimes there might be needs to be other management parts to this where, look, we don't need to be so aggressive here or let's try and reimagine what we're trying to do on this drive. Let's just get a field goal and let's continue with that. I do think part of it is scheme and part of it is maybe the players he doesn't want to have are in the scheme. I mean Garber's would be obviously perfect to have in the situation. Dormy played well enough, although I do think a lot of it was run after cash. Anthony McFarland was fantastic. For example, he did a lot of work for Dormy and Dormy had a much chiller game than he did against the roughnecks. I do think some of it is scheme fit. I mean AJ's still young. He's still figuring this out and I think smart defensive minds can figure out what he's doing a little bit and it can stymie the offense. I think the thing about the Braas is they're such half oriented offenses that go on with them. It's like sometimes they look great for the first half, second half, they kind of peter out. Other times they've started off really slow in the first half and they figure out in the second half of the fourth quarter. So I just want to see them kind of piece a whole game together and really have a solid performance from front to back and that kind of what makes me hesitate to pick them in a situation against a team like the battle hawks. But I do think they do have some of the right pieces, but other times I wonder if they have the right personnel to execute his vision on offense. Interesting. All right, so let's get to the games here. Let's switch over to this and then we can go deep dive if we want any of this stuff. I guess let's talk about that because we're bras here. We'll just kind go reverse on this and taking care of the business against Arlington, right? I'm looking at the dates, correct. Yeah, I get all screwed up on this. Didn't that back Wasn't the Hawks game? No, the Brams game was last. I was watching. I sat on my deck and played Super Mario World on my Vision Pro and had the football game on. It was really kind of cool all afternoon and Dorothy went together a pere. I said, oh my God, I get a weekend day at home. I'm not working. I'm going to watch this game. But anyway. So what did you make of this bra and renegades Again? The Brahmas did enough in the first half and kind of cruised after having a, I believe it was a 20 to three lead at one point. So they basically were able to continue cruising from the way that they had this game going. But for me, again, it's just Arlington's inability to really get anything done. I mean Perez was making some fantastic throws that just weren't connecting with someone like the likes of Davante Peyton, who I think could have had a really big year just didn't end up panning out that way. Again, more defensive mishaps with not being able to tackle someone like McFarland who was running all up and down the field. Still a lot of inconsistencies on their special teams, especially coverage, just kind of a lot of sloppy play from the renegades and they never really felt like they had a chance in this game. I know they kind of came back late and they'd been able to get the onsite. I wouldn't fine, but to me it's just the same continuing comedy of hes here and for the bras, I mean they got to keep leaning on John Lovett, man, he's been really good for them this season. I know he was a bit stymied in this game, I know, but they got to keep him going. They got to have some sort of semblance of a run game. Dormant was much better. Like I said, he was much more consistent. Can you expect that from him week to week? I still don't think so, but for this Arlington team, it was bad luck. They've lost by so many one score games this year. I don't think they were really in this game. I think in my opinion, it looks closer than it actually was, but they just haven't been to be able to get it done this year. As far as San Antonio goes, continue to lean on your defense. I mean, you have some really good defensive players on your team that are able to keep everybody else in check on the other side, and I think that's what's kind of improved a lot for them this season two is just their defensive consistency is also a lot better. Yeah, I think they were saying that very garbers could be coming back. I know we talked about would you immediately plug him back in or would you ride with Normandy here because he's, nothing's really blown me away with him, but it's been Serviceful going on. If Garber's is healthy, if I would say yes, but let's make sure that he's healthy first. We got to make sure that he's actually able to come back in one piece. If you're able to use him in the playoffs, absolutely you she him until you think he's ready for the playoffs. And if that's the case, great. Then I would just say that even if you lose a pivotal game, that might stop you from hosting the playoff game. I mean, I know the Battle hawks are obviously a juggernaut at home in terms of home crowd advantage, but I do think there's a lot to be said about the adrenaline you can get as a road team that play in that as well. And I do think that health is ultimately the better thing for the Brams to look forward to if they think that Garbers has a chance to come back. If not, then you try your best to win the next two games and see if you can roll the dice enough to be able to actually host the championship game, which would be tremendous. But Garbers again, it's really contingent. We'll see what happens in these next three weeks. I tell you, if the ballot locks don't win here, if they host and they don't win, that would be pretty remarkable. We'll see. How are we going to get a huge disparity between paid attendance of the championship game and what actually shows up? It's going to be half of that. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, like I said, the league is desperately hoping that happens, but I still think there'll be decent attendance even if it's San Antonio and Birmingham. It's not going to be what they want, but I think they'll still be at least a decent draw out. Anything else on this game we can keep moving on. We will talk more brass. Like I said, Emory and everything coming up for the playoffs. RIP to the Renegades. I'll be there. I mean I'll be there this weekend. I'll see the Battle Hawks in person. Maybe I'll see AJ McCarran or whatever else. Anything else on this game? No. Again, I just want to shout out the San Antonio defense. You have three of the four top tacklers in the league. Devonte Beckett, Jordan Williams, and then Jordan. Am I, Jordan Moseley, excuse me. There's Stu Jordan's on the team. I'm always mixing up. Their last names have been really excellent this year and have supplied a lot better consistently on defense. But I do think it's important. I'm seeing this comment below me. I don't know if 60,000 is really even achievable if the battle hawks play in the battled do, but that would be amazing. I don't know if that's going to happen. That'd be a site to behold. I mean, if you're in the league, you would be doing, you'd do Back Flips. Oh, you'd do triple back flips if you got that attendance. That'd be incredible. I don't know if that's going to happen. We'll see. But again, the Brahmas have a chance to spoil this entire party. I mean that's me. Like I said, the Brahmas are technically my team. I had a lot of Reed hates the UFL because there's no Sea Dragons. I watched was I live and dive on the Washington Commanders man, and that makes, I mean blame Taylor Heineke for all of that stuff, but it doesn't affect me. But I would be very excited to have the Braas play. Spoiler. Let's go here. Defenders Hawks, we could talk to. You talked about this off the top. We mentioned defenders and all this stuff, battle hawk's taking care of business. You're pretty much solidifying here in that first place. But thoughts on this one? Anything else you wanted to touch about? Well, initially you look at that completion percentage for Manu Wilkins. You go, oh, yikes. But you know what? He did enough, especially with his legs. I mean his ability to break, contain and really make plays with his legs was the biggest key factor here for this team. Also, Wayne Galman did not expect this to come out of him. He had an incredible game. I really discounted him at the beginning of the season. He just looked really slow and really lethargic. Jacob Sailors was playing better than him. Mateo Durant was making better plays than him at the beginning of the season. But no, Wayne Goldman hats off to him. He had a huge catch and run to set up the game-winning drive at the end, and he had the game-winning touchdown obviously there at the end. He was tremendous for them and they really needed that because it was really sluggish in the first half. I think DC has to be a little bit disappointed. I mean, you get two picks from Tom who just again, has limitations to his game. He's had a lot of turnovers this season. I think that's kind of underplayed a little bit. I do think he had some great throws down the field that were able to be caught. They don't have Kelvin Harmon who was their main weapon. They don't have him in this game. Ty Scott was able to come through a little bit for them. But again, just note, when you don't have the run game, I mean you think about last year, Abram Smith running for over 200 yards in the battle domen and being such a thunderous performance by him and the team. They just seemed to really come play with authority this year. I mean, they were kind of struggling. They couldn't convert a fake punt conversion they were trying to make, they couldn't convert that. A lot of inconsistencies on the offensive line. It just wasn't there for them for the battle. I mean, they just wanted to survive and they did. Defense still kind of scares me a little bit. The thing for me with the battle hawks is they got to create turnovers. That's the only way they're really going to stop teams. I don't think they're going to stop them completely. I do think they're a little bit better than last year, but really to me, they're very opportunistic defense. They have to continue to create turnovers if they're going to be able to do anything against some of these offenses. And if you're talking about playing a team like say Birmingham, that might be what it comes down to. They're going to have to create those turnovers, which they were able to a little bit last week when they played Birmingham. Obviously they gave up those slant routes, which really killed them. We'll see how they addressed the second time around if they end up playing them. But for the Bell Hawks, you survived. That was the most important thing and you just got to survive in the next two weeks. Unless maybe you get Adrian McCarran to come and play you back. But again, they kind of have to be careful with how much they want to play him, especially with that ankle. Yeah, what was it they said that Manny had the first two, I think it was the first three quarters, had more rushing rights than nature had the entire season, which really speaks to the difference with that. But like you said, they got did what they needed to do. You don't want to give that home field advantage. It's nothing to me. I don't know if the problem is have a home field advantage. I think it's you want to make sure you're hosting it in your own yard to kind of have that. But they did enough they got through and move on for another day, right? Absolutely. And again, the fact that I think the biggest thing is they clinched, they're in, there's none of this voodoo math that they have to deal with. I know they lost your sea dragons and that's really the end of the story, but there was just so much weird circumstances around them missing the playoffs last year and this year. It's just, that's it. They're in the playoffs. No controversy. This is it. They're in. So I think for them, getting that monkey off their back I think was a really big deal. Dual here is talking about Hakeem Butler's health alongside Case Cook. As you were talking about people really worried that he's been playing hurt the whole time and taking big shots, right? It seems like there's a lot, I don't know, battle hawk's really kind of fighting through injuries right now. Getting to, I'll be curious here in the next couple weeks, are we resting for a lot of these teams? A lot of the playoffs teams? I don't know if we're resting players or we want to get other guys' tape here in terms of the playoff picture here moving forward. I mean, if you're the battle hogs, you are praying that the bras lose. Next week you win and then you're able to rest your guys for a week, but you can't really rest yet. Birmingham technically is still in the same realm. They can't do it yet. They have to win another game and then they'll be safe, but they can't, I'm sure they don't show anything against, if they win next week, they won't show anything against Michigan at all. When they play them on week 10, say, well, you'll figure us out when you come down here for the playoffs. But for this case, for the Battle Hawks, they kind of have to keep their foot on the gas pedal for now. It's hard to rest starters, it's not the same situation, not as much distance as you have like you do in the NFL. I mean, it's still so tight unless you absolutely crush your division. DC obviously did last year. They were so incredibly potent in the East. It's hard to really, without that separation, it's hard to, or even Houston, they had that separation too, and they could rest. Guys, A couple comments here, and this is interesting as well with Foosball fan, but Abdul says the issue with resting guys talking pay difference, right? We're talking pay difference between that and would you rather play injured and make sure you're getting the full game check for all that? That's actually something I kind of hadn't put two and two together, so thank you for that. And then the other thing, and this is just interesting and don't, I'm not a big schedule watcher, but if we look on here, look at our week 10 mashups, the Panthers, the versus the promise, excuse me, the stallions and the promise against the hawk. So we had that last year with the, was it the Roughnecks and the Renegades played or whatever the week before that. That could be interesting as well here because definitely won't be a playoff preview. I mean in a way that helped Arlington kind of work out the kinks and then they were able to unleash on the Houston roughnecks the following week, whereas the roughnecks weren't really playing for anything. So I guess it depends on what you're trying to show and what you're trying to show. I mean, that's a really tricky thing for the Brahmas and the Hawks that could end up being a legitimately important game. It really depends on what happens next week for the stallions, assuming that they're going to have it wrapped up by then. I mean, what you throw in Jaymar Smith, you throw in Matt Corral, you kind of just throw in whoever you want. It doesn't really matter, in my opinion, and we were wrong about this last year, I don't see the Panthers having a renegade run here where it's only going to ramp up and suddenly gain momentum going into that game. You wonder about Adrian Martinez, but Adrian Martinez didn't start the entire season. He was back and forth. He started week three, didn't start week four, and then he was the full-time starter week five, so it's not like he's not taking weeks off before. Maybe you play a little bit just to make sure he doesn't get too rusty and then you allow other guys to start playing. I would advocate for that if I were the stallions and then you basically have two games that don't matter at all. No offense at the bottom of the schedule here. So your Saturday and week 10 really is, I mean that could determine a lot of the playoff picture, but this is so much what if scenario here. Yeah, because like I said, you're still dealing, and we talked about with Player pay and all of that and people wanted to get game tape and there's not really, I mean you don't want to call 'em meaningless games, but there's not a lot of, I don't know. I think the players still have a lot at stake here, even if it is a meaningless game, if that makes sense. Oh yeah. Game tape, winning paycheck. Obviously being able to show that they still have something to prove. Coaches too. I mean coaches are also battling here. I mean all these coaches, we think a lot of them are going to be on the chopping block here at the bottom of the schedule, so they got to be careful about that too. They got to showcase themselves as well, obviously. So for the players, yeah, there's a lot to play for here, and that's ultimately the purpose of this league, right? It's guys who want to get that game tape out there, and some guys really like this lifestyle and other guys who are trying to move on to other things, but you want to be able to have that to showcase. One comment here, we'll get to the last two games. We'll get out here pretty quick. In terms of flex, I know that one of the games got flexed a little bit earlier. I got the press release about that. Let me see if I can find it. I know Jeff had sent that out, but the problem with switching days is people have already bought tickets, right? Yeah. They're changing here. I'm reading through the screen here. I'm not looking. The June 1st game is now scheduled for one. It was previous scheduled for 11, so they're moving that one down. That's probably just the scheduling thing, but yeah, you can't flex the games. I mean people, if you're traveling, I mean, and spoiler alert, the already have. We can't be flexing days here you can flex hours, you can't flex Days. I agree. Yeah. Time's fine days. No, I think you keep the schedule as is, but times say if you want to say, oh, battle Hawk starts at five if you can, I don't know what there's also, you're Dealing with it. You're talking about scheduling. Yeah. It's like, well, the TV network can't just suddenly be like, oh yeah, we're playing this game back then. Unless it's delayed, unless there's a weather delay, then yes, but otherwise, no, you can't do that. That's not going to happen. These networks have things to do as well, not just accommodate the UFL. Sorry. Well remember was it last season that they went to Saturday Night Live when the USFL game was on, or maybe it was the first one of the seasons. It was on NBC. It was the first season. I remember they're Going the SNL. They just faded out of the Panthers game and they're like, we're on the SNL. See you. It was like, okay. And that was the first time in decades that the TV network had done that? Yeah, yeah. We're still getting a lot of people. We're not flexing the games on that. I'm sorry, we're not flexing the dates for all that stuff. Let's get to these real quick, get out here. Houston made some noise here. Birmingham took care of business, but I mean, was this anything from the roughnecks now or this kind of the last ditch effort here at the end of the season? Completely last ditch effort. Nolan Henderson played a lot better than I expected. I mean, he came fraught again and I'm just like, really? We're doing this now and I want to shout out a guy, Reid Sint. He was so complimentary of Henderson on the sideline. He really just advocated for him full throttle. He said, I really like this guy. I'm excited to see what he has a different skill. He admitted he has a different skillset than me. He can do more running. That's really cool for a guy to be that selfless to say, I want this guy to get playing time. I think that's incredibly selfless of Sunnet. I just really like Reid Sunnet man. He may not be the best passion in the world, but I like him as a player a lot. I felt so bad when he got hurt last year with the brass. I thought, I don't know if he would've been an ultimate difference maker with them, but I really thought that he could have helped them play better. And it's really great to see some of these guys just honestly can be good teammates. They can really just say, I want that guy to play as well. You're competitive. You want to play as well, but you are thankful to watch other guys play that are playing aside you in practice. It's really cool. Mark Thompson was very good, you have to admit he was very, very good. He had some incredible plays here, especially for the roughnecks and trying to keep them in this game. But look, the point here is what I'm going to make, and I say this every year in the NFL where at some point during the season I text this to my friend and I always say, this is give blank or so-and-So the damn MVP trophy give Adrian the damn MVP trophy. He is incredible and he didn't even have that great of a game passing wise. I think he's actually had better games and he walks away with five touchdowns, two rushing, three through the air. This guy is incredible. He has had an insane four week run here and really five out of the last six weeks, he's just been incredible. Completely changed his offense. Really just given them something that they've actually needed because I think their defense has had lapses, especially I do think I wonder about Birmingham without someone like Scooby Wright without an emotional leader like that. Where are we going forward with this? I know they have a really good defensive line. DeMarcus Gates comes in and finishes the game with a sack on Sunnet. It's really good to see their defensive line produced. I'm a little bit worried about some of their communication on defense. Are they able to stop some of these teams? But Adrian Martinez though is just, he's the straw that serves the drink. He has been amazing this entire year and it's really just fun to watch it. It really is. It's genuinely fun to watch Adrian Martinez. I look forward to it every week. Yeah, we had a comment here about you Reed sin. That being the best read in the U Ffo community. There's not many reads, but we do tend to be nice. We tend to be good. We do tend to be good sports. So let's get to the last game here. We'll get out here at the top. We got Showboats Panthers here. Panthers getting all this at home. Like I said, better crowd here at Ford Field. Thoughts on this one before we get up For Michigan? I think they found an answer in Bryce Perkins. I don't really care for Brian Luki. I didn't really care for EJ Perry and I really didn't care for Danny Etling, but I like Bryce Perkins. I know he's not the most accurate thrower. He's thrown behind his receivers a couple of times. He even did that in this game, but I think he really supplies a real legit run past dual threat option. I know our colleague Pat would disagree with that. He thinks that the world of guys like EJ Perry and at Ling, but I really, really like what Perkins offers and I rather him just stay in this offense, especially if he's going to be alongside Matthew Colburn. Also real shame, west Hills obviously out for the remainder of the season. Terribly injury. I mean non-contact, knee injury there in the backfield on the conversion for the first touchdown. Real shame. Real shame. He was playing absolutely spectacular this year and him as a one-two punch with Colburn was great. That sucks for Michigan going forward. They got to just continue to lean on Colburn. But like I said, I like this Michigan team. They have an identity. I know what they're about. They can need to continue running the ball and I don't think they need to play by committee. I think they need to stick with Perkins. I'm going to say it right now. I really do. I think Perkins and a healthy run game and a run pass option would be really good and maybe an RPO that would really just work as far as the Memphis goes. Yeah, I love, gosh, what was it? I think it was, I hate to call him out, but James Larson was tweeting about how Josh love was coming out here and he was going to get revenge on his team against the Michigan Panthers and I'm like, I don't think there's much of a storyline there. I don't think Josh love is really going to do much here. Sorry, I really don't. I know he got replaced by EJ Perry, but obviously that ended up being the better move ultimately I think. Look, Memphis just has no answers. They're done. They're shot. De legal can stay, but the entire roster needs an overhaul. They needed a complete makeover. Yeah. Philip Harris says, I heard breeds that hates puppies. Wow, that's great Job. Okay, well Philip Philip's just mad. His roughnecks fell apart and Sissy lost. Lost his team identity and lost everything else with that. Tough Philip. Yeah, tough. We're going to wind down here. Like I said, I think we added a couple. We're 10 subscribers away. Get us the 3,500, get us to the championship game here. Become a member. Join the community. 99 cents. 99 cents a month. Be a good, just help me out. Make me feel good about my life managers. This guy out of base is loaded. We'll see here. Feeling good Andy. We'll get through it. Anything else from you? Anything else you want to chat? We will be in St. Louis, right? For the championship game here. Andy is going to be, you're going to be out of town, right? We will figure out is that next week we got to figure that out. Yes, so I will be out of town leading up to the championship game that week of, but make no mistake, I will be there in person in St. Louis. You best believe I'm there. Yeah, it's going to be funny. I don't even know. We will get to all that. I don't even know if we're going to have to have remote guests because you're going to be there. I'm going to be there. Pat's going to be there, Anthony's going to be there. I dunno. We'll see. But it could be fun. I know Pat wants to host us. We'll figure out all that stuff. Otherwise I've got a studio or not studio. Pat has a studio. I have the hotel. We can do it too. We'll figure that out. But big live show for all that stuff. Appreciate it. Like I said, we'll be big show Friday Emery Hunt. I'm really curious to get his thought so that'll be more football. I know last week was the expansion and everything, but more football talk with Emery for all that stuff. And then obviously the CFL stuff. Andy, we're excited. CFL. It's almost June. We had CFL preseason today. Oh my God. I'm already getting my notes ready for your CFL pregame shows. I'm really excited for the CFL. I already have that on tap. I know we haven't even finished the UFL season, but I'm ready. I really do miss the CFL when it goes away. I know by the time it comes back around, I'm really, really ready for it to come back. Yeah guys, if you like these, if like all the UFL stuff that'll be starting up, if you're accustomed to this style of play, the quality, if you're cool with the Spring league quality, I think you'll be fine with the CFL, right? Because you get all these people and they're like, it's not, if you're cool watching this, it's a really high brand of football. We'll be doing the Monday recaps, we'll normally do. I think we'll get hussy, Jason Hussy back on that, Evan, if Andy wants to partake in any of that stuff, we'll figure that out. But we'll do the Monday recaps for that and a lot of CFL stuff as well. So like I said, subscribe. If you're part of that, Andy, I appreciate it as always making time on a Monday here, we'll figure out what we're doing in your stead and I appreciate everyone. Subscribe. We'll see you next week. Thanks.

UFL Expansion/Relocation: Who’s on the Chopping Block?

Hey guys, welcome to the Markas Read here. Well, here we go. Here we are. It is finally time to have an expansion episode. Word gets thrown around a lot here in the alternative football landscape. I think it's almost kind of become a crutch, like we need to write about the UFL. We need to talk about the UFL like 12 teams expansion coming in 2025. But I do think we're actually at a decent spot right now to kind of take a pause, take a deep dive here and to see what do we think relocation expansion, anything else could look like in the UFL as we approach the presumed 2025 season. We have a lot of data here in terms of TV ratings, attendance. We have trademark kind of updates happening. The Dallas stallions, anyone, but we have some stuff to actually look at today. So I think it's good to have a kind of deep dive into all of this Now, a little bit of speculation today, but it should be fun. If you enjoy the work that we are doing, please like and subscribe. Remember, we get up to 3,500 subscribers. You get a chance to win two free tickets, do the UFL championship game. You can even sit with a professor Andrew Murray himself if you want. If you don't, if that's, maybe that's holding people off, but 40% of the people that watch our videos aren't subscribed, which is weird to me because even if 5% of the 40 subscribed, then everybody would get a chance to win. So that would be cool, but a good episode today if you want football talk real Gridiron football talk. Andy and I did that on Monday, second half of the live stream. I made sure that we did a deep preview and all the matchups this weekend, especially that last half because we were talking attendance and all that. So if you want the real football Monday's on that, we're doing speculations and musings today. On here, John Lewis of John Lewis Sports joining us. John has a great YouTube channel. I figured he would be down. I think we spend almost an hour here talking about hypothetical situations for the UFL in 2025 and then CFL talk with Dan Ralph of the Canadian Press Hall of Fame reporter. Really appreciate Dan taking the time. And John as well. With Dan, we talk about Deshaun Lemon, kind of his, or is he retired, is he suspended? What's going on with the gambling with the alouettes and all of that? We talk Chad Kelly and the Argos whether they're going to do without a quarterback moving forward. We also get Dan's thoughts on some of the other CFL teams in the West. I plan on doing a lot more kind of deep dive here Now, this has just been the last couple of weeks have just been crazy. So want to get the Dave Campbell's of the world and Tim Bains and Steve Milton and kind of all that stuff to do some CFL team previews here. Kickoff here is what? June 6th. It's in like four weeks from today I think. So we're certainly getting there. One note, Chad Kelly did release a statement today after Dan and I recorded he is taking time away from the team during training camp. That's kind of what was dictated with the suspension and all of that, but Chad did put that out. So if you want to read that, I know it's on, I think his Twitter and the Argos and all that pushed that out. So please like and subscribe. Hope you enjoy a fun episode today. Leave your comments. What do you think? What do you want to see with the UFL expansion here coming up potentially in 2025 and we'll see you at the end. Thanks. Well, here we are today. Finally, this is the long anticipated expansion episode. We've trying to hold on because this is such the sugar rush. Okay, what we have nothing to talk about, let's talk about expansion, but I think that this is a good spot here. We have John Lewis here today, John Lewis Sports great YouTube channel as well and probably one of the only people that would do this deep dive with me, but we have the report Friday night, UFL games, potentially next spring. There's been some recent trademark activity related maybe to the Birmingham stallions. So little things to talk about here. Andy and I kind of preview the games for the weekend on the Monday recap, so if you want more football stuff, this is a little bit more evergreen speculation today, but talking expansion, relocation kind of who's on the chopping block here? John Lewis. How are you doing sir? I'm doing good. We talked before the season about what is your optimism level and I got to be honest, it's really higher now that we're getting closer to the postseason. So I think all's going good. We have some problems, but there's been a lot of positivity too. I know. I don't know what the deal was on the Monday show. Everyone's like, oh, you guys hate the stallions. I'm like, we just, he praise at the stallions for 45 minutes, but there is a question there, and that'll be one of the first cities we tackle here because the protective stated lease is going to be up. We've gone to three years there. We'll get into that. First off, just pour one out here. RIP the XFL 2020 Viper. Sure, I did see this because I'm notified if, I don't know, I get these some time ago. I set up email notifications, so the original v, the Tampa Bay Vipers and the Cobra face there. I don't think that relates to do with the Vegas Vipers. They don't want to do anything like that. That was a different V. But John, are you sad to see the RIP 2020 Tampa Bay Vipers? Yeah, it's such a legacy. They left behind and then becoming the Las Vegas Vipers. I don't know that anyone is going to really miss that. Yeah, the 2020 vipers with probably one of the worst color combinations that the XFL could have thought of. But yeah, maybe good riddance of that one. Yeah, it's interesting when you talk about some of the attendances now, and I'll include some of the XFL franchises in there, but you look back at what the guardians were drawn or what the vipers were drawing, even the Wildcats, I mean it puts it all in context here, all of that stuff. So we had the report coming out the Friday night football games potentially here next year. I know Mike Mitchell's talked about, okay, adding teams. I'm at the point where going into if there is a 2025 season, you need to either have one or both of moving a team or adding teams just to have it feel like there's some sort of excitement and growth. The US FL kind of tried to do that with the hub things going from year one to two. Are you of similar elk? Do you think we could just roll eight out next year? Where do you think just generally about expansion and relocation? I think you could roll eight out. I think to your point, I think it is a better sign of success if you and you're fiscally responsible about it to roll out at least two more teams just to show there's some kind of growth mean, and it's not just that you're passing along to your fan base or even to the casual fans who we talk a lot about that I think this league really needs to continue to bring in, but I think it is something that adds to the product on the field and I don't think it waters down anything. There was a lot of talk about how consolidating these two leagues together was going to make this extremely better play. I mean we've got how many one in six teams right now? So that wasn't necessarily the case. So I don't think you're going to water anything down by adding two more teams and a hundred more jobs out there, a hundred more players. I mean the quality of football is good and I know Mike's been talking a lot about that. We talk in our group chat over the weekends. It doesn't feel like super teams though. It is weird and I do kind of worry about that. Like you said, you could add the two. I don't know, do you have to go to Skip Holtz and say you got to let go back Corral, we got to have another quarterback here, but you add these, I don't know, it doesn't feel like it's been super teams this year. I think the quality of play has been the best we've seen since probably 2020. Where do you land on that? Yeah, now I will say with the Renegades, that is a one in six team that doesn't feel like a one in six team if you watch them play. The other one in six is unfortunately for Memphis and Houston. Those are two teams that just don't look good on the field. But yeah, I mean I thought there was going to be for the season I went on a fool's errand and tried to predict the final records of these teams. I didn't think that Birmingham and St. Louis were going to be the two teams that were right up there, but it did feel like this is a little bit of bottom heavy league maybe It is. Yeah, there's quite, and now especially doing the episode today, some of this stuff is locked away and we know the USFL stuff and think the XFL will be pretty locked up here coming up. I know you can still play for home field if Michigan wins out and you can kind of do that, but for the most part I think that they're going to have that all. So in terms of, I think you tend to be a little bit more optimistic when it comes to the USFL stuff. What have you made of the attendance woes? I think Arlington is kind of in a glaring spot as well on the XFL side, but where do you land on that and then we'll roll that into what we should do with these cities. You said something before the Birmingham St. Louis game that I completely agreed with. If you don't get 16,000 people in there at Protective Stadium when AJ McCarran is coming into town with the St. Louis Battle hawks, then there might be a problem and it was only 14,000. So I think there are a lot of people in Birmingham that are diehards who expected a lot more and they're kind of disappointed that the rest of the community hasn't caught on and that's too bad because it's a very good team. They are fun to watch. Now they're obviously fun to watch on television because when you start to look at the market rankings, you've got Birmingham up there, you have St. Louis up there. Interesting enough, Louisville, Kentucky where I am, maybe I'm helping the ratings somehow, but it's top 10. So these are all teams that are Funnel Detroit's in there too. These are teams that are fun to watch. But as far as attendance goes, I ride the fence on this because we understand that the financials are not necessarily based on ticket sales, but also when you're putting on a TV product, you wouldn't watch a concert that there was nobody in the stands. So you would think like, well, this act is no good. So I think that there's a dichotomy there that we have to come to grips with. And when I start to see 14,000 for the biggest game of the year, I take pause in that for sure. And I mean the TV Radiance came out, it was the carried the weekend, it was the highest viewed one and it was on Fox, but 750,000, a lot of people were saying, Hey, that's going to be a million. St. Louis is a big market and there's a weird, especially with Birmingham, St. Louis is in that too, some of these markets. But there's just weird, the team you living there, the city is part of, it's kind of like the CFL, right? Where the people in Canada really take pride in. We are Canadian. It's like the Birmingham people. It's no disrespect on the city of Birmingham or the team or how standing they're playing. It's purely the number of people when Seattle didn't show up, and I was the first one to admit that when Seattle didn't show up for the 2020 Sea Dragons, it's like I didn't take personal injury that like, oh, they're criticizing the Seattle crowd. It is what it is. And especially now you've been there three years. I think the hub has worn people out there. I think that they have other stuff to do. I think you've lost the novelty of it except for the diehards. I'll always be surprised how the damage that Hub did the first two seasons there for the stallions and I think just saturating and just burning people out. I think anyone that was going to go kind of went. Yep, I think you're right about that. And it doesn't even have to be a good team or a bad team, very reluctant to compare the UFL to minor league baseball, but when a lot of people go to a minor league baseball game, they don't necessarily go for the team, they go for the experience, they go for the other things that might be happening. They go for the giveaways. And I think that was what is really lacking now. I really enjoyed my time in Birmingham in 2022 when I went down there because it was two games a day and the parking situation was great and all that. And I got sit around and drink some cold beers or whatever and watch a couple of football games and it's very accessible. The only problem is there was almost nothing surrounding any of these games. It was kind of like that in Canton. There was nothing happening between the Saturday game and the Sunday game. There was nothing really on site. So I think there has to be a little bit more experience and I do wonder if that's starting to hurt some of these teams. They go like, well, it doesn't really matter about the product on the field. If you're a casual fan, we're just going to go like, Hey, let's spend a few hours and watch some football. But if you've got kids or even you're just there, you want something else to do before and maybe after the game. And I don't know that a lot of these venues are providing that and they're not providing a lot of giveaways now they have recently. But giveaways, including not just tickets, but you need to give away some merchandise and maybe that'll help boost it a little bit and that brings more people in and maybe more people watch the product on the field and then they say, yeah, this is something that I'm interested in and we come back to. It is so funny. And the last thing about this, and I want to get into even my wife last night we're watching the Mariners game on and we had been, they're on the home stand and we had went Friday and then Sunday for Mother's Day. We were watching the game last night and it was colder here Monday night. Very sparse crowd. And even Dorothy walks downstairs and she's like, oh wow, there's really not a lot of people at the Mariner game tonight. I'm like, this is someone that's like, so it's these people and you get, I respect the Emory Hunts of the world. Well, who watches looks for the stands and who watches for the, it is just a casual thing. You turn it on, wow, people are invested in this. You turn on the game on Sunday and we had 42,000 people, whatever. There you go. Wow, this is, look how beautiful it is. Look at this. And it just adds to the whole ambiance. Even if you're not watching the game for that, it just adds to it. It really took me back of that even where she's like, wow, that's remarkable. There's not a lot of people there. It's a TV program with the UFL and that's part of the set, the people in the background, the fans and they add something to it. As you said, an ambiance. You hear cheering, you hear booing when you don't hear that and it's an empty stadium. And that was always the knock on the USFL was a problem with these empty stadiums and these hubs. It was not appealing for a lot of people to watch. Last thing here, I want to make sure any thoughts on this because part of, we had this deadline in Hollywood coming out talking about this, and I wish here I can pause that gif because that was giving me a headache. Adding the Friday night games I think lead's credence in our conversation today about adding two teams. Mike Mitchell had said it was very much going to be the two teams and Canton was very much in play or Ohio. Is your thought process the same here that it would really be hard to move two of the games or a game from Saturday like this would help add, add I guess tv, what shelf whatever for advertisers and stuff, add more slots for them to do that? Are you under the same feeling? Yeah, I think so. And Fox has really leaned into live sports programming over the past five plus years. Again, SmackDown was on Friday nights, they go into college football and college basketball on Saturdays and Sundays. And it seems to me like this is another opportunity outside of college football or basketball where you have a time where you can put on the UFL. Yeah, you're right with the cadence of if you didn't add a team or two teams, the cadence of one game on Friday night, then are you only going to have one game on Sunday and two games on Saturday or whatever. So to me this feels like there is a lot of talk behind the scenes, which I'm sure there is, that we need to add at least two more teams to add that extra game and that gives some availability there for Fox to sell and make it a thing, make it a Friday night thing. I think personally I thought it'd be great to have either a Thursday night or a Monday night game, but Friday night makes sense for a lot of reasons. You could do a Friday night game and then maybe do two early games Saturday or Sunday, whatever you want to do with that. But you have that cadence of three straight days of the UFL and more opportunity for people to jump in and yes, so to me, when I saw this from Deadline in Hollywood, it seemed like okay, unless they're really going to fundamentally only change things and only put one game on a Saturday or a Sunday, it feels like there have to be at least two more teams in play for 2025. And to me it shows investment, it shows investment in Fox and we're giving a spot to that the college stuff and everything they have, and I know we talked part about this on the Monday, but just more thoughts here as we sit later in the week, but what are these networks putting on this time of year? I think that that's a good spot for that. It keeps the whole live sports. WWE has really done a remarkable job over the last decade or so of marketing themselves more as a sports product, even though it is scripted and they're able to call in more advertising dollars for that. And I think keeping that and hey, if you like sports on Friday, even if it's not wrestling, here's something else kind of action packed and put some branding behind it. CFL does a great job with that. And the Friday night football in Canada, I know a lot of the CFL listeners on our show kind of wrote in about that and said, yeah, we like that and this is kind of what we do. Any other thoughts on that? Or also let's set, let's get to the eight. I think we'll go rough shot through the eight cities we have and then we can see if we want to do any expansion as well. Any other thoughts before we move on? No, but just summing up, we talked about how Fox is starting to lean in on live programming. I think a lot of networks will too. So if CBS and NBC start to get involved, I mean you look at Fox's schedule right now, I think it's all either reality shows or game shows and that's what almost every network is doing, very few scripted shows and what are the things that are cheaper to produce than a scripted show? It's news and it's sports and I think that's where Fox has really started to lean in and get away from some of the scripted shows and then move into this and then make that initial extra investment in the UFL. And I think that is a good sign. I think we are definitely going to have a 20, 25 season and it really feels like there's going to be at least 10 teams in this league. And also, I know we're still kind of in the wake of the rider's strike, but that was part of it. And now have the networks used to like, Hey, let's focus more on then we don't even need to worry about these stupid union riders and all of that. Not that, but I think that that's what happens, right? When you put yourself in the situation of we're going to go on a strike or we're going to do whatever. Okay, well then people find alternative sources or ways to do all that stuff. So a lot of talk, and I know in the Monday as well, we had a lot of talk about the stallions here and everything else. The Protective Stadium lease has been good, right? Successful with the hub and kind of all that stuff. Is that worth investing, continuing to invest in the Birmingham, we have a trademark here. I want to get to involved in the stallions, but just overall thoughts, I think it's been worthwhile for the three years. Is it worthwhile to double down on that moving forward in Birmingham? I think so. I don't think you're throwing good money after bad because it has been an investment. You're still getting 14 to 16,000 people, 14, 15, 16,000 people. And I think by UFL standards as we know, that's pretty good if you continue to build, and I went into this season, I have a little different mindset than I did before the season started. It was such a clunky rollout and you and I have talked about that a lot. You've talked about that with a lot of people. It's a clunky rollout on a lot of different things. But the more I thought about it and the more I've seen this season progress, we know that they were trying to just get this out and trying to get this product on the field. It was almost like a proof of performance thing. Here's the concept here, this is what we're trying to do. And you're getting 14,000 people on kind of a shaky rollout here in Birmingham. I think it's worth it. Now I know we're going to talk about this, but I think there are some other places where they've got some big decisions to make, but I think to me it's worth it in Birmingham. So here Mike Mitchell had sent this over as well and he's like, well, because I was posting about the Vipers. Well, if you really want to make people go crazy, I'm like, well, maybe we'll talk about this. Way to go Mike, but Dallas Stallion, so this was filed back in April, 2023, whatever, but they just filed an extension year of April. So a little less than a month ago here to extend that out. My crazy idea, this is my crazy read whatever tinfoil hat here, we'll talk Arlington Arlington's been lackluster. What if you keep an Arlington team, have it be the Dallas stallions, move the stallions there and you still have the hub in Arlington? Oh, I hate everything about that. I hate everything about that. I mean that's up there with let's call the Houston gamblers the roughnecks and move 'em to Rice Stadium. I mean that is just too much fumbling the wall there, but You're keeping the hub presence in Arlington. I mean it is the same team. You're just really, so you wouldn't touch the stallions. Oh, what do you make of this? The Dallas Stallions trademark? I don't know. Honestly, I don't know what to make of this unless this was some kind of insurance policy that if they couldn't or Birmingham didn't want to come through that, well they have this. I don't understand that. This is well beyond my business comprehension and this is very much above my sports comprehension because I can't imagine why the USFL would want if you did move the stallions, why you would want to continue to call them the stallions. I know that Eric Shanks in the USFL and what they wanted to do was really play on this nostalgia. And this was a personal project for Eric Shanks of Fox, but this seems like it would be personal to try to keep the stallions brand alive. And I just think Birmingham has always been the place, the home city, the capital of all kinds of alt football, which Scott Adamson does a great job of covering and he wrote a great book about it. Every spring football team seems to have, has had a team in Birmingham, but this one, it's beyond me. This just seems like would be such a bad move on many, many levels. So we know we have the mobile stallions trademark, and that was filed back when they were doing the Birmingham stuff and I don't know if they were just worried about it, still could call it be in the area or whatever. Not that far. Right? Mobile to Birmingham Now that I don't know. Oh, well come on. I mean I've been to Birmingham, but I haven't been to Mobile. It looks like it's about three hours, so three and a half hours. Yeah, but I remember when that was coming up, there was all of that and okay, this is why we're keeping all that. But I don't know. It's interesting to me, this Dallas stallions thing, little placeholder there. And again, it's cheap and it's easy to file trademarks and I had a trademark for the National String Football League and all that stuff and more expensive for me than it would be for Fox and US FL here. Which it is interesting that these are still under the US FL enterprises, right? Even though now it's supposedly this fox red bird kind of indenture endeavor there. But I don't know, I could just, I guess so then reflecting on that, the Arlington Renegades, I know that's the home of the XFL. You wouldn't know that by walking around Choctaw Stadium. You wouldn't know that by talking with a lot of the Arlington Renegades, maybe audience walking around, people on the street. You have to keep a presence there. What do you do? Just double down and hope for more. I mean, I don't think you can pull the Arlington renegades unless you have a different thought. No, I don't think you can. I mean if you're going to continue to keep that model there, but to just change the name to the, what good does that do? Just to change the name of the stallions or the renegades? I mean they did go from Dallas to Arlington, whatever that means. But yeah, I don't get that one. Have you been surprised? I have been, and I know the team now is terrible. I'm going to be at the game here in a couple of weeks. I'm like, oh, will be. I bought this months ago. This will be a fun game to go to the Battle Hawks and the Renegades, but we'll be there. I mean the team's terrible. It's really hard now it's like the Edmonton Elks and the CFL where it's really hard to market these. It's hard to get people out to the games when the team stinks. But are you surprised with, it feels like apathy for the renegades, it just never feels even last year for the kickoff. I dunno. It doesn't feel like there's a real fervor there. Yeah, I mean the Renegades have that. They've got the diehard fans. I know how much you love to talk about the beer snake, but it almost seems like the apathy it's showing up on the field. They seem checked out and I don't understand why. I mean, it seemed like there was a really good court. Now I understand Abram Smith got hurt for the year and all that, but that should not make the team as bad as it is. And I don't know if what happened last year, if it was they got hot and continued to be hot and it was the schedule laid out for them. But yeah, I mean I've got friends around the DC area. I don't think a lot of them even realize about the defenders or what they are. And there are people, I've run into this friends of mine, I worked in the sports industry, TV sports for 30 years. I got friends of mine in the sports industry who have been in it for as long as I was or longer. And they still get the USFL and XFL and UFL confused. And these are people who follow sports every day. So there's got to be a better marketing effort I think overall, but certainly in these communities to get people out. It just seems like the dc, what was it, 12,000 people they said showed up for that game and hey, I don't know. So all right. So going through here, so Birmingham, you said you feel like it's not untouchable. Arlington, you need to have a presence there. I don't know if you get rid of stoops here at the end of the year. Can you kind of revamp in there? I'm worried. I'm worried about the renegades kind of here. Yeah, if Perez ages out, it just been, like I said, I've said apathy before, but it just feels like that. It just feels like they can't get, if the hub wasn't there, if they didn't have the deal with Choctaw, I don't know if you would keep the renegades there moving forward. Yeah, I mean I think that's a good point. I think Stoops might just walk himself out there. I don't know how interested he is in this whole thing, especially the way the pay structure is going to be for coaches next year. Is it going to be worth it to him as far as Perez, maybe he ages out, but when you look at the stats, man, you can't blame any of this on Louis Perez right now. So I would hope that they would keep some kind of something there, especially if it's going to continue to be the hub. It seems to make sense. I wouldn't say it's untouchable though. I mean, I'm reluctant to say Birmingham's untouchable, but I think they are. Arlington seems like that's a place that you, you've got to continue to keep this thing going unless they have a better business plan right now it's like firing a coach. It's like when you're talking about moving a team or moving a hub or whatever, you better have an upgrade. And I just wonder if they have an upgrade in mind. I do think we're going to see some big coaching changes here coming in going from this season to next season. I think STS is from just my feeling. I would think Stoops is gone. I can't imagine Wade Phillips rides up this again if the pay structure drops down back. We talked about that before on here. I mean he's so tied into that brand and it's not even worth talking about relocating the battle hawks, but him staying involved. What is your sense of that? It feels like he's pretty invested long term, but hey, there's always going to be lots more opportunities for someone like him. Now going through all this, just a side note here to kind of veer off. No, no, I think you're right. He is so connected with that St. Louis brand and what he has done for that community. But you do have to wonder when he has the success on the level that he has had with St. Louis, if an NFL team comes calling for not a position coach, but for maybe some kind of coordinator position or maybe even a front office that you would think that that's something that he would have to look at. I mean, I hope for the UF L's sake, I hope for St. Louis's sake, things don't change there very much. I don't know if AJ McCarran is going to come back. That could change a lot of things too. But yeah, I think there's going to be some coaching changes. I can't imagine that Houston, they've got to make a change. They're going to be a few. I think DC we've touched on DC less enthusiasm right now in the stands or out field. I know that Mike had to paid attendance here for the weekend, certainly with less of that in the stands, but that feels like about as strong of a market as you can have right now, building back all the way to 2018 through 2020. I know the play on the field hasn't been as great this year, and I think that's probably part of it. Any other thoughts on kind of DC I want to get to Houston? Yeah, I think there is maybe a little bit of apathy and it's starting to come down because the play is not great and there are some very knowledgeable football fans in that market. But to me, when you start comparatively speaking about as far as fan engagement and fan attendance, I mean it's still up there. So it just seems to me that's something that they can build on. And going back to my point, I feel like they were just trying to do a lot of different things and trying to get this league going. Maybe what they've learned in a year, they can build it up and maybe another step, The defenders have been lucky that the commanders, the football team, the Redskins, whatever you want to call it, have not been great kind of through this whole been a long, I mean they're really lucked out. I think, and we'll talk with Michigan, I think you've seen the lions now, and my God, we're paying Jared off, but King's Ramsey, Hey, good for you, man. Get your bag. But you're seeing some of these markets, even Seattle and with the XFL coming in and then we had the Kraken and the Sounders are more popular. You lose, there's certain times where obviously St. Louis hit that situation hasn't changed, right? With the NFL, but I think DC has been really lucky that the commanders have not been great. Now, hey, maybe Jane Daniels comes in and sets the world on fire and then hey, I'm going to watch this versus kind of the defenders. But they've really been lucky thus far that Washington's kind of wallowed in the football market here the last four seasons. And a lot of the enthusiasm for the defenders was we hate Dan Snyder and now that's all out. But I'll be curious if that continues, if they're continuing to retain any of that or now if people are willing to go back to the NFL franchise. Yeah, I mean that's the dynamic in St. Louis by far. That's the reason they have 30, when I was at the game earlier this year against Memphis, there was a guy there who was dressed like Stan. There's still people holding up signs about Stan Crocky who moved the Rams to la. So there is that dynamic. I think you're exactly right. DC had gone down so far in the NFL. This team comes in and just starts setting it on fire in the regular season and goes all the way to the championship or no, were they at the championship? No. I got to think DC's championship. Well, we Had Arlington won DC Yes, Against dc. Okay, yeah, when you turn 50, these things happen. That's Okay. I have a lot of different football League. But yeah, they had that weird loss against Orlando was their only loss and then they went to the championship game. So I think you're right about that. That's why I say I know there are so many thousands of factors at work, but it just seems to me like San Diego would be a great place because they've been jilted, they love football there. Wouldn't that be a great place to put a West Coast team? And we'll touch on that because the deep conversation I want to have here with all that. I like I so talking Houston now, I'm just trying to roughly alphabetically through this. I don't know what you do with Houston now. I think Houston's been so mismanaged in terms of just the coaching and then that screwed up the braas as well, and obviously they're better because of it, but the domino effects of trying to keep and placate the SFL side with the Houston Roughneck gamblers, whatever, however you want to refer to it. I don't know how you come back from that. I've seen people complain about Rice Stadium and that's part of it too, but it's this whole mishmash, I mean, do you pull the plug on that they have other Texas trademarks here. We'll kind of go through some of these, the Austin Outlaws, the Austin gamblers, the Austin running. I don't know what you do at this point to rectify the situation. I don't know that you can. I mean, I really don't. That's one of the way that's been handled. What does the UFL do as a league to say, okay, yeah, we kind of fumbled this and this was messed up and we shouldn't have done this and shouldn't have done that. But like you said, how do you come back from that? I can't think of a good plan where you say, okay, well Rice Stadium didn't work, so where are you going to play now? They already had so many problems trying to find a place to play in the first place. To me, I think if you pulled the plug on Houston, there would be a few heartbroken fans for sure. But I don't think overall that the entire league or even the casual fans are going to say what happened to the Houston roughnecks slash gambler? So I don't know that the value is there for this team in this league Except for just the hub sense of it. And that's really the reason why we have the three Texas teams to begin with. Yeah, I agree. I don't know what value, it could have been tremendous value. I just don't know what value it has more. I think of any of the teams thus far. I think Houston at least has to be drawing 6,700 people, whatever there, it's just not going to cut it. I mean, it is just so sad. We have a lot of people and the Phillips of the world that have been fans of the show forever, and they sit there and we love this brand, but I get a lot of people that are upset, and it is weird because I really predicted this and everyone was like, no, nobody cares. They're fans. I'm like, no, you can't just put, he said, you can't just take the Birmingham stallions. Hey, they're the Dallas Stallions now. Aren't you going to still be a fan? It's the same. And I don't know, back in the USFL in the eighties, how that worked if you were fans, if I've never lived through having my team, I know, I guess we had the Sonics leave and now it's been long enough that if we had a new team here, people would embrace that. But certainly Sonics fans that felt scorned by the Sonics leaving Seattle fans, they weren't fans of the Oklahoma City Thunder. That was the opposite of what you wanted to be. You hated the thunder because they were the ones that took your team away. I don't think you gained the relocation of that. I don't think you gained, I don't think you retained the fans from your original city and then gained the fans that you're moving into. Yeah, I mean, you'd have to go back and ask some of those fans who were Breakers fans back in the original USFL. Well, they had three different cities before the whole thing collapsed. So yeah, I don't know that that followed. Apparently they thought that brand was good enough, but I don't know that those teams would follow those other teams. So yeah, you're right. There weren't many, I don't think there were too many Cleveland Browns fans that became Baltimore Ravens fans. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think there's a weird, and we have this all the time. Oh, do we need to go back here? Should you go back here? And part of all this conversation with all that, I think Seattle is burned. I think some of these cities you do get burned. I mean, shoot, they're in San Antonio when we'll talk about them, but you still hear it. San Antonio is burned in the city, darn teams in the city right now. They're like, well, we don't want to go because we're too upset about stuff in the past. They have a team. I think you lose, like I said before, you don't retain, you're not adding through relocation. You're kind of slicing off and then moving on. But yeah, I think Houston for sure should be on the shopping block. Anything else on that we can talk through? What would it be? Memphis would be next? Yeah, I mean, Fox themselves put a lot of money into Liberty Bowl, so they might want to roll the dice one more time with Memphis maybe. I mean, I think there's going to have to be some retooling there. I was really pulling for John d Filippo to do something with that team and Case Cookes, they just seem like two of the best guys in the league. But I think with the monetary investment that Fox has put into the Liberty Bowl to do some different things there that they did it a couple years ago. Maybe they rolled the dice on that, but they got to figure that out. Yeah, I agree. On the surface, yeah, you could pull the plug and you could say, well, they didn't provide any value either, but I think it might be a little bit more value for Fox. We'll see. Except for that, and except for the FedEx guy that they say wants to buy the team there. And I mean, I guess, right mean what are you Buying? Well, that's been my point all along. And this goes back to the attendance thing and people get mad at me all the time because the gate doesn't matter. But then, yeah, what are you buying then? You're buying partial ownership of some trademarks from back in the day and you get a 10% stake of merch from the ufl.com. I mean, I don't know what being a franchise owner in this league, and maybe that's a deep dive for another day. I don't even know what being a franchise owner would look like here. You still have to, I mean, I would imagine that Redbird and then from what I hear, Fox then would still kind of have to sign off on everything. It's not like you're running your own marketing plans and everything or running your own deals. Well, and hopefully that's been the talk for a while now, behind the scenes, what do we do to make this happen? That was always the US L'S plan. They were going to try to relocate those teams, I think in five years or something like that. Well, then there was the merger. So that probably reset the clock on that. So hopefully there's some talk and some real talk behind the scenes of here's how this league will improve next year and here's why you should invest. So maybe there will be two or three that step up. There's always been this, and Mike's reported this, and I don't question Mike, but I question that the people providing this information, they're like always, well, all these SFL, these were all set up long-term because we ownership, we knew who we wanted in each. And I remember back, what was it with the generals and was it Arod or someone Jeter. Jeter wanted to own part of the team, or they wanted Jeter involved, right? Seems like Jeter, I think. Yeah, I think it seems like it was somewhat, it was a former Yankee of someone that was going to be involved and be a part owner of the generals. But I just don't talked about this before in here. But the way we've got these cities now, right now at eight is 18 steps of telephone through the world. This is why we were going to do these, and this is why the XFL, and then we had to do this and we had to do this, and we had to do this, and we had to do this. I don't believe any of these save for supposedly this legendary Memphis, the FedEx guy. I don't think any of these do, but I can't imagine at this point he's even invested. He is like, shoot, man, it's been three. We did the hub. We're doing this here. I think especially when you're looking at the stadium every week, there's no surprise like, oh, well actually there's all these people invest. You can see that. You can see the local investment on the field every week. I mean, it's not hidden. No, no, you're right. It's very public. You do have to wonder if this team had been better, if there would've been a better turnout. I think that might've been a market to me that if that had been a good team, that maybe you would've had a better turnout and it would look a lot better on television. I don't know. And maybe draw some investors. I have to think that everybody behind the scenes combined as the UFL have some kind of plan in place. Because if expansion did happen, Andy brought up a good point. If expansion happened, this would be the first time it really happened in spring football in recent memory, and I remember, I'm old enough to remember the original XFLA month after the XFL started, it was like March of 2001. They were visiting cities to talk about they were and open about it. They were visiting cities to talk about the expansion of the original XFL, and they'd gone to DC and Portland and some, I think Pittsburgh and some other places. So you always have to keep that in mind because you have to grow the product. And back to your original question when we first started, it has to show some kind of growth. And I think you got to have at least two more teams, but then you also have a few that you're going to have to say, well, we got to do something with it. Either fundamentally change them or maybe move them somewhere else. But you're still going to have to add teams one way or another. I think you give too much credit. There's a plan like, oh, they got this plan here. You might be right. And I mean, we used to work in news and I remember all the time, and there's media bias a hundred percent, right? You watch CNN or Fox or any of this stuff. But I remember back at the local Fox level of people, oh, you didn't go to this because you guys are biased. It's like, no, maybe Sherry was just in the bathroom and missed the phone call. And then we just totally missed the story. And maybe there's no, it's like people, you read into a lot of this stuff or like, oh, Reed's covering or Reed didn't do this or repost it. It's like maybe it's like I was in the bathroom and saw this and thought it was funny and had a typo and deleted that, or I don't know. There's not always some grand conspiracy here with all this stuff. You're right about that. Every time I hear about that when working in local TV as long as I did, people would say, well, yeah, same thing. Well, you guys didn't cover this because you're biased against us or whatever. And I'd be like, if you think that we are organized enough to get a conspiracy together, let me let you sit in on a news meeting that happens at nine o'clock in the morning where everyone starts talking in circles, trying to figure out what they're going to do that day, much less trying to plan out some vast conspiracy to not cover your event. So yeah, you may be right, but I think that might be some cautious optimism on my part and maybe just wishful thinking that there is a plan behind the scenes. Memphis, to me, I like the brand. Good, strong brand, love it. I think they've done questionable stuff with some of the uniform. Other people are hired bad about that. Michigan, the other one here with the Panthers, a lot of history there. You got the Ford Field, the people, can they play it? I think there's the college, they were trained in that during the hub and all that stuff. I don't know what you do. It is both of these in literally. So every week when I post the things on my sports illustrator or whatever, I got to tag all the cities and I'm trying to go through alphabetically and I always forget the m's. It's like, Hey, we've got Arlington and Birmingham. To me, they're both really forgettable. I know Memphis is second in the US FL conference right now. To me, all these really kind of boring games, boring teams. But to me, Michigan is in the same point as Memphis. I doesn't feel like there's a strong outpouring of support there for Ford Field. No, I mean the numbers reflect that. And I think it was an average of 7,400 people or so in the four home games that they've had. And despite that, they're still three in one at home and not having a home field advantage. And they're a good team. And I kept saying, I've heard so many excuses about, I know that the ticket sales came late, understand that. Then people were saying, well, there were three straight home games. Well, to me that was three straight opportunities for someone to attend one game. There was just so many excuses on why that is not working there. But I think you hit on one of the big reasons. It's not an excuse. The Detroit Lions are very good and they're starting to really catch a fan base. And I don't know that the appetite is that big for another team in Detroit. That's why I did a YouTube video and caught some heat from some people and got some agreements from others about there is a problem in Michigan and it's with Ford Field, and there are a lot of people that said, we can keep the Michigan name, but you got to move this team somewhere else. Because again, that's to me, throwing good money after bad is if you are trying to get this lease on Ford Field and you keep seeing the attendance drop in a, what was it, 65,000 seat stadium or whatever it is You getting. It's massive, 7,400 people. It's just that doesn't make sense to me. And it's a good team. Obviously they're going to the USFL championship game. Yeah, whether the conference, whatever. To me, and part of it too is the way that this all goes back to how this league handles its media relationships ride. And we've seen, I don't know if you've tracked all of this, the Birmingham, there's the controversy with the Birmingham stuff and all of that, but the league, in my opinion, doesn't always do the best. Right? Okay. We don't know how to work with the non-traditional media, right? Thank God. No personal complaints, but just is. I've seen other podcasts and read other things, and so we have a question about that, but then we're also not sexy enough nor doing enough to attract the big name media. And I think you see this in Detroit, right? If I'm a writer in Detroit, and I know the Bill shaves of the world, and Tony, what's his face with the, he's been on the show, sorry, I forget his last name. Tony Paul. Tony, what's his face? Sure. Tony. Was it Tony Paul or whatever. They came with the first game there. Oh, this is a novelty. Let's go check it out, whatever. But that wears off. And we have meal vouchers in Arlington for the media there. That doesn't help. I dunno how the Detroit, I don't have someone sitting in the Detroit press box every week to ask 'em about that. But so you don't want to deal with the non-traditional media, but then the traditional media think you're too small time, right? I'm not coming to season two, week seven of the Michigan Panthers. So then, yeah, I don't know how you continue to grow in that market. Memphis is a little bit better, not as big, right? Michigan's got a lot of other sports stuff going on, like you said with Alliance and they've been having the draft stuff. I mean, even though the draft was everywhere, I mean, that was a month going into that was all that, Hey, we're covering, this is going to be the set up for this. We're doing that. That's an issue to me. Some of these markets where we don't, what is the game plan in Michigan? I don't know how you do build that out because you don't have anybody there thoroughly covering the league. I think in dwindling numbers that kind of traditional media are, I just dunno who's covering that league there anymore. And Reed, as you know, when you work in local television, which is even as local television, it's not what it once was, but it's still a big avenue to get the word out. And a lot of people still consume local TV news. But when you start, especially in a market like Detroit, and especially in the environment that news is now, you don't have the manpower you used to have. So if someone's going to decide, well, are we going to cover A or we going to cover B and B ends up being the Michigan Panthers and A ends up being something that is of more local interest or something bigger. They're always going to choose a. And I feel for some of the, I guess sports information directors, some of the guys who are behind the scenes, the PR guys for these teams, because what's the answer? It's like you're trying to appeal to these traditional media, but the problem is you got to wonder, is it from on high or are these people sitting in their own fiefdoms of PR saying, well, we're not going to deal with John and we're not going to deal with Reed because we don't ever see their stuff. We're trying to get the attention of the local market. There's a happy medium in there somewhere. I just don't know what it is. Yeah, I mean, I just searched Michigan Panthers here in news. I mean, you have a Detroit News article from yesterday, a Detroit free press article from two days ago. And then there's a million sporty news, sporty news, sporty, whatever this website is, and then the Detroit Free Press article from a month ago. So it's not like, it's another conversation too about the off, how does the UFL handle during the week kind of stuff and getting information out there when it's not game day and how do we deal with off season and kind of getting the news out. But I certainly wouldn't say that there's an overwhelming amount. I don't know, to me, Michigan, if it wasn't such a nostalgic brand, but I don't think you can get tied up in that mean to me that's on the chopping block as well. I think it is just because of Ford Field. If nothing else, I mean I don't know if there's another venue in Detroit that would work or if you are going to have to move that team, but you're right. And it's sad because they could pull it, but then again the Pittsburgh ballers, they were successful team and then they got the plug pulled on them, but they weren't really in Pittsburgh or ever played there. But you have to weigh is it worth what we're putting into it? And I think when you start to look at Michigan, even though they're a good team, UFL has to say, this is just not working as a whole Last one here and then we'll do a little expansion talk. Battle hawks obviously untouchable with that. I mean there's no point even having to debate about that. The brass are a tough one because the brass having we're good in the a f with the commanders and everything else have never really hit those marks have done respectable. I know the Easter weekend, right, the first game was like 14,000 and they've gone down from that, but that's about what Birmingham drew. What are your thoughts to me, Birmingham's kind of a bubble one. Yeah, I think San Antonio, yeah, I think if there's a, I don't know what the lease agreement is there for them, so I don't know what they're pouring into as far as their stadium, but I think when you start to get the numbers that they've gotten a bubble team, I think that is a good way to put it. But again, if you're going to move them or going to, are you going to move venues or whatever, you need an upgrade and I don't know what the answer really is for San Antonio there, especially if they want to continue to keep the Texas thing going. But yeah, I think that San Antonio commanders average like 19 or 20,000 fans for the brief time that they were there and I think it feels to me like you're right, that community was so burnt and actually has a really good alt football history, but I think they were so burnt that even Wade Phillips might not be able to win 'em over here as it goes along. Yeah, so back, this was Easter weekend, the first weekend that Sunday game, 13,000 for Easter Sunday and we had all the with the, and I understand the market sizes are different. I understand that San Antonio has more people than Birmingham, but we're just talking about, and again, it's not always apples to apples. I get all these cool, how come we so hard on Birmingham and you're not so hard because Birmingham's been there for three years and they played like 70 games in the city and the people should know what that's going on there because even non Birmingham, if you think about that, you had 40 UFL games season one and then you had another quarter of the games and another, however, I can't remember the schedule breakdown how many, but you've had probably 65 U-S-F-L-U-F-L games played at Protective Stadium over the last three years. Visibility is not an issue there. It is fan interest in that product And the stallions are a known brand there with San Antonio sometimes in these markets too, as working in, you've worked in local television, you've got to have an advocate inside some of these stations unless you're St. Louis because they've got really good relationship with the media there in St. Louis because St. Louis television and newspaper, radio, whatever, understand that people are interested in the battle hawks. There are small groups that are interested in all these cities, but not maybe overall. And I think that's what you really got to work on is the marketing and some of the media relationships. But yeah, I mean you could look at the attendance with these New York guardians and it, we are in the biggest city, but it didn't really work out. So still you're looking at numbers of people who are coming to these games. It doesn't matter how big the community is, Just to make sure that I'm fair on all this. I'll cut San Antonio. I say they're on the chopping block. You've had two seasons there to figure it out. You're not up to the standards anymore. Scott Bailey's of the world trying to advocate for you but it's not working out. I put 'em on that. So I got, I'm cutting Houston, I'm cutting the whole LI dunno, I think everything except Birmingham. I mean Birmingham, St. Louis, I really would. I appreciated Tom KO's interview last week on here. That Was great. Yeah, It was good. There really can't be, to me there can't be that many untouchables besides, what's to call it Birmingham, St. Louis and DC at the end of the day. I'll totally agree with that. I think if you've got some bubble teams like San Antonio, I think you give 'em another year, Houston pull the plug, you're not losing anything there. There's sadly there's just no value there and to me with the Panthers that's got to be relocated or something, I don't think you can continue to trend the way they're trending and stay in there. Alright, so now let's talk relocation here a little bit. We'll try to get is going long. I hope John Lewis's like how long am I am? I'm on your up all this. I'm pulling up here. I want to get just a map of all this to show because this is where, let's see. Okay, Reddit made this one. Okay, this is good. So now what do we do with these teams? I think we need to get some West Coast representation on this. It kills me and I wanted to find the official one, but this demonstrates clearly here where when they show this map, I'm like, where are you cheering the UFL from? And we're showing area here. So what do we do here? I have some trademarks that the US FL has, right? We've got the Austin gamblers, we got a lot of Austin, we got the aviators, got a lot of Baltimore stuff here. Where do you want to see 'em go here? I mean I think you got to take advantage of Oakland somehow. I don't know how you do that, but to me that would be a no brainer. Try to hop in there, the San Diego of it all. You got to get somewhere in California. I think you have to get somewhere in California and you got to get somewhere in the northeast. I think some people have tried to push like, well you've got dc I don't really count. I mean DC's not really that northeast. I think you have to get something up there and you have to have a West coast press. You've got the middle America there, you've got all your central time people, but you've got to get somebody. I agree. To me San Diego is a no-brainer. Now again, there are so many things about trying to place a team in California. I think a lot of owners would tell you that there are a lot of issues, but Oakland, let's bring back the invaders. Let's go or San Diego, either one. That makes sense. Portland would make sense to me, but if you're going to add two teams, I'm with you. I think you have to add a team in the northeast and a team out west somewhere in the Pacific time zone. So you have the Oakland invaders here and not all. If you go through the trademark listing in here, I put a little bit more stock. Were the ones where they've registered multiple categories for these. So if you're looking at the Oakland, I mean again, this is easy to do, but just in terms of things that they've gone through the work to kind of do here. A lot of work with Ohio and Mike Mitchell was talking about that. That was going to be one of the teams of Canton. I think I would just call it Ohio. I don't think you need to call it Canton. Oakland invaders here. Heavy marks on that. I've got the Oklahoma Outlaws here. A lot of heavy marks on that. And then we go down through the line here. Obviously we've got the stars and the Mahler teams who are involved in that. The gunslingers. Yeah, this is when I was losing track too, going through time here trying to get on the bucket. I was like, where are all this going on? But I don't know, to me, I go through the Tom Meows of it where, and you had said earlier with the Houston, you move Houston. Yeah. Are there going to be some upset fans? I think you need to prioritize being in a market. I think if TV is important as it is, no disrespect to Birmingham, not the biggest TV market in the world, no respect to Memphis. I would almost stay in Michigan just because of you're in Michigan if nothing else because it's a bigger market in terms of that. I know Houston's high up there as well, but like you said, dumping money in there. That would be where I would prioritize it. Thoughts on that? Yeah, no, I agree. I do like the idea of Ohio and the whole Canton area. I mean I went up there last summer, it was really fun. But yeah, I think if you have a team in the west and you've got a team in the northeast, it just kind of feels like it balances everything out in Ohio. I mean it'd be another Midwest team I guess that could work. But yeah, you've got to color this map in some more. I mean this looks like Mondale versus Reagan here back in the day Just is finally. So Arizona outlaws, we got a lot of Arizona on here, a couple different marks for that many Austin. I think if you can't make American Houston, I dunno if you're going to make it work in Austin, I don't know if the population and everything's there for that, the Baltimores of it. Do you like the Baltimore stars? We roadmap the stars. No, No. I mean you've got DC there. To me it doesn't make sense to put two teams that close together in such a small league. To me that doesn't make sense. Boston breakers, There's your northeast presence. I could see that Just going through Canton on that here we got a lot of the Dallas stallions. Denver, you bookmarked this, the Dallas stallions, the hub of the UFL 2025 Denver Gold, always get a lot of, there was the Canton Gold. I think that was rumored as well, but that would qualify for me even though that's not quite filling out the map. As much as I would like anything in this, and I know the sports doesn't exist for a large swath of this, but I would be okay with Denver. What would you make of that? Yeah, And Denver was a pretty popular team back in the original USFL now that was a long time ago and lots of things have changed. I mean the only concern is are you going to be playing in Denver in March or April and that could be a little tough. We've seen you get snow outs out there sometimes in baseball, so that could be a little tough, but I think Denver could be in on it, especially if it could be another city with a very bad NFL team that would maybe say, let's try this gold stuff for a little bit. Oh, your national tutors, this one had to come up here. Well, I just surround out the conversation and make sure we're touching all these. Like I said, you got to get out of this portion of the map. It hard. It's hard to appeal. Again, I've said this a million times, you would never settle a team on a league in these markets under any circumstances except the way that we are at right now. Well, but wouldn't you feel like Nashville might be a home for relocation rather than expansion? Yes, that would be fine, but to me it's one that's deck chairs on the Titanic at that point. Think you Might be right. I think you need to make a move on that. And I think that's it. I was just trying to make sure we had any other, and again, you can get a lot of these, but at least it just gives us a good jumping off point for all of that. So I dunno, final thoughts. Rounding this out here have been wild meandering into conversation. Anything else you want to touch on? I know we came in with a very structured idea of what we're going to talk about, but it tends to happen. We talk about a lot of different things, which I enjoy. No, I, I'm continuing to stay optimistic and like I said before, it was such a clunky rollout and there were so many red flags with this league the way it rolled out. But then the more I continue to think about it and maybe I'm just getting soft, is like, okay, they've got it. It's working TV wise. Let's hope that they're learning from their mistakes. They're starting to learn from what I know you have heard a thousand times and I have too. You've got to do better local marketing, let people know these things are happening and start giving away stuff. I mean, come on, let's give away some things and get some people in. That's what I'm hoping for. Yeah, I've always said that they need to view, I was like, oh my dog said I thought there was another creature on my deck. There needs to be, I would say if I was involved in the UFL, I would do a deep dive in the off season of how does the CFL conduct its marketing A in the off season because the CFL has an extended off season as well. They really go dormant for a lot of it. And then how do they ramp up and how do they work with the communities? That's why I thought Todd was great last week because selling tickets to me and I know there's vast differences and I had Sam Schwartzstein texting me like the arena football's nothing like that. I'm like, we're selling football content here. You're trying to get butts in. See to the end of the day you're trying to market a niche product. I think there's a lot. But yeah, if I was with the UFL, I would do a deep dive into some of these CFL franchises, figure out how do you stay relevant in the off season? How do you market bring players in? I know the teams are doing more. I get the press releases trying to, it seems like they're not coming in just an hour before the game. They're trying to come in the day before or the morning of and try to do some more stuff, but my fear is June 17th or whatever, this shuts off and then we come back in December again and that's kind of the biggest fear then I think you're rolling the same plan out next year and it doesn't seem like it's going to change. No, and that's not going to work. That's not sustainable. Yeah, you got to sell an experience too. I remember listening to a podcast of a guy who was a general manager of, at the time WUSA, which later became the NWSL roundabout, but he said, you can say yeah, these are the greatest, this is the highest level of women's soccer and people don't care. You've got to sell an experience. You have to give people an opportunity to come to a reason to come to the game, whether it's some pre-game stuff, halftime stuff, post-game stuff and then when they take in the product on the field they say, oh, that's interesting too. That was fun. This was a whole fun experience. So I'm going to come back and I hope that we see a little bit more of that as we go along in St. Louis. I was there, there was a little bit of pregame stuff. It wasn't as big as it was the year before and there was really nothing happening after the game, but the game's, the thing, there was a lot of tailgating going on. That was a lot of fun. And I'm going to be interested, I'm planning to head down to Birmingham for the season finale, so I want to see is there a better experience than what I had before as far as outside the arena. So it'll be fun. Yeah, I've always said I got a lot of flack even going into the XFL last season from people with the league and it is never been a question of the football on the field and the minds behind the football product of it at all. And I mean even we want to poo P on Curtis Johnson and build up stoops and stuff, but overall the quality of football is I believe the highest quality of spring that we've had since the US fell back in the eighties. And that's, that's not the issue. It's never been the issue. It's kind of all of this other stuff and I use my own as a videographer. I am not at all the best videographer in the world in terms of vision or talent or whatever, but I think I do a really good job wrapping what I do into a tangible thing that I think I'm pretty good at marketing it. I think I'm pretty visible about it. I think the customer service aspect of it is pretty good. I mean we just got back from Vegas this huge conference. It wasn't even my client, it was whatever colleagues, clients and I'm like, there's nothing that we do that's like a thousand other people could come do this, right, the quality of what, but it's everything else that's involved in that and it's responsive and we show up and you look professional and you market and you're in these places. The quality of the football isn't the issue here. But that's also, yeah, not people are not, when you're flipping through your guide on a Saturday morning, it doesn't say UFL like the best spring football that's ever existed. You need to know everything else about it. It doesn't matter what's on the field that people aren't turning on the tv, Which I wish they would bring back the United by Football or some kind of pre-game show for these things to tell those stories because a thousand great stories in this league. Well I think yeah, mean you could even do that through podcasting right now for free, but they don't seem to interested in doing that. What an idea Reed, what a great idea. Just make some guys available and we'll talk to 'em about their story. I've given up. It's been so busy but I've really just kind given up sending my Monday email. So John Lewis, if you want shorter little more detailed, shorter conversation John Lewis' channel is probably the way to go if you want long meandering, rambling thoughts, this is probably the place to go. John, anything else you're working on? No, just I try to do about a video a week or so just trying to talk about the league and some stories and things like that. But I appreciate you having me on. It's always fun to be on here and yes, a lot of my videos are usually less than 20 minutes. Sometimes they're about five to 10, so it's fun to talk over an hour about some UFL. I appreciate it. Yeah, I'm about out the game. I'm just going to start uploading the games to YouTube and just call it a day. I think I'm getting out of this, but I appreciate you guys' comment. Anything you have, any thoughts on this? Anything we've talked about? Like I said, a little more speculation today but always found, wanted to touch on that so we appreciate it and think we got some CFL content hopefully. Fingers crossed you're coming up after the break. Well I haven't seen this great face since I think our CFL Great cup show. Where the heck were we Hamilton back in Hamilton de end, Ralph Canadian press here. Deanne, how are you doing? It's almost June And it can't come too soon. Thank you. Always great to catch up. Do you mean in terms of excitement for football or in terms of weather or in terms of Both? Both. I mean we can't complain about the winter we had, we had very little snow by Southern Ontario proportions, but yeah, I can't work. Summers always summer and fall are my two favorite times of year. So bring it on. Let's go. Well we're getting in and we'll talk the Chad Kellys of it all here and everything else. Argos and I wanted to talk maybe a little Edmonton but the Sean Lemon thing and we were tracking that last week coming out and then the news that he's at training camp and the C-F-L-P-A kind of all that. Walk us through that. This took a lot of us here in the state side by surprise. Well US two, excuse me, only because you're retired then came the league discipline and then they made it sound like it was pretty emphatic. But then as is the case with any suspension, the player can appeal and the C-F-L-P-A can launch an appeal or grievance on the player's behalf and while that process is going through to fruition, the player is allowed to resume practicing and ultimately playing with the team until an arbitrator renders his decision. So I thought when the whole thing was kind of bizarre, I mean you resigned with the LO west after the gray cup, then he retired and then came the discipline and then Tuesday was Tuesday morning he was at practice. And so I think, like I said, where the PA's going to come from on this is he was suspended for allegedly betting on CFL games in 2021 when he was with Calgary. And on one occasion he also is allegedly to have wagered on games that he was involved in. Sports betting didn't become legal in Ontario and Ontario is the only province in Canada until 2022. And so I think where the PA is going to come from on this is how can you have a policy in place in 2021 when it wasn't legal to bet in Ontario, for example. So I don't know, we'll see where it goes. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he came back because it was on again off again. Now it's on again, but we'll see. I mean Lord, there doesn't seem to be any ideas how long this could take and so he'll get into maybe an exhibition game or two or maybe he'll start the season. We don't know. It just surprises me because like you said, you thought he was walking away, he was retiring here and you go out and Greg kind of all that stuff. I just don't understand here and now to be embroiled in all of this, I know he's a player that's been in the league a long time because various players, you might go to the CFL and then whatever, I'm walking away. But to someone to be in it so long and then I mean there's this, his legacy now we had Darryl Davis on a couple weeks ago when it kind of first came out and he looked at it way less severe than maybe an Andrew Harris issue where you're cheating on the game and all of that. But what does this do to his legacy here? It just seems kind of messy right now. Yeah, it seems messy. I mean I guess it all depends what the arbitrator decides, excuse me, and what the arbitrator finds. If the arbitrator finds evidence that he did do this and adheres to the suspension or gives it let's say nine games for argument's sake, then I think we can sort of say that it's a tarnished a bit. But right now I don't think it has done anything only because we don't really know exactly. I mean there's allegations of what he did, but until the arbitrator does a deep dive and takes a look and we find out exactly what he did, you know what? It's very, very bizarre because sports betting and betting on your own game, I mean there's a whole integrity issue. I mean we went through this years and years and years ago with Pete Rose and decades later Pete Rose is still not in the baseball hall of fame because of it. So I mean it's a serious matter, I get it. But it happened. I don't know, maybe we're naive here because it's not like there's allegations that threw a game or that he bet on his bet on himself or he somehow intentionally marred the integrity of the game. We don't know that. And if the arbitrator comes through and says that the policy is not very strong and that Mr. Lemon did not do anything untoward, then I think he should be allowed to play based on that. Now depending on what the arbitrator finds, if the arbitrator finds something else more gambling, then I guess we have to revisit the subject at that time. Yeah, it's less and there's a fire ambulance or something going by here, it's less severe than the trying the raptors where the guy was betting on games and the parleys and all that kind of stuff. And we'll get to the Argos here. I mean is this a Sean Lemon issue? Is this an ettes thing at all? I know the Argos have got their own PR and kind of everything because obviously the ettes and they want the focus of this the off season now to be, hey, we're running the back and all of that stuff. Is this affecting them kind? What's the media landscape of that? Or is this just the Sean Lemon issue? You know what? I know yesterday it caused a bit of a stir at training camp just because of the obvious, right? Yeah. You come there and you see number zero on the field and you go, wait a minute, I thought he was suspended. Like I said, I can only speak for me, I would look at let's wait and see what the arbitrator finds out and go from there. Like I said, I don't partake in sports betting, so I'm probably very naive in terms of asking whether this is big or not. I mean, I think it's a big deal. I mean the integrity of the game comes into play definitely. But like I said, someone much more succinct than I is going to take a deep dive in this and then hopefully those findings come public and when the arbitrator renders his decision one way or the other, we'll have a much clearer picture. Yeah, I am emotionally invested enough in all the sports stuff. I couldn't imagine betting on any of this stuff and having be more upset. We were going to do this last week and then my work schedule and stuff, but now we got more with this Chad Kelly issue and everything. Catch us up to speed here. It really sounds like a mess and just a lot of PR kind of nightmare for the Argos and Chad and everything else. Yeah, it is. There was a lot of fallout Thursday when we showed up at rookie camp. We were told that Mike Clemens was going to speak on the suspension two days prior of Chad and for the gender-based violence policy of violations. And so there was, I mean by Argo Standard, a very good contingent of media there. And I got there a couple hours early and during the workout, and I wasn't even at the stadium 10 seconds when another reporter said, can you believe it? And I went, believe what? And I took a look on the field and it's like, holy smokes, really? Now I know technically he was allowed to be on the field and I know he wasn't participating in practice, he wasn't practicing, he was just on the field. But the PR ramifications of that, I mean it was mind boggling. I don't know who thought that that would be a good idea for the Argos, for Chad Kelly and for the CFL in general because I mean we'll get into the reasons why, but the reasons why are very, very serious and very, very significant. And to have him on the field as if, well, I don't want to say nothing happened but have him on the field to me was very, very, it was a PR nightmare and it created the fallout that you would expect it to create to the point where on Sunday when the open camp they had said, they made it clear that Chad Kelly was not going to be involved in team related activities. And to the best of my knowledge, that remains the case moving forward. I've seen now he's going to be transferred to the suspended list or there's, He was transferred this morning. But that's procedural too. I mean anytime a player is not with the team for team activities, a matter of procedure is to put 'em on a suspended list. I mean if you look at it the first time, you might look and go, oh my gosh, the Argos have suspended. Chad Kelly, well not really. They've done a procedural move to put 'em on the suspended list. I wanted to talk about this twofold from the football side as well, but just from kind of the Argos, and we've chronicled this for a long time on the show, and I mean even longer than that, but with the media there and with getting a foothold and all of this, and here we're finally, we do the gray cup two years ago and then we make it again and all this stuff. And what is this? I mean, do you think this will blow over season rolls on? Because obviously Chad's going to be out for a while pending all of this stuff, but what does it do just kind of for them in the landscape there? That's a really good question. Part of me wants to think that if he complies with conditions of the suspension and goes through all of this rehab or all of this education process that the league has put forth to him and comes back and they feel that he's completed terms of the suspension, then I think the CFL will welcome him back. Sorry, reinstate him. I think that's the better word. And then Toronto's got a decision to make right and the whole thing through this process, and that's what G and Mike Clements said last week. Even if Chad in his camp appeal the suspension and theoretically is able to come back to resume practicing in play, the Argos will reserve the right to decide at that time whether to bring them back or whether to give their own secondary punishment or on this matter. So they've taken the attitude, they're going to take a wait and see and they're going to see how this plays out. And I think that's probably the way they're going to do it. And like I said, I'm of two minds. This is a very serious, serious situation for him. And can he come back? I guess kind of maybe, but I wouldn't be surprised if he finds it difficult to come back just because of the severity of the situation. But then the other part of me is saying if he comes back and they're two and seven, one and eight and he comes back and all of a sudden they win two, three games, then maybe to some they'll put that in the back of their mind and think, okay, he's back playing good football, the team's winning, everything's all good. I'm not so sure. I just think the severity of why we are where we are is pretty damning and the Argos are really walking a PR tightrope here regarding how they handle this and what happens moving forward. And I guess we'll have to see, just like I said, I would've kind of liked to go to rookie camp last week and just concentrate on Mike Clemens and then understand, I just took it for granted that he was not going to be at rookie camp and he was not going to be at training camp and was not going to be with the team until he complied with conditions of the suspension bringing him back and telling us that, oh yeah, it doesn't violate conditions of his discipline. I thought, whoa, I'm not sure I would've done that. One last question about Chad, and then I want to talk the football side of it because it's hard where someone's had things in the past where, I don't know if Jeremiah Mazzoli, for example, gets accused. I just think where there was history of other behavior in the past where it's just more of a spotlight here on that where maybe you would, I don't know if Chad's not getting the benefit of the doubt, and I don't really have a side one way or another where I stand, but it is hard where you're someone that's had things in the past and now you have this and now it's like, oh, well see, there you go. We were just waiting for him to screw up and now we finally screwed up. It's kind of what it seems like and not that people were wanting to see Chad fail, but it feels like, oh, see, there you go. We knew all along something was going to happen. Yeah, it is funny though. I mean up until everything that happened in November and in the off season, I'll be honest with you, he really made me personally believe that he had turned a corner and that he had matured and that he had grasped the understanding that this was a new opportunity for him and it was an opportunity for him to continue playing football with a new team in a new city and a new league and to start fresh. And I mean in training camp, when he was going through the process of being the starter, I remember asking him about his past and what have you, and he's always owned up to it. And when we talked about whether there was vindication on his part because of his past, I mean he was very adamant. He said, well, you didn't think I could do it. And I told him point blank. I said, you know what? I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, but I told him there was some trepidation there and he accepted that he embraced it and everything he did during this course of the season, he looked like embraced being the face of a franchise. Then this came, right. And it's unfortunate because like I said, I mean we're all very well aware of his past. He has made questionable decisions in the past. But I mean, the guy who's 29, he was approaching 30, and I just thought he embraced the fact that this was one last opportunity to play football that was close to home and all those things, and that he had embraced it. And unfortunately we are where we are And making pretty good money. Well, that doesn't hurt either, but I mean now all of a sudden that opportunity is hanging in the balance too. So Football here, I mean the Argos, right? They got Cameron Dukes up there, Brian Scott, friend of the show, and he has kind of been way down the depth chart there. But what do they do? I mean, is this season gone? Nine games mean half the season. I mean, what do you think from a football standpoint? Well, I mean if you bring in right now nobody's cut any veteran quarterbacks or all the guys who have a CFL pedigree are still in camp or have retired. So I think you're almost obligated to go with what you got because at least Dukes, and I'm having a brain cramp, Ryan Scott, Thank you. At least they know the system, they know the coaches, they know when Ryan Dinwoody makes a call, these two guys at least can comprehend it immediately and know what to do. You bring in a new guy now and if there's a crash course involved, CFL training camps are very, very short a couple of weeks and they don't give you a whole lot of time to cram. So I think they're going to stick with what they have and we'll see both those guys play in the exhibition season. And I mean, Duke's made two starts last year and was the short yardage quarterback and show glimpses now we'll see, can he be the bonafide starter? The jury's out. And that's not a slight against him, that's just Chad started 16 of 18 games last year and was the outstanding player for a reason. I mean, there's just a lot of talent there. You would just not like to waste this opportunity right now. It just feels, I mean, Chad's playing, this is their window still. And now to think you flip it like that, you would never think that we're not going to have our starting quarterback like that non-injury related for half the season. I mean, it's a pretty big blow there. How do you think, have you gotten a sense of how coach Jim Whitty and everybody's handling it, I know pinball did his media, have you guys gotten any of that since yet? I have not had a chance to talk to Ryan. As I said to you, I'm going to Guelph tomorrow and we'll have my first opportunity to speak with Ryan on and off the record just to see how he's doing and what they're doing and how he's grasping it. But I mean, the guy had a pretty good run up to now, I mean three years on the job, and they finished first all three years and won a great cup in 2022. So he's obviously a very good coach. And I look at that offense, the offensive line is coming back intact. The receiving core is maybe minus Curley Gittins Jr. Who was traded to Edmonton, but Curley was hurt much of last year too. So a lot of those guys are coming. There's a lot of familiarity on offense, AJ Willett's gone, but Kadeem Carey is shown when healthy, he can be a pretty good running back. And Daniel a boy, I'm proud of myself for even pronouncing it has shown that he can step up and he probably may get a more increased role in 2024 as well. So offensively, I think they're in decent shape. You just want your quarterback, don't shoot us in the foot. Just basically what they had told Chad, take whatever's there and live to play the next down. And I think Cameron Dukes and Brian Scott, Thank you, and Brian will have that analogy because they're young quarterbacks, right? And they probably don't have that same mentality that Chad does, that I can make this happen, whereas these guys are going to look and go, okay, it's there. I can do it that way. Yeah, because a side note, I'll never forget Brian and winning the Spring league, what would that have been, the 2021 championship during Covid? They flew him into, I think they had to do it in Orlando because everything got shut down. And then having to Colin from the hotel room the next day, it was very exciting stuff back in the early Mark Casta war. Last things here. So the east, we got the ettes here running back and everything, and Toronto in the west. Am I wrong in thinking that Edmonton is the most interesting kind of the watch here? I don't understand the Trey Ford not, okay, we're bringing them a cloud, paying them a bucket of money. Do you agree with that or what do you think on the West? Well, to me, the west is Intri top to bottom. I mean, you've got the Elks making the big pitch for McLeod, but it is only for this year. So let's keep that in mind. But also you mentioned Trey Ford. I kind of thought last year he earned the right to at least start the year as the starter, and he's in the last year of his rookie deal. So the timing is interesting, but I mean to me, there's no doubt that cloud's, how do I say this nicely? I love Trey Ford, but I think McLeod brings more experience, more veteran savvy and a championship pedigree having won two of these. And he's played a ton of football throughout his pro career. So I get it. I understand it. My concern is that you've got, what sort of impact do do you make on Trey and his development by telling him this year that you know what, yeah, you're going to watch, and I mean in talking to Trey this off season, he says all the right things, but you know can tell just as the competitor in him that he's disappointed. But the other intriguing thing to me is you got BC hosting the Gray Cup this year. There's a big push for them to get to the game. You've got the Calgary St. Peters, they had their first losing season in a while last year. They're in the playoffs last year for the 18th straight year. Can they keep it going? And there's a lot of questions about Jake Meyer and his time there, and Matt Schultz is the backup in Calgary, and he played well when given the opportunity in Hamilton last year too. And Saskatchewan has Trevor Harris back, healthy new head coach and a bunch of new faces in free agency, and then you've got Winnipeg being Winnipeg going after a fifth straight gray cup. So to me, there's a lot of intrigue in the west. But yeah, my interest is in Edmonton to see what happens. They haven't made the playoffs since two 19 and they've only won something like 11 games since then. And Chris Jones, I got to believe as the coaching GM is under the microscope this year, this is year three, and they've been four and 14 in each of the last two. So it's time to fish or cut bait. There's got to be some sort of just salt, or was it oil and vinegar or oil and water between Trey Ford and Chris Jones where there's just got to be, because when he plays and you see it on the field, and I don't understand why you don't do with the Trey Ford thing like BC did with the Nathan Rourke when they had him for cheap, and let's bring in, it's like, well, no, now we're going to pay McLeod, but lot of money and then we got to take advantage while you can. I mean, BC was incredible that year. I mean, a Rourke was awesome, but B, we could sign every single person we wanted around him because we were paying them a nickel and a half, right? Yeah, exactly. To me, I think Trey showed last year he can be a good, very good quarterback. Maybe you could have made some investments on the defensive side to give him some support or maybe brought in another receiver. I mean, they do have Eugene Lewis as the top receiver, so I mean there's no doubt there. And they have Brown as the running back. So yeah, it's interesting. I guess the CFL is a quarterback driven league, however, so basically you're telling McLeod, we're expecting you to stay on the field and put points on the board and keep our defense fresh and keep them off the field. But I will say this to Reid that Chris Jones has won a lot more gray cups than I ever have. So I'll defer to him, but if it doesn't work, I'll be the first to tell him. Well, but yeah, but you get that with the Bill Belichick here where, I mean, you can have success for a long time. If I'm Ford, I demand a trade to the Argonauts or something. I mean, wouldn't that be Spicy shit? Know what I'll tell you, I think he would look really, he would've looked good in my mind in Hamilton because he is from nearby Niagara, but they've got their quarterback of the future and Taylor Powell, who showed a lot to me last year as a rookie starting nine games. So I get that. But you know what? He would look good anywhere in Southern Ontario. That's for darn sure. You're right. Last question then. So because Bo right, showing up in the boot, they say it's fine. You really are high on Taylor Powell there. I mean, what do you make of that? Well, I was there on Monday when Bo took to the field. He participated, he was in pads, he participated in 30 or 40 plays. Granted they were Skelly six receivers against seven defensive players. And he didn't run, but he threw the ball well, he made some very nice passes and afterwards declared himself fit and ready and that he's no doubt in his mind that he's going to play in the season opener in Calgary, which is a homecoming for him, given that he started his career with the stamps. But I don't think it was a coincidence that on Sunday they signed Powell to an extension keeping him under contract until 2025. So you know what? You can't have, I mean, they'll tell you anything in the CFL that can't have, you got to have more than one quarterback to make a run of it. But yeah, they're pretty solid there with those two in my mind. But as far as Bo, we'll see, right? We got two weeks to see how much he plays in the exhibition games and see how he feels. There were a couple of times he walked to the line or he walked to take the snap. He looked like he was a little ginger with his right leg, but we'll see. Well, Dan, I really appreciate making the time today, taking time. Good luck tomorrow training camp and all that stuff, and hopefully we'll get you back on here. And I'm getting my Rolodex here working, trying to remember who's on what team and everything. We're getting back into it. It's been UFL here and now we're getting back in, so I appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you so much. Huge special thanks to Dan and John Lewis for coming on today. Really appreciate that. Like I said, Dan working with my crazy work schedule and him and covering the Argos training and the Tiger Cats and kind of all of that stuff. Dan's incredibly busy, always just a huge wealth of knowledge, A Hall of Fame reporter like he is coming on the show. And then John Lewis is always go check out John's channel. Like I said during the interview, not quite as this extensive hour long discussion, John does a little bit more bite size, and so I think that it's both sides of the coin. I think it's all good. And subscribe if you enjoy all this and give this to 3,500 subscribers. Hope this wasn't too, not football today, but I thought it was fun. We'll see you next time. Thanks.

UFL Week 7 Results + Reactions! Winner and Losers From UFL Week 7!!

Well here we are, hopefully a little less chaotic than last week with me. Tap dancing around, trying to kill time while Andy was racing home from work here. But we have lots of stuff to talk to about today, UFL. We'll get TV ratings tomorrow, we'll talk attendance. And Andy, we have breaking news to talk about as well. Andy coming off a Dodgers shutout win or excuse me, the Padres shutout win of the Dodgers year. But you still have a rant today, so this should be good. How are you doing sir? Yeah, I'd rather just rant about that. That was really fun. I got to go to my first Petco game this year. The weather was immaculate attendance record for the Padres as a three game series in their history of Petco Park. It was really fun. It was great to always be an rival, but had a great weekend. How about you sir? It was good. Yeah, I saw the attendance from the Padres game and I said for context, that's like six Memphis, so I didn't want to tweet that out, but I no, but based me around. But no, we'll talk about all of that today. We'll talk about attendance. Andy has promised me a ran. People are saying hi in the chat here. We'll talk through the games. We got some playoff stuff that sealed here. The USFL conference, A little sleepy here maybe the last couple of weeks. Workshopping the fun show this week. I think this is the last week of my weird work schedule, so this might not be what everyone wants coming up Friday, but I'm trying to get CFL stuff on here and then we'll have a long form XFL interview, but it's the best and the worst of everything. I got paid more today to drive to run a Zoom call than this podcast I'll probably generate all year. So we got to just contextualize your but reiki news here I was setting up. I saw this. This was exciting. So I guess let's get the original tweet here and then I have the article potential here for UFL games coming in for Fridays here, coming up on Fox deadline reporting today. Fox unveiled their upfronts and I had seen this coming already that they were generally, they kind of wait to do some of this stuff for the advertisers, but they were going to unveil their whole slate today because I don't know if revenue's down or they're trying to appeal to all of this stuff, but coming out, we all know that SmackDown is moving the USA and then WWE Ross going to Netflix here I think next year. I can't remember the timeline of that, but they're talking about using UFL content to fill some holes on Friday night. Andy excitement, what do you think? So I guess we're just going with Friday night football. We're just going to go ahead and move on that. And you know what, we've seen that from other leagues, obviously the CFL famously does that. Obviously they put Friday night football on tv. I wonder what that's going to look like as far as presentation goes. I'm sure, I mean not just in terms of graphics but in terms of do they have other bells and whistles that go with that Friday night football presentation package. So for me, I mean sure it's worth trying. I'm sure there's been much value about the ratings and what's going to affect the ratings and how is it going to go about So far the ratings have been pretty solid this year and even better year over year compared to both the XFL and USFL last year and really the last two years as far as this goes. I am curious to see how many people will tune in on a Friday night. Obviously most people in this country are tuned to Friday night football being high school, but that's not until the fall. So in this case, you start to put other kinds of show reels or do you start to put in other documentary footage? What other kind of content are we talking about here? The schedule is already set. The game schedule is already obviously set in stone from what we have, unless they're thinking about flexing a game, which would be really interesting. I'm not sure if that's what necessarily entails. Well, Yeah, so there's some confusion here and yeah, I, when I was in Bakersfield, we did FFX, it was Friday football extra and we got to go and shoot. That tells you what kind of timeframe of the lifespan that we were in when we were using the X for that. So this would be presumably in 2025. So there's been a lot of hoopla about, okay, we extending, are we doing another season next year? I've been getting dms this week about strife and stuff. I didn't really know. I haven't had time to deal with all that stuff, but presuming we go into next year, we had the comment here from, and I thought this kind of said it good here, you have college football in the fall, college basketball games, college football ends and then the UFL would start the brightest college basketball end. So if we were to expand, if we were to expand next year to have 10 teams, then you could do a Friday game, you could do the two Saturday and the two Sunday games, spread it out that way, Philip staying here 12, yeah, whatever, but that would be, it would give you another time slot of that and it's a really good time slot. I mean SmackDown has made that destination Now, do you attract a lot of casual viewers in that time slot? Not necessarily. And I remember back when I was really into WWE stuff, there was a lot of debate about that, right? It's not great because presumably casual people are out on a Friday night. They're not sitting there flipping through the tv, but you're getting the diehards that are staying there, but if you build this up and make it be a thing, I think it would be cool. It at least seems that Fox is bullish enough to include it kind of in there and kind of in their press release here, deadline had the article about all this stuff. So thoughts on that. Having the expansion, we might do some expansion talk on Friday as well, but thoughts on that and kind of allowing more spots to do this. People always want to have expansion. Talk for me. I guess the thing I think about is the distribution as far as who's broadcasting the games sometimes it's not always an even split. I've noticed that at times, two times it'll be SPN and two times it'll be Fox, but there's some weekends where it's three times ESPN and one time Fox. So now you maybe can distribute it a little bit differently where maybe it could be three times ESPN, two times Fox or even three times Fox and two times ESPN. So kind of playing around with the different channels. What do you put down as far as where do you want to distribute that game? Do you start prioritizing certain games? Do you say, Hey, we're going to have flex scheduling? The other thing that hasn't really happened doesn't really come into play yet in spring leagues, at least not that we've seen much of a little bit, but maybe seeing more flex games as far as, well this seems like a really important matchup. Maybe we should put this into an enviable time slot if possible, or swap this out with another game. Then you start, I guess it doesn't really matter in terms of travel schedules because everybody's playing in the same and practicing in the same hub and then flying out. So in that regard it doesn't really affect it too much. That's something to be discussed later, but I think it's worth a try. I am curious to see, like you said, if there's going to be casual viewership outside of that, that's going to stick because it's probably just going to be diehards for the most part, especially if it's Thursday or Friday night. Casual viewers are not really looking to watch things on Friday night. Like you said, everybody's trying to get out and trying to enjoy their lives or do something with their family or something of that nature. We'll see. And then does that affect attendance? Does that affect people who want to do something on a Friday night who are in the area? Is that going to affect something as well? Yeah, I think it's interesting. We've had a lot of comments here about do we do regional games on this slot? Experimenting around with that. Do we not have to do regional games anymore because this year we have the double ups on that, but yeah, and so just haven't highlighted here and this is kind of what they're showing for the year at least in terms of the Friday slot is how I read it. We're not playing UFL replays in September, whatever, we're going to move, we're going to air things as they're timely for that. But it is interesting because it is the same thing with some of this NFL network stuff and I know we've had the Arena Football League, everything going on and that's a whole separate issue, but now that we're post draft, what is NFL network airing right now? I don't know. And I watch Good Morning football and that's even cut right now and I think they're bringing it back in the fall, but there's a wealth of, this is just a weird time where if you're not in the golf game or you're not in the hockey game, you really need something to broadcast here. The basketballs, that's its own thing. So I think it's cool. Like I said, WWE has made this be a spotlight on Fridays. I definitely think it's cool and it helps add to this kind of expansion talk because as Mike Mitchell list said repeatedly on the podcast, 10 was an idea going in to talk to the government here before the merger Canton was really on the table, so then you do Canton and then you do Oakland or something. I think that would be kind of smart. Anyway, any other thoughts on that? I mean I love the idea of expansion. We have yet to see it for any of the leagues that have been around so far. Mostly if we've been downsizing, not upgrading. So for me, I would love to see it. Of course, I think it's possible if you have another time slot, but again, you need to do the research on the markets. You really do and I want them to do their thorough research on these markets before they go and jump into them. Obviously we've talked about them doing a lot on their own markets. Of course I want them to make sure that they're careful about which ones they're going to, but more games I'm happy to watch, I'm happy to see more people get a chance, maybe bring back some of the teams that got stiff armed. Do you go back to Tampa Bay that's lost the bandits and the Vipers in the last five years? Do you go back to a market? I don't know if you want to go back to LA if you want to try that, but again, I know they're trying to cost cut too, so dependent on where they're going as well, what kind of TV attention are they trying to get? Like you said with the regional markets, you have to think carefully about what region are you trying to appeal to now, and as you and I have both noted numerous times, there's no west coast market here, so do you finally start to get the West Coast involved in this iteration of the league? I would love to see more games. I just would have to be confident in saying that yes, next year they would have 10 teams, but for now I still want them to worry about a teams that they have right now. Yeah, I just want there to be, and like I said, we'll have probably a deep dive about this Friday just because and we'll talk, I want to preview the games a little bit on here as well and have a little bit more time for that for the Friday episode. I just want any thought at all put into these markets and we've talked to NAM about this and well, these are the trademarks we had and these were the leftover cities and this is where we had stadium deals and this is where the hub is and this is where I just want any thought process at all until this is a really strong market. We know we have a good venue here. We know we have local interests, we know they're starving for that. We can see the regional viewership. We know that what is it always like or whatever. There's certain markets that are always non UFL markets that always rank really high on that Columbus or whatever. Mike's always got all the different stuff on there, but I just wish there was any thought process at all than just like, well, we have the Wildcats trademark from LA and well, we were in Tampa before, so it's going to be the Tampa walk. Okay, there we go. Any sort of thought process would be cool. Yeah, just relying on the trademarks has not really seemed to pan out all that much, which we'll get more into later in terms of the attendance numbers, but you have to put in the work if you expect those trademarks to work. Obviously there's two different angles that we've had the XFL and the USFL. The XFL was more grassroots. Hey, these are new brands. We're going to try and try and up the ante on these new brands. That worked for some and it didn't work for others. USFL the same way in terms of some worked, some didn't, but more so from them it was, well, these brands are already established. People have nostalgia for these brands. Some people do, but I don't think most of their viewership does, to be quite honest. I think it's all brand new people. You have to kind of find a way to appeal yourself to the new audience, which there's plenty of. There's plenty of new people like us and other people who weren't around in the eighties that obviously like the teams and the brands, but you can't just rely on nostalgia. You have to be able to put in the work for them and not just be reverent about them because there's not really a lot of familiarity with that history other than maybe a few players that people know went to the NFL. So if they're going to continue doing this, they do have to pitch it. I don't know if they have to necessarily pitch it as a new thing, but maybe just I would say reimagine it. That's what I would say. Reimagine what the brands are, reimagine what the show bones are, reimagine what the panthers are, reimagine what the stallions are or whoever you bring back into the fold, you want to bring back the express if you want to bring back the bandits or whoever reimagine it. That's my biggest take there. And we did the episode a couple weeks ago, the UFL or UFFL carried this way. I am pretty convinced that SANS Birmingham, which is credited with three, which is good and we'll get to attendance, but credited with three years now of being in that market and having more fan support than some of the other ones, the UFLU, USS FL nostalgia I do not think was worth the squeeze. And we tracked all of this stuff with the Michael Cohen's of it all and the trademarks and the lawsuits and all that stuff. I think if you had invested the last three years in building your own trade, I think you'd be the exact same you are if not further ahead and not realizing on what is the Memphis, oh, the US fell back. I know Pat's in the chat. I know he likes to track the stats back and this the modern US L and all that. I think it's not a zero number. Obviously there's people that, but I think that the juice was not worth the squeeze on that and seeing how this has all panned out this season, I'm pretty confident about that. Yeah, no, like I said, the brand identities maybe not as strong as they expected it to when they bought those ips originally, they expected a lot of people to jump back on board and look, there were players that were reverent about it and then it came back. Of course there were, unfortunately they couldn't celebrate that the first season because there was still a lot of trademark issues last year. Obviously they put a lot more work into being more reverent about those brands and again, that was great, but I don't know, you just haven't had things like being able to, not being able to trot somebody out there like Jim Kelly when you have the gamblers brand and you said, Hey, you remember when he played for the gamblers? Wasn't that cool? We really haven't seen that. We haven't seen people be able to be advertised in the same way, But they also Is that cool? I mean, I get it. I totally get it in the historian of it. Nothing for me. I mean I track Chad and I know I'll just, I track Chad Kelly because of everything going on with the Argos and everything else, not because he's the nephew. It's hard for me to make that connection. I don't know. That's just where I'm at. I understand. I guess for me, would it be such a bad idea to have, let's say the real gamblers were still around. If you still had the gamblers around and they were playing in the Houston market for Example, the real Gamblers, the real gambler. If you had the actual Houston gamblers playing in the Houston market and you said, Hey, we're going to fly Jim Kelly down here and we're going to have Jim Kelly bottle head nights. I think that would be kind of cool. I don't know if it would draw all of the people, but it would be something, I think a really good point that was made on your show last week. If you have to remind me of the gentleman's name that was on Tom Meco. Yeah, if you've missed that, it did fine. I mean the episode did fine. If you haven't checked out with Tom Merkel last week, the former A FL team president and COO, I thought it was a great interview just talking about just someone 30,000 foot view. This is what I would do. This is what I would try knowing enough to know what's going on but not living in it every second. We do. I think it's very valuable to get that outside perspective. I do think we live in kind of this echo chamber. Yeah, well also I think he was bang on about the giveaway thing. I really do because he was right about, especially with MLB baseball, they always giveaway stuff. There's always free stuff that people can get and that's a draw. I mean people come out, I Reed, I bought San Diego Padres Hawaiian shirt separately because I didn't make the game because I loved the shirt so much and I was like, I couldn't make that game, but I want that shirt and I found it secondhand from a third party supplier and I bought it. That's how badly I wanted it. And so I absolutely think there's value to that and I think that's something that these leagues have to lean more into. I know obviously we made light of the whole spatula thing with the Memphis Showboats, but lean into it but also don't devalue your own tickets. Sales of course value what your product is worth, but then also have bells and whistles attached to that too and say, Hey look, here's what you get if you come to the game. I'm going to read a couple of comments here and then I want to get into your rants and everything here. I want to make sure we're talking enough for the games. I will say, so yesterday at the game, at the Mariners game, so we do like a cross body bag. It's like the tiny enough it fits in and I have one from last year. They did first 20,000 last year, whatever. It was a Mariner one, but then they did one yesterday. That's like the Sunday cream color that we wear and it was a Mother's Day exclusive, so it was mother's only 21 and over because it was sponsored by the casino. So it has to be Andy. I stole one for myself. I waited until they're back to return and I grabbed one and I walked away. I don't because I was going to buy it on eBay and I was already like, look, we were in line to go in and I was already, okay, is anyone listen it? I stole it red handed and I walked away and I don't feel bad at all for it, Andy, but I've never stolen anything in my life and my heart was racing. I literally just ran up the stairs. I hope you're okay with having that on your conscious, sir. It's fine. It's a good bag. It's a good bag. A couple comments here. We're just talking expansion, like I said more about this on Friday show. Just stay tuned for that. Scott Portland, I think you get one or the other. I don't think you could do both. And I know that we do the MLS everything with the Timberwolves and the Sounders. Seattle didn't show out great. This is a Seattle guy. Seattle didn't show out great last time. I would not double do that. It's not, I wouldn't say Portland people would travel up. It's not out of the realm. It's a pretty far track. I mean everyone thinks that. It's like, oh, it's the I five, it's pretty far. I got to go to Portland for work here in a couple weeks. But anyway, all that is Phillips talking. Bring Seattle, new Orleans. I know that New Orleans is working on the stadium. We have another comment about that as well. Jared's surprised. Denver hasn't been picked talking about they have a good market there that works. And then this is just interesting. I wanted to talk a football binge here and this is a read issue too, getting harder and harder for me to get a chance to see these games time hanging out with family. That is the one thing I don't like about the later start. It's May now. We got Mother's Day, the championship games on Father's Day, people are out doing stuff. You're at the Dodgers games. I'm in the, there's things going on now where you're not competing with that. I know the TV market is tougher in terms of March Madness and all of that, but you're not fighting with that. Let's go outside and do any of that other stuff. Let's show attendance here. And then Andy's got this ran. I'm very excited here. So Mike Mitchell here over the weekend, Arlington, I don't believe this attendance, this was paid. So I think we're getting to the point here of sparse where these aren't butts in seats or turnstiles. These are people that bought season tickets, did not choose to go to the game, right? Forfeited that. I got a lot of comments. I tweeted out like it's 70 degrees, it's beautiful in Arlington. The renegades are going to be, excuse me, the Rangers we're playing out of town, getting swept by the Rockies. What is the excuse? And everyone's like, well, Dar Rowan six, they suck. Why would anyone go? We were season ticket, the holy of the Kraken. We went to every game through the end of the season, even after we were playoff contention eliminated because we're fans of the team. Also, I'm going to be in Arlington at the game whenever it is Memorial Day weekend because we're going into town for something else and I'm like, we might as well go to the XFL game or I always the UFL game because it's something fun to do. It's kill three hours during the day and then we can still go do whatever. So I just hate this. Well, the team sucks. Why would anyone want to go? People go to crappy teams all the time. I mean we went to the MAR games all last year after we were like, Hey, we're losing the streak. We're not going to get in the playoffs and we miss people go to the teams if they're fans of the team, Birmingham, 14,000. That's a lot of people saying that was going to be like 20,000 approaching St. Louis numbers DC again, this was paid not there, 12,000 and then with the six on that. Thoughts on that? Let's go Andy. Yeah, look, I find it really fascinating that these numbers were so contently debated this entire weekend and all because our guy, Mike Mitchell decided to put out these numbers that people decided to debate them. I found that really fascinating. Look, the numbers are the numbers. They come from the venues and from the sources themselves. If you're having a problem with those numbers, then talk to the venues, talk to the league, talk to them. You think that just because these numbers are being relayed, by the way, by multiple people, not just Mike himself, multiple people have relayed this number that is literally announced in the stadium and there are also pictures of these numbers being posted up on the video boards that show them in plain sight. I mean, Reid, there are people this weekend that I looked at and I realized, do you think two plus two equals five? I started to wonder about some of these people in terms of their ability to really receive this information and be okay with it because a lot of people weren't. And that's on them because they need to understand that this is how it is, this is what the numbers are and this is what they're going to be for the foreseeable future and for the season. As far as the Birmingham goes, did I expect 20,000? No, I did not. Did I expect a decent number? Yes, because this was a marquee matchup. This was the best matchup of the entire season. You can debate how many people were in the stands that were St. Louis fans. I'm sure if Hawks people will say, well, we made up half the attendance. I don't know if that's necessarily true. Yeah, I really, I don't believe that Brett was there. He runs the ally. He is a Birmingham guy. He said it wasn't that. Yeah, hundreds, but it wasn't over. That's just what I heard. Again, I caught a lot. We'll get into the game, but I caught part of it. But yeah, I heard it wasn't overwhelming For me. I just think it's the number you were going to expect. And of course there are people that are coming out and saying, well, that number can't be true. There's got to be more than that. Then were they invisible? You tell me where they were, what was reported. That's the number that was relayed. So I don't know what to tell you. You think there were more people than that? Do you think the ticket counters aren't ticking those away and it doesn't go the other way too? You can't look at another like DC people were debating. Well, there's not that many people in dc. There can't possibly be that many people in dc You know what? Watching on tv, maybe not, but guess what? It's called paid attendance and that's the number that was shown as the people that paid for the tickets. You can debate whether or not that many people really showed up. That's the number that was shown. So it's not going to be any more than that and it's definitely, it could be less than that depending on if those people actually show up or stayed at certain points when you watch the game. So I just don't understand people taking numbers and just almost debating with a wall in terms of just saying, I can't believe this. This can't be true. It is true. And you have to face that reality. That's what it, and that's the same with Houston. It's especially the same with Arlington. I mean Arlington doesn't shock us because let's be frank, they're not a good team and they haven't been a good team and you really want to walk into a stadium and say, yeah, I can't wait to support no one six team today. I just don't really get, I just really don't understand people's inability to comprehend these numbers. I really don't. Let's see here. Just a couple comments. Robert wants to talk football. We get this the same pace every week. We do a TV attendance and we have the breaking news today. We'll get to football here. We'll talk through all that stuff first. I don't know if I've seen Robert on here before, but this kind of, I got my list here. So we go do the list. Oh yes. Devoted fan base. People don't go to crappy teams. This isn't the majors read well, I mean I don't dunno. They talk about all that stuff, but yes, maybe the league could do better job marketing and all that stuff and then yeah, let's end it here. I can't even see myself DeMarcus, I'm seeing stick a hole in re gates for marketing. There's nothing on the stadium, so lets people know they're playing there. We're lets people I agree with that. I stand by that. Andy, anything else or do you ready to talk football? I mean look, I just think that's a huge part of it, right? It's the brand identity and that's the thing that has to be part of this. You have to know what exists and what doesn't. I mean that was the case with the last couple of years. If I had something USFL related or XFL related that I was wearing, somebody would confuse those leagues all the time. People are getting mad about this, but I would talk to someone about the USFL and they'd be like, isn't that the one that Rock owns? No, that's the XFL. Actually the USFL is owned by Fox. Oh, okay. People don't know that. So yeah, that kind of brand entity doesn't exist. The last thing I'm just going to say here before we move on and look, I get it. I get a lot of comments about Andrew, you're too negative. You don't have anything positive to say about anything, right? You just want to be negative. No, I'm being objective because I want things to be better because I expect better. And if my expectations aren't the same as your expectations, let's hash that out because my expectations are that numbers should be better on the attendance and there should be more attention that's given to this product because it is a good product. I love watching this football. I think Stallions bi, the Birmingham Stallions and the St. Louis Battle Hawks game was fantastic. I loved it. It was a great game. I said it in the chat as much, I wish more people were there to see it live and it disappoints me that there's not more people. Half the stadium is full and the other half is blocked off for various reasons There needs. I think that's something that needs to be addressed. And one other thing I'll say, I saw a comment. I know that you read about somebody saying, well, the parking situation's terrible here at Protective Stadium. We can't park here. Well then, okay, first of all, I Wrote a whole Article mind. I wrote a whole article about this two years ago about the infrastructural issues around Birmingham and people were upset with me. And I get it because you think that I was coming after the Birmingham, I wasn't. I was pointing out something that was perhaps affecting the ability for there to be attendance numbers for the average viewer. And if I see something like that and someone mentions that, then if it's a problem at UAB games at University of Alabama Birmingham games in the fall, then it's going to be a problem for Birmingham stallion games. And that's something that has to be addressed. There's a mitigating, the problem with this picture read is that there's mitigating factors across the board for multiple reasons why there's something here, but when we keep getting people who have excuses about why these things aren't transpiring a certain way, that's when I get a little annoyed because I think it's people who want a certain reality that's not there and it's people who don't see what they want to see. Yeah, the comment about they wanted more people at the USFL game, but the parking lot, I'm like, this was a 45,000 capacity stadium. What are we talking about here with? It's one of those and I don't like to get, yeah, the last comment for me because I want to get to the standings here. Yeah, I get a lot of, because I was anti XFL when the CFL stuff was going on and I said the season was going to start on time and there was anti USFL. I've been the same. The entire timeline here you read what do you want, want, man, my wife knows she married me, I married her. We've been together 10 years. This is what it is, man. You're happy with it, you appreciate it, but you know what you're waking up with in the morning. You know what you're going to bed with at night. So let's talk about this stuff. So this is good, bad kind of whatever USL conference here, stallions obviously seven and oh on there, Panthers here. Now the stallions, and correct me if I'm wrong, home field could Birmingham lost out and then the Panthers won out. We could swap all that stuff. But USL, this is it. We got two one in six teams and then the two teams thoughts here we have you week eight, week nine, week 10, 10, 3 weeks left on here. What do you make of that? Just because for the US FL side, then we'll get to the XFL, but it's pretty locked up here. Yeah, I mean, like I said, lost cases for the Memphis and Houston. They're both just listless franchises right now. They don't have much going on for them and they mathematically really don't. This here means that they're pretty much out of it. And for Michigan and for Birmingham, I mean this is such an easy clinch. Really what it comes down to is Michigan will play Birmingham again down at the end of the season, but they probably will not be fighting for the one seat. I surmise that will at that point be looking at an undefeated season and you have to debate whether or not the question becomes how many people are they going to rest. That's really Birmingham's biggest question now is how many people can we get away with resting while we're still trying to win games? And we've seen that they have quite the arsenal. So I mean for the USFL, it's disappointing. Houston was just such a rough transition into Rice Stadium, taking their players with them from the gamblers and then not really panning out. Obviously Memphis, I mean they're the worst team offensively and defensively in the league. They're just, they're putrid. They got absolutely railroaded by Arlington and they don't have any semblance of identity anywhere across the roster. And it's a shame that this has come down to where there's no competition here with the rest of the USFL whereas in the XFL there is, but there's a lot of question marks as far as a lot of these teams. But the USFL, I mean everything's just kind of locked up, so there's not a lot of intrigue between watching really from the Panthers or the Houston Roughneck side. We have a comment here, Jared. I thought the show votes would be so good. I was wrong. Big time. Renegades too. Remember when we were doing our, it was you and I and we were doing our preview and it was like the Showboats guy was like, they don't even understand how good the showboats are going to be. And I put up the meme about the guy in the corner, they don't even know. Maybe you did know Andy, you called the showboats be hot garbage. Because I remember we were having this conversation. Abdulah wants to know, do you think CJ and Flip survived the season? I want to talk about Flip because is this a John DeFillipo issue because he's invested in it. Is it the players because I like him and his passion in the league or is he part of the problem? No, I think this was just poor roster construction and he got shortchanged. Obviously not being able to stay with the Breakers. It's kind of unfortunate that he got flipped over to the Showboats. This was obviously Todd Haley's baby last year, the last two years, and it just didn't really pan out for Flip. I think it's unfortunate. I'm not going to pull the plug on him yet. I think he needs a chance to have a better roster. This offensive line is terrible. You can't protect anybody. Their defense is just a wet paper towel. They can't stop anybody. They have to reconstruct this entire roster. I think this is more of a player personnel issue than it is a coaching issue. I think John Dave Felipo is fine. I have no issue with him. Curtis Johnson, I mean he's had two cracks of this and it's not worked out and I think he's probably going to be quietly ushered out the door here pretty soon, especially with how this rough next season is going. And they might be. And also again, if this league is adamant about advertising in the Houston area, maybe they try to find another Houston legend. If Wade Phillips isn't going to be there, maybe they can find somebody else to coach there because I think they want to appeal to that market. They can't continue to have these numbers at Rice Stadium or perhaps they get everybody back in the renovated Houston stadium and it's fine, but they got to find a way to reconnect with that community and maybe that means a coach exchange. Let's go here. Any other general thoughts about the XFL conference and then we'll get to the Memphis Showboats here. Obviously Battle Hawks taken here, one and two with the Brass Defender. Any other just general thoughts on this? I feel like there's a little bit more up in the air. Maybe there's not because the defenders here. I think someone was calling for an upset here coming up this weekend if they're playing, but I don't dunno, what do you make of the XFL conference? Yeah, DC at St. Louis. That could be interesting. Early game 9:00 AM Pacific on Sunday. I mean the Hawks already enacted the revenge. I'm sure they would love to just end the hopes and dreams of the DC defenders right then and there. DC's just not the ST team as the lies. Last year, Mike Mitchell was dead on calling them a 500 team this season and he was right. This team just lacks the same tenacity they did, especially on offense. The running game is just not the same as far as Arlington goes. I mean sure they're technically still in it, but it's kind of like, well actually no, as of now, they're not in it, excuse me, because obviously the bra is winning, it eliminates them. But they were a team that was just unlucky and a team that just couldn't win close games. And I think they're better than what their record shows. I really believe that now their special teams are still bad, but they were able to do enough offensively on Saturday to show they had weapons. They had ability to do something, they just couldn't punch it in. As far as the problems go, their biggest problem is who's going to be under center because they've been having quarterback issues and that can sink a team if they're not careful, but I think they've accumulated enough wins and that head to head against DC did hurt them. But I think they are going to be ahead enough that they're going to be able to be able to pull this out going down the stretch. But I don't know. I don't have a lot of faith in DC so for me, I still think it's going to be one two at the end of the season with St. Louis winning the conference. Yeah, no, I agree with that. Let's get in here. So I watched a lot. This was a good, well really got out of hand here. I was watching this Saturday morning here. Renegades get their first victory. Just a shellacking, just shellacking of the showboats here, a stoops and company finally get all that. What are your thoughts? Arlington finally got one kind of for pride at this point. They were right. They were still in contention at the point where they won and then obviously the last side. But thoughts on that? I mean, just an absolute clinic by that offense. My goodness. Davion Smith having a revival game. Willie's pre looked great. I mean his downfield passing was so crisp, especially the Jared Payton. I loved seeing their offense roll. It could have been like this the entire season. And again, I don't think their offense was the problem this year. I really don't. They just had so many lapses on defense and special teams gas and penalties that it cost them games for Memphis. I mean it's par for the course for them this year, really. I mean, their defense just looks so lackluster. They have no sense of identity on defense offensively. They're going back and forth. You're throwing in case cookies, you're throwing in Troy Williams, you're trying to see what sticks. Nothing really sticks. They're creating turnovers that can't really seem to run the ball effectively enough at times because they're offensive line again, has a lot of issues. They don't have the pieces. I know there was a lot of individually talented players like Jonathan Adams and Darius Victor and a case cooks and you looked at the playmaker, sure, but the fundamentals of this team are just broken and they just didn't have it as far as any way of controlling a game. They always seemed like they're playing catch up every time they play somebody. Arlington Renegades weren't just completely out for blood. They weren't. They were out for blood. They were out to prove everybody wrong and they did, at least for an afternoon. We'll see if they can do it again. But it's unfortunate that Arlington is defending champions in trying to continue this enthusiasm with their crowd. Their home crowd that they've been trying to build just wasn't really coming to fruition this year because they just weren't good enough. And it's a shame because they caught fire so hard at the end of last season and now it's just really up in smoke for them. And so again, are we starting to count down the last days of Bob Stoops, who by the way, I will say got his two hundreds career victory. Congratulations to him between his tenure at Oklahoma and with Arlington. That's fantastic. I love that for him. He's just been a stalwart of this game for so long, but we'll see if he continues on with this franchise going forward or if he says that's good enough. Yeah, I was joking because Pat, I think Pat had shared it too, and I said, yeah, I am sure. He probably felt like finally took long enough. It only took seven weeks into the season to get all that Memphis going into Michigan next week. I was trying to look ahead here on the schedule. Do you think Memphis reacts to any sort of revenge here, Michigan clinching at this point? What do you make of this year, the early game next Saturday? Again, you want it to be competitive. I don't know how competitive it is. I do think this Michigan team is really hitting their stride now. I mean, Danny Ling's actually been pretty well, I got to give 'em credit. We'll get more into that game later. But from Memphis, I don't see them really enacting revenge here. I think it's going to be another lackluster performance from them. I don't think they really have much juice left to continue the season as far as the renegades go. Yeah. Are you going to be able to enact any revenge on the bras? You know what? I give them a punchers chance. I would look at that really hard. They might have a chance to upset San Antonio if they're going to continue having quarterback issues. I think there's a real chance Arlington could win that game and play spoiler. They just haven't again really been able to do much offensively. But I give 'em a chance next week to really see if they can pull this out against San Antonio. I mean, I trust their offense a lot more right now than I do San Antonio, so you might want to look at that as far as upset, that's going into next week. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, San Antonio's got to keep pace here, so I think that they have a lot to play for as well in terms of running the exit belt conference. Let's get into my tabs got all screwed up. Here we go. Oh, of course. And then I clicked the wrong button here. I have it. I swear. The game of the year, the Battle Hawks here, going into Birmingham against the stallions. I caught a lot because again, remember I had a memorial filming and the second the game started, got done early, watched the last quarter, caught the highlights going through in the M punts and block punts and all this kind of stuff came down to it. AJ McCarran injured, trying to get down the field to kind of, I don't know, what do you say? Did he kind of crap the bed here? I missed opportunity. They had a chance. They had a chance to win. What did you make of this game and did it live up to the hype? Oh, absolutely. It lived up to the hype. I mean great back and forth action the entire afternoon. I love that it was played in the daytime. Actually at first I had mentioned that I wanted to be at nighttime for a rating's sake, but actually as a daytime game. It was pretty entertaining. I loved seeing both of these teams in sunlight for AJ McCarran. He fought his ass off. I know he definitely thought he was going to be able to play through this whole game injury list, and he got twisted up on his ankle. I remember at one point during the audio, we heard the game audio and it sounded like he said, oh, did I break my ankle? And you're thinking, oh no. That may have just sunk the Battle Hawk's chances for the year as far as winning any sort of title. But he comes back in, he seems to be fine. Hakeem Butler is a man possessed. They're trying to get the ball to him as much as they can. Great game from Jacob Sailors, my goodness, my goodness. Three touchdowns from him. Just an absolute fantastic game from him for Birmingham. I mean, Adrian Martinez. What can you say about this guy? He has been absolutely fantastic out of the pocket, avoiding defenders, just using his peer speed to get away from guys. I mean, there were times where he was behind the line of scrimmage. It would be a long situation, maybe a second long or a third long, and he would just run away from these defenders and just run upfield and be able to get extra yardage. Really, his abilities are on full display in this league, and he now has 10 touchdown passes in the last three weeks. He's the league leading rusher as a quarterback. I mean, he really is putting on an absolutely outstanding profile. And honestly, I know a few weeks ago I said he hasn't played enough games. He hasn't had enough snaps to really be considered the MVP conversation. McCann's your front runner. Well, he has the head to head win now, and if he keeps playing, he just very may win it. I mean, I think is starting to qualify for that award based on just in the short amount of time he's played. He has just been so spectacular. It really comes down to how many more snaps does he get and Adrian McCarran gets, depending on who clinches early and who's able to kind of rest their starters. They may ultimately come down to numbers for both of them. AJ's still putting up good numbers. Of course he did have that interception, but you still have good numbers for both of these quarterbacks. So the MVP award's going to come down to who plays the most down the last three weeks of the season. I think Pat had posted today, they're kind of taking AJ day by day. The other quarterbacks are getting some opportunities on that. What do you think they do here? Because, let me get back up. Where is my everything? Because there defenders coming in, it could be a really competitive game here. So what do you make of, what would you do for the Battle Hawks? That's a tricky situation. They had the situation last year when AJ had to sit out and they started Nick Tiano against the famous vi, And he did the, remember he ran into the touchdown and did the helicopter thing. I remember That. Yeah. He did the helicopter spin and they won an overtime, I believe it was the first overtime ever in XFL history. And they finally were able to get that special overtime play through where they got the three conversions. It was really cool to watch. But I mean, for me, this was a case where you wanted to see the defenders and the battle hawks at full speed and full health against each other. So not having aj, I think complicates things. Can they still win at home? Sure. I think they can rely on their defense. I mean, they still have an excellent pass rush that I think that they can rely on. I just don't know if they're going to be able to score as much as they really want to. But DC has not been very efficient offensively, so I wouldn't be afraid about that aspect for them. So for the battle, you could start Manny Wilkins. We'll see what happens. Obviously you want AJ there, but I think they still could win that game regardless. Yeah, I mean, looking at the standings, everything, I have too many freaking tabs over here. I mean, a lot would have to go right for the defenders here. In terms of moving forward, I don't know. I don't dunno what the defenders do here. Do you go all in? I don't know. What would you do for the defenders? Oh, if I'm in Defenders, I'm running the ball all game. That's what I'm doing. I'm running it down the bow hawk's throats and I'm going to continue doing. So I don't think they really need to rely on their passing game, which has been okay this year. I think they got to find a way to run the ball and they got to run north South. They can't be dilly ding around or trying to deal with all these horizontal plays. I think they got to just run north and south, and I think they got to do that as much as possible if they want to have a chance to win on this weekend. But they have to be able to control the clock. That's really the biggest thing. Yeah, Fu all fan said, I've become a hype for a silver start. I said, is it time? Is it time to see Brandon Silvers? I dunno. I think he's a pretty inactive QB three. If I'm not reading anything incorrectly, you think I'm right there? It seems to me like that's the case on the dev chart. But again, maybe he impresses the most in practice this week and he gets the start, but I think they really like Mandy Wilkins, so that will probably be more likely outcome of this scenario. Anything else on St. Louis? Birmingham, like I said, a lot of hype on this, and we have the attendance and people PPO and all that stuff. I mean, it was good. It was a really good, but I don't know. I think there's this weird, and just to get back into non-football for a second, there's this weird dynamic of like, well, the Birmingham stallions are the best team ever, which they're really, really, really good. And that means everything else that goes along with USFL versus XFL or whatever, it's clearly the XL. It's like that I am the most skilled technical painter in the world, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I am the greatest artist or the way that I do it is just a weird disconnect of like, no, the Birmingham stallions are phenomenal, but also there's other things that aren't great about this or that. It's not A or B, it's not black or white. There's shades of gray here, but the stallions are awesome. This is going to be a great game for the championship game. I think having this game now makes the championship, which we assume going to be even more entertaining. Any other thoughts on that or anything else about the game? Listen, stallions fans can go ahead and live in their little candy land there. That's fine. But they have to realize that just because their team is great doesn't discount what other teams are doing. So I understand that sentiment. But look, the stallions have to worry about themselves and their own franchise. They got to worry about their own team. Don't focus on the other teams because what they've been doing the last few years has been fantastic, and I think it's a tremendous accomplishment, but I don't think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread. And you know what? Birmingham fans don't like me anyways, so I can say that, but I just think that they need to calm down a little bit before they ano themselves. They win three, no, look, they win three years in a row. Fantastic. Go celebrate. Do whatever you want. But they haven't gotten to that point yet. Let's wait until the end of the season and then we'll talk. I think it's going to be pretty, I mean, again, don't really, I don't have a horse in any of this race. I mean, I like the Brams, but I think that this is, it's a lot of bragging rights if you're the three time stallions. It's a ton. A ton of it is almost to the point of annoyance with if you're Chiefs fans or whatever it is, getting to that point of the, but I think it's pretty cool. I mean, it's good for the league. I just wish storyline wise, we've had the kicker things this year, right? We've had kind of Arlington's collapse and then we've had, it just doesn't feel like there's been eight different storylines going on this year. It feels like. It's like the stands, you're killing everybody. XFL is a little more competitive in that conference. Right? Am I missing, just in terms of major storylines this year? As far as it's going? Yes. Outside of all the non-football related things, as far as play on the field, yes. That's pretty much what's going on here. The XFL has been very competitive and they've been sort of taking bites out of each other. Whereas the USFL, it's pretty clear hierarchy of who's the top and who's not. And that seemed to be the case the last two years as well. There always seemed to be a clear favorite as to who were the best teams in the SFL and who we're not. Let's get over here. dc, Michigan, dc losing again at home here, back to back, right? With the Hawks last week. I don't know. DC has not had, I know injuries that stuff ahead of the season and everything. Panthers coming in, taking care of business. What did you make of this game? I thought this was a dominating effort by Michigan. They just ran the ball right down DC's throats, and they did an excellent job of continuing to pound the rock with guys like Matthew Colburn had an excellent game. West Hills, all of them. I mean, this is the kind of game that DC wishes they could play, but they can't play it this year. They just don't have the horses for this. They just don't. Michigan able to contain themselves. Again, Danny Antley not doing much to the air, but again, he doesn't really have to with a running attack like this, he really doesn't have to do that much. Their defense without Frank Gida didn't seem to affect them too much. DC just really couldn't get any momentum whatsoever on offense. Again, the crowd may be a little more sparse than usual and just that energy was kind of lacking. DC has lost two home games this year now, and that's significant. You go into that game against the battle hawks and you are 10 and old time and now you've lost two out of your last three. It's kind of a new era for dc. It's an unfamiliar feeling for these DC fans. They're not as formidable at home as they thought they were. So I think that's a big point. Going forward, again, Tom was trying to do his best, but he's getting bum rushed in the pocket. He can't really make just any sort of spectacular throws to help save this team. But again, I don't think this is really all on him. I think this is just more of there's just a lot of lacking in the offense and defensively, again, they just get bullied at the point of attack. So for Michigan, I think it's encouraging that they've shown who they are. Again, it's a consistent team. This is a team that knows who they are and they don't fake it in any way, shape or form, and I know who they are. So I like having a team that I can watch that has an identity like the Michigan Panthers. I'm just seeing there. I'm starring a couple comments we'll get to at the end here. Yeah, I don't know. DC Oh, let's get rid of that dc, all that stuff. Michigan looking good here, right? I mean in terms of the as well, you going to be at a playoff spot here. I mean, what do you make stallions panthers at this point? Is it even a contest? I mean, are they just happy to be second place? I think you're happy just to get into the dance, which the Panthers done for the second straight year. Now, last year was a surprise that they got in at the very end this year they clearly have all their ducks in a row and they have a good team. I think they're going to clearly be the two C because I just do not see the stallions dropping enough games for them to catch up to them. But for the Panthers, I mean you have to start thinking about long-term. What's your plan to face a team like Birmingham, which again, they only lost by seven in Birmingham, so they played 'em tough last time. Now of course, again, they had NDA in there, but they could try and see if they can keep it to be a really sloppy game. What they want to do is they want to make the game ugly against Birmingham, but also they weren't facing Adrian Martinez full-time. They were facing a lot of macro. So that also changes the equation a little bit and they did give up a lot of yards, but we'll see what happens with this game and what happens going forward. For Michigan though, they should feel pretty safe and feel pretty comfortable with where they're at. Maybe start looking a little bit ahead to Birmingham. Yeah, like I said, we talked about here, Michigan hosting the Showboats on here, DC going into St. Louis. I dunno, I'll be curious in terms of TV ratings and stuff, and obviously we'll get the things with Mike tomorrow about this weekend. I think it might be a little bit of a low except for the USFL, the Birmingham game, just because of the stakes of that. But the other three games weren't on the best in terms of network slots. I guess I was going to make this point earlier, there was been a lot of talk of do we flex games later on if there's no stakes and all this stuff. I don't know. I mean last year we moved up a couple of the XFL games, like upper back an hour. I know one of the Seattle games they did that. I was going to go to that game, but I don't know if they're really sitting there. Well, the last game of the seasons doesn't really going to have any stakes. I'll just be curious if they do that or not. I think it would certainly help attendance or TV interest, but I don't know. You sold, you're already having trouble selling tickets. Can you move? Do you have any thoughts on that? I think it is an interesting thought exercise. I just don't know if it's practical. Again, if they can then if they think it's really going to affect the attendance ratings, sure, or the TV ratings, but I don't know if that's going to make any significant impact this season, next season when you start doing the schedule making. Maybe you can keep that as a conscious thought, but this year, I don't know. I don't know if it really adversely affects it one way or another. To be honest, again, I prefer the evening time slots for Saturday. I think those are great. Having space between the day game and the evening game I think is great. Obviously the NBA playoffs and the A HL playoffs are still going on, so there's not going to be much movement there as far as moving the games around. So for them it would be better if they could start experimenting after those seasons, but their season's going to be over before that happens. So I suppose with the time being, it is what it is, you're going to keep it locked in as it is. And I don't know if it really, really changes much going forward unless there's some significant schedule change and there's some event that's going head to head that is going to adversely affect your ratings. We had a question here, M Rider. We'll get to that at the end. Let's get through the last game and then we're going to talk through all that. Chris, MBA is on life support. I think NBA ISS doing all Right? I don't think so. Oh, you don't think still life support they the in season tournament didn't do it. Didn't do it. Nah, they're doing just fine. Their attendance ratings were just fine this year, so I don't think so. Chris, Let's go here. Last one here, a bras eking out the win. I had a text from Max the second that the field gold kick went through like destroying Mrs. That kick wide, right? I don't know if this bras we going there. Are we seeing a shoot out here with all that bras eking out the win. We talked to tenants earlier with the roughnecks. We've talked to Chris Johnson and everything else. Any new thoughts on the promise here? I mean Doherty finally fell back to earth and he was horribly inconsistent. Kevin Hogan having to come in and finish the rest of this game. I mean it's a concern for the promise now because now you have a carousel, a quarterback, and Garris is not coming back anytime soon. So now what do you do? I guess they lean into Kevin Hogan, but I know that's not their plan A as far as running their offense. Unfortunately the same thing sort of plaguing this offense as it was the Houston Roughnecks last year with AJ Smith and this entire staff. It's kind of starting to slow now. I don't know if you have injuries to other players like you did last year with John Trey Kirkland. He's obviously still playing this year, but it's just not the consistency you would hope for on this offense. It's really not really working out for them. So it's unfortunate. I just think that this Brahma team was able to take advantage of a pretty hapless offense for the Houston roughnecks who also could not hold a lead. They were up 12 three and you gave 'em a touchdown on a three point conversion and then you give the ball right back to the braas, they go down, they kick that field goal and they win. So again, that's also a gaff by the Houston roughnecks, but it took that gaff in order for them to be able to win this game. So the bras, I mean you're not going to be in St. Louis this way, that's for sure. You are absolutely not going to be the St. Louis team with this kind of offense. You have to figure something out. But is that going to be with Kevin Hogan? It's going to have to be probably because Dormy really just looked lost out there on Sunday. It is the issue again, we getting a lot of comments, the dorm of it all, and I saw a lot of you guys' comments in the chat as well. I mean, what do you attribute that to? Well, I guess for me, I guess for me it's kind of like, I suppose that obviously his biggest thing is his downfield accuracy. He really loves to push the ball downfield, but there are some times where his intermediate routes get kind of haywire and he doesn't really have the same kind of accuracy that a garbers does. And I said that a couple weeks ago. He loves to push the ball down field, which it supplies more of a threat with a vertical threat, but they don't really have the same consistency in their short to intermediate game as they did earlier in the season. And without that sort of ability to sort of calm yourself, just move the chains, get something going because Houston's maybe playing a too deep shell or it can't really allow anything over the top without that ability to kind of pull yourself in and be able to make those short throws, then you expose yourself as a quarterback. And unfortunately Normandy has had that issue in the past and he has it right now. And because of that, there just wasn't any fireworks to be had. So Kevin Hogan will definitely do that for you. He will make those short throws. Will you push the ball to downfield? Probably not, but he will make the short throws, he'll make the easy throws and maybe that's all this offense really needs. So it's unfortunate. I always liked Dormy in terms of his ability to play on his aggressive traits a little bit more, but in this game it didn't come to fruition and he had a really bad pick in this game. He just didn't really look really comfortable at all. At any point, There's a conversation going on in the chat. Chris, sorry I'm listening you as well. I'm reading all this up Chris, here you go. Just spell it down by NBA 76 billion TV rides deal say in the future for life sports. Okay. He's like, we're just having freakouts here with all this stuff. Sorry Andy. I just had to put them. I see the spiraling out of control here. I don't know. I mean the bras, which were the roughnecks really exciting to watch last season. Does it feel that way now? Is that, do you put any of that weight on AJ Smith? Is it Wade Phillips? Anything else with the Brahmas here before we run this up? Like I said, there's been times when I think other defenses start to figure out what AJ Smith is about. As an offensive coordinator, I think he's a brilliant mind. He has a lot of good points to him. I do think there's maybe some tells in the way he runs his offense. And again, it's consistency with his quarterback. Some quarterbacks love getting talked up in their ear up until the snap out, the quarterbacks don't. Brandon Silvers was fine with that. Cole McDonald potentially was not. Chase Garbers was fine with that. Maybe Quin dormant he isn't. So it really depends on what quarterback he has and if they're okay with his coaching style. And I'm not saying it's wrong either way. Again, I really like AJ Smith. I think he has a lot of fantastic ideas for running offense. I just wonder if his cohesion with the roster really always is able to mesh correctly. But there's a lot of thought process into how he runs his offense. But it might may lead to some confusion for some of the players that are involved with it. Anything else here? We think we've got through, like I said, TV tennis will be coming out tomorrow. We will be tweeting all that stuff up. Like I said, probably some expansions on here. Workshopping which UFL teams on the chopping block. Thinking about that or maybe moving team working chop. This is a whole process here. Andy work shopping thesis is for that. Like I said, if you haven't seen Tom Workhouse interview from last week, I thought that was really good. Really appreciated him taking an hour to sit down and talk through that. I had one last question here. I wanted to make sure we got to that I started. But anything else from you, Andy, from any of the teams? Anything else here before we get to this last question? Like I said, I wish we could get Battle Hawks stallions every week. I mean that was an amazing game and especially the one thing I didn't get into was the stallions were lucky because they had that punt blocked and St. Louis had a prime opportunity to go down the field and get a touchdown. But for some reason AJ Smith, or sorry, AJ Smith, AJ McCarran decided to run with the ball and not get, he didn't get a first down and the doesn't have a timeout. I didn't understand that at all. That sort of mismanagement was sort of baffling from St. Louis. It is really a shame that we didn't get to really see a greater ending to that. That game was fantastic. That game was amazing. I wish we could have that every week. But other than that, I mean you kind of know who your teams are. It's going to be the Brams, most likely it's going to be the Battle Hawks and it's going to be the Panthers and it's going to be the stallions. So your Final four is pretty much set. You still have three weeks to play here, so we got to figure out some other things here. But look, quality of football continues to be really good. I harp on that and I hope that becomes more of what it's about and I really want to focus on that going forward. Of course, there's other things we need to focus on too in terms of the longevity of the league, but I do want to focus on how fun it has been watching these games. No, it is been great. The last we had a question here was because people asking about markets and stuff, like I said, we'll talk through all that. That'll be deep dive, deep dive Friday. That'll be good. We were talking about, did I lose it here? Maybe I lost it. Oh, here we go. What do you think of the mistakes so far? Rebranding mistakes because we were talking about the quality of football is great. I don't dunno if it's even anything to do with the rebranding or staying separate leagues. I just think that the fundamental philosophy of all of these leagues is we put football on tv, people watch, we put football in stands, people go to games. And that's not what it could be anything. And that's why when we had taught them last week and everyone's like, what does the AFL know about all this? You're selling the entertainment products, selling the sports product. It was the same thing when Josh Harris, who owns the Commanders, they brought in the guys from the NBA to help. And they people like, well what is the NBA? They know about marketing a product. Yeah, you're not going to take every idea word for word and translate across, but you need to talk to people that know how to do this and selling arena football or selling Pokemon cards on the street or it's all of the brand awareness and marketing. And so it just kills me in some of this stuff. But any thoughts on that Andy, before we get out of here? Yeah, there needs to be a strategy going forward and I think it can't just be the cut and dry strategy of like, here's football, C football, watch football. There's got to be more to it because let's face it, this league is not, unfortunately, I don't think this league treats itself as a major league. I wish it did, but I don't think it does. And I think they should operate as such. If they want to be big time, they got to act big time. And that requires a unique strategy and that requires taking themselves seriously. And sometimes I feel like they don't do that. I really don't. So for me, they got to continue reprocessing this and moving this forward if they're going to be able to create a new strategy going into the next season, I don't think things can stay status quo. They really can't. I really believe that. And I have a lot of ideas about that too, which I may get into it some point in the future, but I just don't think what's going as far as their standard right now. I don't think that's going to be enough. I want everybody to survive. I want, look, do I want 20 million teams to be thriving? Yeah, of course I do. That'd be awesome. But we have to be realistic about these expectations. We have to be realistic about what's going to come about from these leagues. And look, I want what's better for these teams because I want these players, these coaches to have opportunities. I want them to be people who enjoy this product and I want there to be longevity in this league. But that also means aiming the bar high and taking risks. And I know that's scary, but that's part of the process. Yeah, Scott, no, Scott, no one's getting ready. Sick now we're getting rid of Birmingham. We're talking about dropping Birmingham and we really aspire here. Gregory, I hope you mean you take these other people seriously. Yeah, I think And that's like why all this negativity? No, I think this can work. I think this is what it should have been all along Fox and a, B, C and everything working together and we've got the right people involved in terms of the football side. I do think the marketing, I thought about that today where we had that Mark Thompson story come out where he's like was selling the merchandise and it wasn't. And then people, they went to the local news and said that they weren't getting the merchandise and they got a comment from the league and I'm sure the league was like, why are we dealing with this? It's like you're still at that. You want to get to that point. And I've said this before, conversations back going into the last year with the XFL. I'm like, well, we're a top six brand and selling tickets. And it's like you're not yet. You can get to that point. But I think this can work and that's why we are critical about it. We are negative about it. This is the time you're going to see this for a long time. We've already seen what's going on with the A FL without solid ownership and leadership involved. We have that here. There are other things that need to be good. The football is great. That is one piece that's a large piece of the pie, but that is not the only part of the pie. And until that everything else steps up to that, you're going to have issues and you're going to have comments from at least me. So if no one else And to point out is people say, well, they say, well I take it seriously. I take it seriously too. And that's my thing about it. I don't want them, I don't want the league to take that for granted or be conceited about it because fanship is pickle. It's something that it can be loyal, but you don't want to ride that loyalty into the ground. You can't do that. You have to be able to reward the faith and loyalty that you get from your clients and from your customers and from your people who love your game and love your teams. I don't think you can just expect it to come back every single year and multiply twofold or threefold every time around. You got to make sure that you understand your audience and you are able to reward your audience. And I think that way it will make a stronger relationship and not just treating it like it's going to come back around every single time or be like, oh, we have to deal with these people. We don't want that feeling. Right. You don't want to be treated that way. You want to be treated with respect and you want it to be a mutually beneficial relationship for all parties involved. That's what I feel. Yeah. Chris here says great show read and guest. This is not a guest, this is the face of the UFL Andy Murray. So we got to make sure about that. And then last comment here at Gregory just said this is in terms of the Birmingham game, that was a great football game. We probably could have succinctly reviewed the game that way, but we wanted to get a little more context. I appreciate it. Like I said, as always, Andy coming on, like I said, I want to do a little bit more football here. And then we have complaints at the top. We got to all that stuff. We're probably going to be a little bit more talking expansion and stuff this week. We'll do my best CFL work schedule last time for me here and then we'll probably get some more of that here and we'll be rolling into, we'll be doing the kickoff show and all that stuff and we'll get the Hussies of the world and everybody and Emma Willmore is on if you can do it and everything else. But if you're still here like and subscribe or what are we at? We're so close, but we're so far 3,500 subscribers. Get to the, I mean it saves me money if you don't want me to spend the money to buy the ticket. We're 37 away, 37 away from getting two lucky winners get tickets to the UFL championship game and so I can subscribe, get us over the hump there. Andy would appreciate it. I would appreciate it. And then we can give away something else. I have a lot of other stuff to give away. We just have never gotten to the, you got to get to the first giveaway to the other. Andy, I appreciate anything else and we'll get out of here. No Ray, thank you as always. And gosh, CFL season's already around the corner. It just sneaks up on you, doesn't it? Yeah, no training came. I would recommend three down for in depth stuff like that. We got the same comments when we were at the Gray Cup last year. I'm in Seattle. We do what we can remotely. I got to rely on a lot of those reporters coming on, so I would certainly follow the people that are doing firsthand and knowledge and stuff that as well. But I'll give three that they're doing tremendous work. Three that. But what am I doing? Elk's training camp. I'll do my best. Let's get through this week and I'll get some more CFL people on. We'll see you guys next time and thanks.

Fixing the UFL: Ex-Spring League Exec Gives Blueprint for Success

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast. Reid here. Well here we go. Here we are going to fix the UFL today. Give them a blueprint for success, kind of tongue in cheek, but I think this is going to be good. Kind of a think tank here today. Kind of an off the wall episode, mid-season. We had Mike Mitchell last week checking in with the UFL. Is it meeting expectations, what's going on? A lot of work and time went into this, finding the right individual to come on that, producing the segment questions and everything else. So I hope you guys enjoy. Please like and subscribe. Get us up to 3,500 subscribers. Remember two free tickets to the UFL Championship game. You can even sit with the professor Andrew Murray. If you get us over that we're like less than 40 away. Get us there. Hopefully this episode will incentivize you a little bit today. I think 40% of people that watch Andy and i's Monday live streams are not subscribed to the channel and those actually do really well. So get on board if you're not already. Support the channel and give it a thumbs up. Good. Great episode today. Todd Merko coming on. Former Los Angeles Avengers, president and COO of the Arena Football League. Really deep dive wide ranging, almost an hour long interview. What does Todd think of kind of the business direction of the UFL TV ratings versus attendance? How should we incentivize the local fan bases to come out, giving away tickets for free slashing tickets, kind of all those strategies. Todd has spent decades kind of in the sports media landscape through ad sales and ticketing and everything else through Fox Sports. He was with the outdoor channel. He has his own consulting firm now. So even outside of kind of the arena football landscape, Todd is a wealth of knowledge. I really appreciate him. Like I said, taking almost an hour to sit down today, kind of deep diving, all of this stuff. And then the pre-production calls that we had and everything else, max. And you get a random email from a podcaster in Seattle, Hey, can you come on to talk to some UFL? So I think Todd went great. It was great. I really hope you guys enjoy it. Hopefully it will be some fruitful tangible things that UFL can do. I know we get a lot of, well you guys are too negative, so here we go. Hopefully you guys enjoy that. And then at Football Talk today we're going to be previewing the weekends games with Kevin Kler of Fox Sports. A long time friend of the program was trying to get Brock keyword on and then I was working all week and he was working and we just couldn't coordinate schedules. So hopefully we'll get Brock keyword on again here soon once our schedules allow it. Last note from me. I know there's a ton of CFL stuff right now. I know there's a Jack Kelly's of it all. I'm recording this late on Thursday and the pinball press conference and Dave Naor doing all that reporting and the Elks losing money and all that stuff literally between Andy and i's live stream on Tuesday. And right now I have had zero time to podcast, so no CFL content this week. The best I could do was Todd earlier in the week and then Kevin ler. So hope you guys enjoy. Hope that's enough alternative football content and then we'll get on the CFL train next week. Again, should have a much easier schedule so I can subscribe. We'll see at the end next. Well this is exciting today. This is a little off the wall here. Normally we have our Farhan of the world, Dave Naer, everyone else, this is a little think tank today. We get a lot of negativity on here. Sometimes you guys are too critical about the UFL, everything else. So I'm bringing in today Todd Merko here and just even looking from his LinkedIn former president and COO of the Los Angelas Avengers back in the Arena Football League. But even just here, confident strategists with contagious passion perspective on how to engage and monetize generational audiences, consumer sports fans and traditional and emerging media. Todd's got a lot of experience with all this stuff, like I said, leading through your LinkedIn. Todd, why don't you just, how are you doing and maybe give us a little bit of background. What's your elevator pitch about who you're I'm doing well, doing well. I've got beautiful weather down here in Scottsdale, Arizona. Looks like you've got it up there in Washington. So cool. I just got done with the spring semester at Arizona State, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism where I'm been given the privilege to touch young minds and kind of give them the fresh approach they should be taken moving forward in media and content and sports. I actually teach to the journalism students a business S class. They really don't get a business foundation. So my whole thing is I ask 'em to remember one thing when they leave and that is follow the money, follow the money, follow the money. So aside from that, I have a consulting business where of late, I've been spending a lot of time talking to local sports teams that have been going through this media, local media change with the Valley sports Diamond sports situation. We're seeing radical changes occur. Time will tell if the formulas that are being put in place. Phoenix is one of those markets if that formula is going to work. But I've been spending time in that area as well. And on top of that, I'm starting a new nonprofit organization focused around youth sports and educating the constituents inside that space. But we'll save that for another podcast. Well this is great. I do appreciate this, Todd, getting a random email from me on a Friday. Hey, do you want to come on and talk? But Todd was part of the arena football league back in the early two thousands and then just a whole wealth of career, you ticket sales and marketing and sports and all of that. So we wanted to get Todd thoughts today on everything UFL, how do we engage the local markets moving forward, talking new attendance versus TV ratings and all of that stuff here. Todd General, just here, we're existing in the world where we have a merged spring football league here, co-owned by Fox and Redbird and everything else. Did you imagine being at this spot here, coming from your past history with all of this? Yeah, I think it's something that we're, we're going to continue to see whether or not somebody can strike gold in the off season, if you will, of traditional football. And the reason being is there's just too much money in it, right? I think success for the UFL or anybody who really tries outside the NFL is can you pick up a ratings point from football fans? Can you layer that with betters that are interested in throwing down some money, win or lose, and then can you pull in the sponsors on top of it? So it is a simplified vision of it, but I think we're going to continue to see the entities come out and try to get a piece of that gold in the traditional off season, if you will. So coming off today, we're recording this Tuesday, early this week. I appreciate Todd making time with my work schedule. Coming off, we have Mike Mitchell's TV Radiance for this week, about a million. Of course I have the, it was Sunday's average was 1.2 million, 41% up over last year. So we're seeing, I would say above average what we maybe are expecting for TV ratings in that the attendance lagging a little bit. I think we had on average over the weekend, 5,000 Memphis, 7,000 Michigan, 32,000 in St. Louis and then 14,000 in dc. We have a debate on here a lot, Todd, about, well, this league is an attendance driven ride. It's all based on the TV revenue and it's just a fractions of a point. Any money made at the gate Gate. We talked offline setting up about this, just wanting to feel like you're a part of it with the audience we're trying to build towards local ownership. Where do you base between the TV revenue and then the butts in the seats? Well, first I had not seen the ratings yet for the past weekend, doing a million plus is a decent number. A lot of people would look at that and think, ah, that's not great. It's not a bad number. College football, the non hiked games we may see under a one for a lot of the games we'll see over ones and we'll see large numbers. Dion Sanders was, my gosh, he was doing tens and elevens this past year, but a million viewers, it's not bad. It's definitely sustainable to the business model, if you will, to what Fox is trying to pull off with. The rock is trying to pull off. Now, on the other side of this, as you bring up attendance, look, it's a valuable piece of the business model and putting butts in the seats is obviously a critical part. It comes with a double-edged sword because we always tried, I always tried on both sides, whether I was on the media side, I always tried to help our team partners by not showing empty seats. When I was on the team side, I always tried to make sure working with production that we were clearly not showing empty seats and trying to fill those seats. And the fan at home wants to see that there is a stadium interested in fully interested and engaged with that game, right? Partly is that energy comes through to the viewer at home, but if there's no interest in the stadium inside the actual stadium or the arena, it does convey and sports fans want to be a part of something. They want to watch something that is can't miss tv. And if there are people actually not going to the game psychologically, it just happens to change how we approach what we're viewing. And look, we can look at NFL games the last couple of years. Their numbers haven't trended like they would want them to. There have been stadiums across the country that have had empty seats. Now if you see those games, one thing I can promise you is whether it's CBS or Fox or NBC or whatever partner, they're doing their darnedest to show all the full seats and not those empty seats. So I think it's a double-edged sword. But on one end I would say the UFL has a positive outlook with the numbers that they're generating ratings wise. But locally they obviously have more work to do. And so we'll get into some of those ideas today. This is going to be, I think I'm branding this a step-by-step blueprint here to fix. We will fix the UFL today. Don't worry about no, because what strikes me is obviously right now this exists as a TV product for Fox, right? And that's why they went into this and we partnered and all that stuff. But at some point the goal, whether it's five years from now or seven years from now or 10 years, we want to sell these franchises off. And if I'm averaging 5,600 people in Memphis, I mean you worked with us with the Arena leagues. I know you had said you built 4,000 up to 16,000 general attendance back for the La Avengers. What interest is there in a property maybe in Memphis or Michigan that's pulling in sub 8,000 a game like that? Or is that viable? Well look again, another double-edged sword. If they're going to sell those franchises off and move away from a single entity situation, they're really going to have to try to create revenues that are coming in from the league side. That's where success is truly. It's not defined necessarily by what's going on on the local level and what you can create if you can't create a strong media relationship with somebody that's generating revenue for you and you can't generate consistent sponsorship revenue and then we can layer in merchandise and all the other ancillary stuff. Betting certainly brings a whole new dynamic to the leagues these days. But if you can't generate those revenues from the leagues, then being sustainable as a franchise entity in a market makes it very, very difficult. And look, that was the biggest problem in the Arena Football league for many years and we're seeing it again now, and I don't think the current owners had any idea what they were getting themselves into. If I'm looking at this thing from 30,000 feet, I think they thought they were going to be sustainable. They certainly sold that story to the franchise owners and the franchise owners who pulled out were expecting to get revenue from the league and that didn't happen. And obviously kind of circumstantial here having you on, we're having the downfall of a FL and I've been trying to get some coverage of that in my work schedule and everything. But yeah, I mean obviously, and I'm sure you're shaking your head at seeing some of that stuff and that might be a conversation for another time as well. We'll see here in terms of, we got questions here. Max put together some of this and really helped him help produce the segment here in terms of attendance and TV ratings issues, is that a market issue in terms of we've chosen the wrong markets or is that we are not promoting well enough in the markets? It's both. So when you look at the major force and you look at this from what they are doing, we see franchise growth, it's not as much anymore in the major fours, but we do see franchise growth. Where it occurs is in the largest markets because what the leagues, in fact, let's go, that's a great example going on right now, college football, let's look at realignment in the college space because the Big 10 has done something which is so smart and everybody else is trying to follow suit to fill in the holes the same way. But the Big 10 went through realignment and that snag of Los Angeles with SC and UCLA that caught everybody off guard. They got the number two market in the United States. So by bringing the number two market into the United States with their primary schools, they drew this interest in. So from a national perspective, they have, what I think we'll see is an increase in ratings for the Big 10 this coming year because they added Los Angeles, they've got New York, they've got Chicago, they've got Detroit. I mean they've got so many and they added San Francisco, they've got so many large markets. Actually no, they didn't add San Francisco, they added Washington, your area, they added Seattle, right? And so another large market. So when you flip this and you look at from the standpoint of the UFL one, what do you need to do to create national ratings, but then what do you have to do to create local ratings? Well, the local ratings help support the national numbers, right? So what I can guarantee you almost without failure is if the New York jets at a five and 10 clip on the season are playing the Jacksonville Jaguars who are 10 and five, I can almost guarantee you that that game is going to rate significantly higher amongst most games around the country because of why the number one market in the country in New York and the TV sets that it brings to the equation. So if you have the foundation of those local teams inside of large television household markets, that helps lift all boats in a rising tide that helps to create those national numbers. Now what the UFL doesn't do, which our major fours do, do are aside from the NFL, and I know this is probably not where the mark cast goes in all of this, but there's local ratings because of the quantity of games that the NBA and NHL and Major League baseball has. And the Arena Football League was in this model as well. We had local broadcasted games. So you had to be strong, you had to be sustainable in your local markets. And if we're looking at it from a ratings perspective, for the most part, the NHL typically ranks really, really low overall locally, depending upon markets that you go to. Obviously Detroit, Chicago, New York, I mean those hockey hot markets rate much higher, but otherwise they're rating lower. And so the goal is how can you put together the strongest markets that are going to attract the strongest audiences fans that are going to tune into those gains and you really want to try to do it, but the foundation of that is really trying to do that with the larger market teams. Well, and we've talked about this because obviously come up here the last couple of weeks on the show and just in no world would you ever have these eight markets selected for a league to kind of start out, even though this is a couple put together here, three in Texas, Michigan, Memphis, we don't have LA have San Diego, we don't have New York or any of that. So where you don't have that a first, how surprised are you that we don't have either coast represented either of the top two media markets, but also then how do you hope to recover from that? It feels like Birmingham is not the hot. I mean, it might be the hotbed of the football world, but it's not the hotbed of the TV viewing population, Not knowing exactly what their strategy is on that. I mean, I think part of this is taking the old teams that they brought into the equation, which I always thought that was a bit of a head scratcher to be honest with you. I mean, I don't know what the true relevancy was of that, especially when we're talking about Birmingham. I don't know if that formula works. They're clearly trying to do it where football is, where it is, hotbeds, Texas. But again, I mean look, the numbers of what we're seeing, what would be really interesting in what you put up on the screen is what do those numbers look like from a regional perspective? Are we drawing in those audiences from those areas? Now you asked about the West Coast for years we had no teams in la it was partly, well, do we really need teams in la? They were rating good. They weren't rating great, but they were rating good and fans there could watch games that were all over the place. They didn't have to necessarily watch the Rams or the Chargers. And there was always this stigma for a long time. In fact, we dealt with it with the Avengers, is this truly a football market? And I would argue and say, yeah, it is a football market because we were able to stimulate those fans, albeit it was we needed 16,000 or more if we'd started to add ratings on. But yeah, we were able to stimulate it in a non NFL time period. We didn't have the NFL for I don't know how many years during that time period, but I'm not surprised that they haven't brought LA into the mix. San Diego's smaller market. So again, I don't know, but we could also throw the argument on San Diego. They don't have the chargers. Are they thirsting for football? Is there something? So all these things end up being kind of trial and error situations to try to figure out, and I think they have the luxury of doing that if they wanted to do that. My thing is obviously right now you're seeing no LA no New York because of cost and travel and venue availability. But my question is, is it worth those added, is it worth those added headaches to be in one of those markets just from that, like you said, getting the local viewership there and then also national. I mean we saw Mike Mitchell will bang his head against the wall that the highest rated XFL and the highest rated spring football game and however long was the New York Guardians game playing that first XFL weekend? That wasn't even the kickoff. It was just because that was one of the media markets involved. Yeah, I don't know. It's tough. I think inside of those markets to kind of get the football fan in a frenzy and week after week after week I think is very difficult. There's a lot of, especially in the summertime, I mean spring and summer, there's a lot of options. There's a lot of options for the sports fan. And so can you get them And think about it right now, if you had a team in New York and you've got the Rangers and the Knicks in the playoffs, I mean you're going to have a serious time competing against that if you actually schedule a football game up against that serious. So there's a lot of things that take their attention away and I think probably from that standpoint, look, the one thing I can tell you is when you got the national broadcasters involved, they're smart. They're smart, they know the value of audience acquisition, they know what it's going to take to get them every quarter of the year and where they're going to get derailed or where their attention and focus is going to go to. They're very, very smart and I'm sure they're leaning in on that information very, very hard. And I'm sure they're lending that information to the league office at the UFL. For sure, for sure. In those decisions, How do you view, we've talked a lot here coming at the end of the season, do you relocate a team that's not working? How dangerous do you view team relocation, especially where some of these, what was it, it was Memphis, it was actually Tampa and then it was Memphis and now some of these places haven't even been in the markets for two, three years. How dangerous do you view that? Again, it depends what you're actually picking up from an audience perspective. If you're getting a national audience and it's scattered throughout the country, I don't think that audience is going to care if team A picks up and moves to a new city. I don't think it's going to matter. I don't think there's enough hype and I'm not close enough to it and watching it close enough, I don't think there's enough hype in each of these cities right now as they exist that any one fan base is going to be like, oh my gosh, our team left us. I don't think that would happen. I mean, first of all, from the spring football side, these cities have seen it come and go and come and go and come and go, right? And so they're used to how close they're going to actually get to that entity. So I don't think it's a huge factor. And that's what I'm saying. I think with Fox, they can be pretty smart with all the broadcast partners, they can be pretty smart and say, you know what? This one didn't really pan out. We thought it would. We're having challenges putting butts in seats to make it look good for tv. Let's maybe try market X. What do you guys think? Here's what our data shows us, here's what we know. Let's give that a try next season. And then you spin it and you see what happens. I think they have that to do that. Do you worry then about a new future market feeling burned because of that? Well, hey, they just came from, I mean because I know the Arena league and all that moved around, but we have people scream on both sides. I mean that's why I asked the questions. I see both sides of the coin. I really do. And believe me, I do too because I've been on both sides of the coin. And look, I know you want to kind of pin the A FL, but look at these fans once again, right? I mean they were going in the last weekend, last few weekends thinking they're going to games and the plug gets pulled. So I get it. I mean you definitely don't want that kind of situation to happen. If you've electrified a fan base, and I say electrified a fan base, that fan base could be a hundred, that fan base could be 20,000. But if you have electrified a fan base, you are going to have to evaluate what that decision of relocation looks like and what you're going to end up getting as a backlash on it. And do they understand? I mean this is a complex strategy of what the UFL in particular is trying to pull off. And I think you have to communicate that to these fans and I think that's really, really critical in the standpoint of their success because those fans need to understand, Hey listen, you were at the games, we got 10,000 people in a 45,000 seat venue. It just doesn't work. If you can pick up 30,000 of your friends and bring 'em fantastic, but that's not happening. So I think as long as the parties can communicate that I have faith in the UFL, I have faith in really Dwayne Johnson, I think that guy's so connected to his fan base. He doesn't want to piss anybody off by relocating. And if he does have to relocate, I think he's going to communicate that if this were to become the if factor, I think he's going to communicate that. He's going to make sure that he's not pissing off any rock fans in the process, which is important. Well, and I agree. I think league transparency is incredibly important to me. And we had the ruling came down today from the CFL in regards to this Chad Kelly stuff that we've been tracking just to kind of timestamp everything. But I think you need to have league transparency. I think the UFL should act more like a transparent maybe arena league in communicating with their fans versus we are a top four, top five league right now I think in my opinion. I think sometimes UFL, oh, well we don't need these people covering the league or this doing that or we are the UFL. And I think you can build to that point, but I think engaging communities and communicating with your fans, I agree with you. I don't know if that would happen, but I agree that that should happen. Well, here's so an interesting commissioner, David Baker, if you were familiar with Big David Baker, commissioner of the Arena Football League when I was there, and again, I apologize for going back. That's okay. He always used to say something, by the way, this guy was, oh my god, he was just an enormous man when he entered a room, it was like holy cow. And he came with this positive attitude and energy. Most recently he was head of the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio for the NFL. But he used to be so positive and one of the things that he used to say almost ad nauseum at board meetings and anywhere he went, even if he was talking to fans, if you want to be big league, you have to act big league. And he really got a lot of people believing. He certainly made me believe, I'll tell you, I would've run through a wall for the things that he was saying because it was true. If you want fans to believe they're watching something of significant value, big league value, then you have to be doing things that are big league. Now sometimes that doesn't work in the business model, but you have to suck it up and you have to do what you have to do to make it be big league. And in Los Angeles, we had an owner that I worked for there, Casey Washman, who was highly committed financially, he was highly committed, he was highly committed to the team overall to make it work into the league. And if the commissioner said, you got to be big league, Casey would do what he needed to do to be big league. Now by the way, that doesn't mean everybody in the league's going to do that. And there was something I always used to say when we'd go to board meetings and you're only as strong as your weakest team. And that's an unfortunate situation too, because if somebody is not kicking in and doing what they need to do nice about the UFL in a single entity situation is they can say, look guys, we're all here. We're all on this level. You can't play down here. I'm not talking about on the field, I'm talking about business operations. You got to be up here. Everybody's got to be up here. This is our expectation. If you're in a franchise ownership situation, you can try to hold owners to certain levels, but owners can make decisions. We've seen that across every league in this country, around the world, quite frankly. And you can do whatever you want to do if you don't want to put all the money in to succeed business wise on the field wise, hey, you can do that to a certain degree. So I think it's just one of those things that I think it's something that as you point out, the fans want that. And so I think the UFL is trying and I'm sure Dwayne Johnson with a lot of stuff that you see him doing, I think he's trying to do that too and kind of rally the troops around. It doesn't mean it's always going to be that, but I do think you got to try to execute that way for sure. Appreciate here, we're going. Hope you're a good time wise here. We'll try to double time. Whatever you need. I'm enjoying it. You're Killing need. I appreciate it. I just always like to check in here. So in terms of this season, and we had the merger coming in and all of that was not a large ramp kind of runway going up to the season a couple months in terms of engaging these markets, most of these teams are going to see five home games, maybe six with a playoff, the hubs in Texas. How difficult is that to engage? We're seeing during the end of the season, we're probably going to have layoffs or seasonal employees. We're only going to have people involved. How do you build these markets outside of the three months you're in play and the five times you're in the markets each season? Again, I hate to go back to the arena days. We had some teams That that's why you're here. Yeah, Yeah. I mean we had teams that had seasonal layoffs. We did not have seasonal layoffs in la. We did not believe in it. It was a 12 month job to make that change succeed. All your work truly starts happening the day the season ends and actually you're really working towards the next season during that season. And so I don't think you can do that. There are arguably some positions you can say are seasonal game ops for sure, but are those game ups people now, ticket sellers? Are they promoters of some kind out in the community? What do they do? I think what's really important and where we saw our success in Los Angeles in particular, it was really important for me that we take the masks off the players. First of all, we find the right players that were really good on the field, good people, so they were going to be good in the community. And we took their masks off and we started marketing them without their masks on Tony Graziani, who was our quarterback, who I was just reminded by this the other night, by the way, I was watching the Bon Jovi documentary on Hulu and he's in playing the piano and I'm like, holy shit, there's the arena football championship trophy sitting on. And it was Tony, it was his quarterback, which I had left the year before. Well, when he left in free agency, I think it was the same year I left. So it was fun watching him lift that trophy with Jovi. But we had Graziani, we had a wide receiver who was one of Ryan Leafs wide receivers from your neck of the woods, Chris Jackson, who was one of the best in the league. We brought in a kid named Greg Hopkins from, he'd been in the, where was he? He was in Albany and then Albany folded and he was with Indiana, he was with Indiana Firebirds, and we brought him in. So we had three really strong football players that we can market around. And I got to tell you something, we went to high school games. That was part of our strategy is we had the off season to go to the traditional football season and we pounded it and pounded it and pounded it. If I was the UFL inside of these markets, I would go to the grassroots. I would go to the youth football games, I would go to the high school games, maybe some of the college games if there crowds there, and I would start pounding and pounding and pounding. We saw success from that. We saw a turnaround where people were identifying with those players the following year. And that momentum built when you start doing it year after year after year, and fans start to expect it and they see you out in the community. It works. It truly works. You got to win too, by the way, right? You got to add a little bit of that winning sugar inside of it. But it does work, and that's what I would recommend that these guys do. They've got to double down in the off season if they really want to see success in the local market. Franchises We joke has in the CFL the last couple seasons, the Edmonton Elks, the Eskimos, and then the Elks have had tremendous, and they've had Victor Que came in their president and left. And I mean the team stunk and it's like you can only do so many things here, and I want to talk about ticket pricing here, but you can only run so many deals or whatever if the team is owe in 13 or whatever, it's really hard to do. I know it was Memphis last weekend did fly in a day early because the thing is, and I talked with Russ Brandon back, I mean, this was two years ago when they announced the hub and I said, well, we've seen the challenges that the USFL have had only being in the hub. How are you guys going to benefit? He's like, we're going to be the first people in. We're going to be the last people out. That hasn't always been the case if we can fit in a media hit when we fly into town on the way to the game and then on the way out. But I did see Memphis come in a day early this week, which I thought was great, and they went and volunteer with some kids and then they played the video during the game. That was great. But like you said, it's the other nine months out of the year and I just don't see, I'm afraid I won't see that same motivation and that same time being spent. How many games are we talking about in a weekend for UFL now? So there's four games a week, eight teams, and so like I said, you figure you got five home games plus playoffs, and then the championship's going to be in St. Louis, so you got five opportunities of six. If I was the UFL, I think what I would do is I would take the model that the premier lacrosse league has done. You familiar with the premier Lacrosse League? Yeah. Probably not as much as you are. Well, no. It's funny, you kind of look like one of the rabble brothers, Abel, when they started that league, they looked at everything that everybody looks at from a startup problem. They had venue issues, what are their fans going to look like? So on and so forth. And they traveled around the circus, they traveled around and played their games, all their games in a weekend in one location. And I don't think that would be a bad thing for the UFL. If you could find, maybe you can do it out of one venue, maybe you do it, you could probably do it Thursday night, Friday. Well, you could do it a Friday night, maybe do two games on Saturday and a game on Sunday and just bring it all to the market, bring it all to the market and sell a package of tickets. This is the thing about sports right now is they've got to be thinking outside the box. And I'm not talking about if this is the box of what traditional football has always been, they got to be way out here. Am I off screen? I mean, they got to be way out here, right way. Got to be able to say, we are going to try this. It sounds crazy, but we're going to try this because first of all, what's the value to a local fan if they're getting five home games a year anyway, you're not getting enough home games to build momentum of any kind. So what they did in the premier Lacrosse league I thought was brilliant, and their goal is the same thing. Their goal is at some point to no longer be single entity and at some point sell those franchises off and go market to market. By the way, we may never get there. They may find that the best way for this league to operate is to continue traveling around. They're doing it, pick their locations, go to different markets every year to duplicate some because they're hotbeds for lacrosse. But I would not rule that out if somebody said, you are now the new CEO of the UFL. I would throw that idea down and say, look, I think we need to try it. I think we need to see what we can build from market to market, bring in focus to those games on those weekends. How many people can we put in the stands to make it look great for television and see what happens? It's crazy but crazy is what's going to really help push this thing upwards. Well, it is. It's funny because when we were talking, because there was the issue, the Vegas market going into last season had issues for the XFL and they weren't sure what they were going to do. And we had even batted around, do you have a traveling team? And they're just always on the road and then you build it that way. But I think we're seeing, and I want to talk ticket pricing here, but we're seeing with Birmingham that held all the USL teams season one, and then they held, it was I guess a quarter of the games last year. And then now this year we're seeing that diminished result where it's like you almost saturated that market so much the first season with having 40 home games there, that now when the stallions play, and we'll see this weekend, the stallions are hosting, it's the biggest game of the season, but are they going to get a crowd out there like you've sewed that field too many times and you can't grow anything. Yeah, look, it's the same formula that gets worked over and over and over again, right? I mean, you're going to see bumps, you're going to see things that are going to occur. But this is why I come back to the idea, can you do something super crazy that'll just generates something that you weren't expecting And look even under their current model, what is that crazy? I would truly be thinking outside that box to try to understand what is that crazy? Because it's tough, man. It's really tough In terms of ticket prices this year, and I want to read Max's question. I thought he worded it well, but basically we're running ticket sales and $10 tickets and buy two for one. And I think they're giving away sunglasses now and hoodies and stuff trying to get in here. But when we're doing all that, how should the league balance trying to draw people in with cheap tickets while also not devaluing themselves so much that fans become disinterested when the pricing goes up? Yeah, that's another one of the, you're bringing up a lot of double-edged swords, reed, a lot of double-edged swords. Man, I don't even know where you could jump off on this one to be honest with you, because it's the strangest thing. The consumer, as we talk about the sports fan here is the consumer. The consumer overall has behavioral traits that don't change product to product. And you can throw sports in the mix and it doesn't change. In other words, what I'm saying is if you put a value on something, generally the consumer believes the value. And if you do a ticket for 10 bucks to a football game, you've totally changed the dynamic of what the value proposition has been for an NFL game. And even in a college football game in these markets, Alabama's not $10. If you're going to go see Alabama play, you're paying hundreds of dollars to go see an Alabama football game. So it's very difficult. But on the flip side, you've got to do it because if you're going to put people on the seats to try the product, how are you going to make that happen? That was a very, very careful situation for us in la. We did not want to, our pricing model was our pricing model, but we clearly had strategies around that pricing model, whether it was group ticketing, whether it was promos, whether it was family packs. I mean, there's a lot of different ways you can kind of cut it up, but yeah, I agree with you or agree with kind of where you're going here. So now the UF L's look five years down the road, the UFL is successful, they're playing more than five games in the season at home, and they want those $10 tickets to now become a hundred dollars when you're 1520 rows or less off the field right now, all of a sudden people are going, wait, I used to bring my kids here and it was a hundred dollars proposition for tickets and food and now it's a $600 proposition. Like wait a minute, timeout, I'm not doing this. So there's a threshold of where that is. And again, that's where having the true understanding market to market. So when you get into what do these, and I don't know what these administrations look like market to market, these operations, but that's where they become highly, highly critical in understanding who those fans are, what it takes to get them out, what it takes to keep them and to retain them and what it's going to mean a year or two or three years down the road. Or you got to think longer. You got to think 10 years down the road. I mean for us to come back to this, to the Arena Football league, the one thing that League was great for, and I have students coming through at a SU who were in that mix, it was a great kids event. It was like the circus for kids. It was nonstop action. They were screaming, they were hollering and they became football fans. They converted to the traditional size field from being arena football fans. And that was a very conscious strategy that we put into place hoping to be there long-term that if we can get to the young kids that in five years or 10 years when they are actually starting to make decisions on their own, they're going to decide to come to arena football games in 20 years down the road. They're definitely going to come to those games and bring their kids. And that's what you hope for in sports. But again, that pricing model is a very, very touchy avenue area for strategy. It's very touchy, but you have to understand who your fans are and what their appetite is and how far their appetite will go in those situations. I don't think I'm really giving you an answer here what you wanted, but No, you're good. It's really difficult and it's market to market in analyzing what the outcomes are going to look like. Well, and this is no disrespect. I know we have a lot of the league and ticket people listening to the show and follow and all that stuff. I mean, I think this is league, this is higher up driven at this point, but I don't know what that strategy is. Like you said, you need to have some sort of strategy. Like I said here it's like take a hoodie with this, take sunglasses last year, the USFL, we're giving away spatulas, come get a beach towel. We're doing the, and now some people say, that's a great idea, increase that value proposition and hey, there's going to be, they talked about in Memphis, and you could bring a jazz person in or whoever, a band every week to do a show at halftime. The question is when do you give too much? And I know there's no right answer to that, but how do you need to balance giving the whole kitchen sink, trying to get people in versus no, you're actually paying to watch the football at the end of the day. I do think because we did a lot of promotions with the Avengers, we did bobbleheads, which our players, they were floored by, and I think we did did three or four bobbleheads a season. So almost half the games, there were other things that we were giving away. And I think for the most part, everybody across the league, I think you have to get into that game. I mean, that's kind of what the sports fan is expecting these days. The NFL does not need to do that. It's not in their DNA, they can charge whatever they want to charge. Major league baseball, totally different animal. They got quantity that they can sell for the most part if you're not the Braves or the Dodgers. But even the Dodgers have, they might have 10 bobbleheads during the season, maybe more. I mean every game, every home stand, let me rephrase this. Every series at home has got at least one game giveaway. And I would say it might be two, and it might be all three or four. I think there is things that fans have kind of expected from these, I don't want to say lower end, but these sports that are right are not on the higher end. I think there's an expectation that there's going to be more value somehow. I mean, look, it might be we did a great family pack and every team across the board does a family pack. So you can control your costs, you know what you're doing going in, you get four tickets, you get hot dogs, you get drinks, and you get something else ancillary. I think you have to do that, I'm sure in the UFL, I'm sure they're applying all those practices. I would think it's definitely something that you have to do. And you have to look at the layering of how you're selling your tickets. So you have the foundation if they have season tickets and what's that look like? And that's where that off season comes into play. And really the previous season, how are you selling into the next season? And then from there, it's you're talking about group ticketing, which is vital to the success of a team. How are they getting out and bringing groups in? That's where you really can discount and hide that value of pricing. And then promotions and different avenues. Some teams have done in major league baseball, they've gone to the subscription model, Hey, give it a shot, right? Get a hundred bucks a person and give 'em five games and let 'em choose what they're going to go to. You got plenty of seats. It's not like I would take a shot at that kind of strategy. So I think everything goes, and I think this is truly in the UFL situation, very similar to what we had a FL. It's a whiteboard and you just throw as much shit at that whiteboard and see what sticks seriously. I mean, that's what it comes down to and see what works and then what works, move it forward, what doesn't work, pin it and hold it for another day in case the environment changes. A couple quick here, just media questions before we get out. Just in terms of lead coverage, I appreciate your time. I know you've been very kind with this. How did the A FL teams go about covering themselves and getting stories out? Did the teams have staff writers or reporters? Because the XFL last year, they had a guy that was kind of doing weekly blogs and articles. This year we're not doing that. The UFL has never really had that. So I mean, we're trying to do that right and get stuff, but how did the league itself and the teams handle that? Well, my days of the A FL, so we can put this in perspective, social media was, it just wasn't that platform yet. So we were still very much in Los Angeles, and I would say nationally too, by the way. We were still very much old traditional journalism relationships. We had beat writers in la whether they were with LA Times, whether they were with Daily News, the Orange County Register, we had those supports at each place. Look, that entity when you're talking locally is a relationship game. And this cuts back to, is this a position, a media position, media person position, media relations? Is that a full-time role that's in the market 12 months out of the year Now, one of the A FL teams, the Orlando Predators, they ended up, I believe, if I remember correctly, they cut their media relations person after the season ended. Well, that person still needs to maintain those relationships. And as the season starts gearing up and you're starting to do things, there are stories that spot now the world's changed. And I recognize that, especially working at A SU and the journalism school, there are ways to create content and I think you have to work that old traditional aspect, but I think you have to figure out what's your content strategy and develop your own content, create your relationships with entities like you, which is great that you guys are trying to fill this void of football that's not the NFL and provide the content that those fans want to see. And so if I was running a team, I would make sure you were one of my best friends. You were one of my best friends. You are going to, whenever you need me, I'm on, and whenever I can call on you to help. I mean that's what the game is. And then I would layer that with what am I creating or who can I partner with a SU journalism? If I have a team in Arizona, right? I'm going to go in there, in that content factory, I'm going to say, look, we need your help. We'd like 10 stories a month if possible that you guys can churn out. We will give you guys all access beat riders, the whole nine yards. And they do that. They do that. They've done that with Rattlers Rattlers games here. And I think it's really important. First of all, what's different from my days 20 years ago versus today, we got multiple content platforms that need to be filled and we cannot control where our fans are, per se. Our fans are across all of these platforms. So the question is, do you have enough content? Are you communicating? Now, I say this and I will point this out, I don't know if you notice, but the Arena Football League changed their website over the last few days. Did you notice? I haven't. I've not enough bandwidth. What have they done? They changed it. They took, it's totally new. It doesn't have, doesn't have the information in it that you would expect. You can't go to a standings page, which is dumbfounding to me. But the reason I brought it up is I looked at their social links and they had Instagram, which I think they must have acquired in bankruptcy because it looked like they still had the A FL account. And they had, they had the A FL X's account, but they had humble, humble, like humble, okay, are you scratching your head and wondering what humble is? Because I was, okay, why are you wasting your time on humble when you need to get in front of where the larger crowds are for arena football? I mean, I would argue LinkedIn, I mean, as stupid as it sounds, there are people connected all over that place. How you found me? Who? I mean humble. There's nobody on humble, what's the point? Right? I'm sure I'm going to get a note from somebody from a FL after this. Well, but my point is, and this is my point, not to knock them. My point is understand, we're very fragmented and try to figure out where your attention needs to be on multiple platforms, not all the platforms, but on multiple platforms of significant meaning. Where you are going to affect fan engagement. Most critical is how can you get engagement from your fan base or new fans and engagement from them? Well, yeah, and to round this out, you were talking about the beat riders and stuff, and there just aren't that many anymore anyway. And especially some of these markets, and I think we had talked last week on here, I can't remember, the Texas Rangers might only have a couple of beat riders, let alone the Arlington Renegades, right? Who's having the time to do that. So I think that there's this weird balance of like, well, we need to work. There's not enough traditional media that we're working with in terms of, and I used to work in local news, I worked with the Fox here that we had all that kind of stuff back in the day, but there's not enough traditional media. But they were kind of scared of this non-traditional riot. I know there's been sports gambling podcasts and things that have had challenges getting credentialed for some of these games. So I dunno, the league to me is in a weird spot because I dunno who you're working with because you might only have a handful of beat riders, but then you're not dealing with the podcasters and the YouTubers and the gamblers and all that. So I don't know where they're spending their attention. But how would you, given today's landscape, I guess, how would you balance that energy? Well, you got to, do you Accept or would you accept everyone? Max has the question here. Would you accept everybody in the world that's trying to cover your league? Or where do you draw that line, I guess? Oh yeah, no, for sure. Listen, I don't know if the site is still up, but during my time at Arena Football, there was a site called arena fan.com, and there was a lot of chatter. Is it still up? Yeah. Yeah. There was a lot of chatter on that site. We didn't ignore it. If something came from that area, if there was content being written, we absolutely worked with them and acknowledged them because they had audience. And so that's my point. You've got to look at where people are. Look, if there's a podcaster that's drawing 500 people, you've got to make a decision. Do you help that podcaster and hopefully help them grow, evaluate? Is there opportunity? Are they good? I would probably err on the side of doing it at least once a year or something talking to them, because you just don't know. You don't know sometimes where those audiences are going to end up growing. But that is the new journalism, what you're talking about. Those are the beat writers, those are the people that if you are getting covered and especially consistently by those people, then you have got to acknowledge who they are. And you have to be in constant contact with them. That's media relations. That hasn't changed. That hasn't changed. The platforms have changed, but the people and the relationship aspect, that hasn't changed. I think there's, surround this, I think there's a gun shyness because back the XFL maybe was announcing things or we were trying to figure out trademarks and cities and teams. You had people that would go on team, people that would go on whatever podcasts and release the cities before they were ready. We're in week six, weeks seven of the UFL. There's no secret information. We're just trying to get Darius Shepherd coming on the podcast or whoever talking about a kick return or whatever. I mean, we're not trying to get the inside scoop here on, but I do think there's this gun shyness given things that have happened in the past and like I said, lack of traditional media and then we're not necessarily, and we're very blessed. I don't want to include myself in that, but I just dunno how you balance that out because it's something that all these, the NFL's got to navigate. Who do we credential for the Super Bowl? Who do we not? I mean every league's got to deal with it. But you would think the UFL, like you said, any amount of tension at this point is probably good garnered. Yeah, that to me would be the box that qualifies. Right? Hey, they're talking about us once a week. Alright, let's go talk to 'em. Check the box, let's amplify it. I mean that's really what it comes down to, right? If you're talking about it, if you're talking about it, we got to amplify it. How can we amplify it? I would do something where in today's world we've got the luxury of saying, Hey, make this up. Todd Meco, the CEO of the UFL is on with us today. I would go take your podcast and connect it to the UL site or into my social media. I mean that all happens, right? Or should and promote it. So it's not just you promoting it, we're all lifting it up. This good for all of us, right? I mean we're not getting enough coverage as it is. And so it's not a question of the old guard, it's a question of the new ways and how do we bring more eyeballs, bring more ears to the table and get people talking about the product? And it only will happen if the content runs into 'em. Well, you would be surprised or not surprised. So that does not happen. So we accept it and I've gotten it both ways. They're like the NFL we've had the CFL commissioner on and they're not, but it's like, well hey, you should just be happy that we're doing all this. So I understand both ways here, but certainly not trying to plug that on my own, but it's just a new landscape and I would be curious to know what their media strategy is there. Well Todd, we have gone way over time here. I think we could probably do another hour here. I'm so appreciative and thankful of your time today. Anything you want to plug, talk about, get into before I let you go? I tremendously, like I said, probably double over what I said we were going to do. No, I'll wait to promote next time when I have a new nonprofit to talk to everybody about. But I appreciate you finding me. It's been fun going back to my arena days. And as I was telling you yesterday when we were talking, I talk through this stuff every semester with my students and the evolution of what's going on in sports and in particular how everybody's trying to grab a piece of the spring leagues somehow. I mean, it's amazing. We did a count one day and I think I counted eight leagues that weren't the NFL 10 leagues and I don't think people realize how many people are actually trying. And I think it's amazing too by the way, that the NFL who stays away from all of this for the most part, back in 2002 to 2004, they got very engaged and very interested with the Arena Football League. Very interested and it's unfortunate that it didn't play out the way it should have because that should have been the Spring league in my opinion. But I've enjoyed this and if there's anything I can ever help you with, don't hesitate to call. Well Todd, we have officially fixed the UFL here. I want to reading my title here, average. We have fixed the UFL Step-by-step Blueprint. Appreciate it, Todd. Good luck with everything else. And like you guys said, I hope you guys enjoyed the talk, send your tips and commissions our way, we'll share it fixed, all this kind of stuff. So until next time, Todd, thanks so much. Thanks Richard. Well, it's not another spring football league season here. We don't have our good friend Kevin Coler back on all the way back with the Spring League. And I will say I so enjoy even watching the NFL games. I'm like, oh, Kevin's here with Mark and they're at Lumen Field or whatever. So I appreciate that. Kevin Coogler here at Fox Sports, how are you? I am good. And I know Reid, you got a lot of Mark and I this year during the NFL season, it seemed like every other week we had a Seahawks game. It really did. And yes, I go back and forth. I like the Washington commanders because of some of the XFL history of that, and we tracked a lot of them. And obviously Seattle with my hometown here and my wife diehard Seahawks fans. So yeah, it always seems like every time I turn on the game, there's Kevin exciting here. We're back. We've talked with you with the Spring league. I actually finally tracked down the Jers jersey. I don't know if I told you that game, jotters jersey from the Mega Bowl, all that stuff. Kevin here. We're back. We're UFL now. We're Fox and Redbird and everything combined. How is life treating you and what do you make of all this? You know what, it's actually been really fun. I think the football is really a high quality football and it would make sense. You take the best of the USFL, you take the best of the XFL, you put 'em into a pot, you have eight teams to parcel these guys out onto. And it would make sense that you're going to have the cream rise to the top, so to speak. And I think that's what we've seen this year in the UFL. It's been a really good brand of football. I love the innovations of the league. I love the one, two and three point tries for extra point. I think we've seen a lot of really cool communications again this year like we did in the USFL days between the officials and our replay command center. And I love that for the fans. I think it's great that airs in the stadium as well as on our broadcast because how many times have you been sitting in a stadium and you're like, I don't know what they're doing here. I don't know what the officials are talking about, whether it's football, basketball, baseball. I like to know and I like the fact that we share that with everybody in the stadium as well as at home when you're watching on tv. Curious you, I don't know if Fox has directives for you guys because it's weird now this year where we're watching some ESPN broadcast, we're watching some Fox write and candidly, I think the fox, I like, we get a lot of sports betting on the ES, espn sometimes a lot of hitting the over, do they give you guys directive? Is it trust now because you've done it so long? I'm just curious, what is their marching orders for you guys calling the games? Yeah, I will be a hundred percent honest with you. I've had no marching orders of any kind calling a game from Fox. No one has said to me, Hey, be sure you do this or don't do that. I think there's a trust level that, I mean, we're putting out people who cover sports and football specifically all the time, whether it's Joel Klatt in our main analyst chair who's the number one guy for college football, whether it's Kurt Menefee, and we all know what Kurt has done over the years. He's been in football for a long time. I've covered the NFL for a long time and obviously a lot of different incarnations of spring football over the last several years. I think there's just a certain trust level Fox's football, that's always been the mantra of Fox. And so I think when they put us on these broadcasts, they trust that we're going to do the game justice. And I hope that's what we're doing because to me, the game is the thing. The stories that are in these games are so numerous that you really don't need to come up with anything else. You can talk about a guy like Breland Speaks who looks at this as an opportunity to show what he's worth and to show who he is. An opportunity for a guy like Adrian Martinez to show that he deserves a chance after his college career to continue to play professionally. A guy like AJ McCarran who's showing that he is a professional quality quarterback, the stories that are in this league are such that I don't think you need to issue any kind of a directive about anything because we can just tell stories all day long and supplement it with what's been some fun football. Well, and you pointed that out I think the first time we had you on and just the extra research that was needed to do games like this and really having to do your homework and be able to be prepared for that because it, yeah, okay, agent McCarran, people know you have to go a lot deeper on some of these players to get more information to be able to share that. So I think, and you feel certainly, at least from the Fox side, I think you do get a lot of informed opinions here coming out from the broadcast booth. Well, and I appreciate that. I hope that's the case because at the end of the day, the goal for all of us is to boost the stories of these people in this league. I mean, these are all guys who are continuing their professional football career in the UFL. And look, everybody knows that the ultimate goal for anybody playing football at any level is to play in the National Football League. And not everybody can do that. So what's the next best thing? Well, right now it's UFL, the chance to get paid to play football, have a team and really play some excellent competitive games. And I think that, I mean, the competition level has been razor thin with these games. I mean, Arlington is oh and six and they lose games by the slimiest of margins seemingly every week because that's what this league is. This league is just one play changes the entirety of the game, and I think that speaks to the talent that we have in this league this year. Yeah, I think it's a tough balance to do these. And again, this goes all the way back to the USFL and the Spring League and even the XFL. How do you balance wanting people to watch this now also knowing that this is kind of the show of people getting along to be at the show. I think it's done better this year. We had Darryl Johnson on preseason talking about wanting to kind of highlight more of just the talent and the football field, the play as it is now versus every other line is, well, this guy's trying to get back to the NFL. Yeah, like you said, we know that, but that can't be 99% of the conversation. No, I think, look, you go into any spring league, and you and I have talked about this for years. You go into any, whether it was the Spring League, whether it was the original XFL, whether it was the USFL, you go into it, I hope, with the base knowledge of these guys want to play in the NFL someday, whether they've already been there or they want to get back, you go into it with that knowledge. I don't need as a play by play guy to underline every single play that's made and say, and that guy would like to take that film and go to X level. The focus for us is there's a game going on and a game that means a lot to these guys and a game that means a lot to the fans of these teams. So let's cover the game. And the game speaks for itself in a lot of ways. I mean, we've got a game this weekend that on Fox is maybe the game of the year so far in the UFL with Birmingham and St. Louis, two of the best, if not the best two teams in the league and maybe the two best quarterbacks in the league right now. And Reid, this all spring football is about is how's your quality of quarterback play? That's where I always start with this. If you have good quarterback play, that is a really good base to start. I think the quarterback play is better in the league this year than we've seen over the last couple of years, again because we've winnowed down the talent. But the way Adrian Martinez is playing in Birmingham, the way Adrian McCarran is playing in St. Louis, and I've had those two teams the last two weeks. I don't know of any two quarterbacks playing better right now and they match up this weekend. Yeah, we'll focus on that game here. I wanted to get your thoughts on, so we had the Renegades collapse again, right? The Panthers and I'm watching and the Mariners game was on, so I've got the split screen going on and I see Jake Bates miss the field goal. Anyone that, I don't know how familiar you are with CFL history, but a Gray Cup was lost in one by, it was the 13th man, and there was the 13th man and then they got the kick again. And I tweeted that out. I said, there's CL ruff rider fans right now that, what was that like this guy that's been automatic the whole season had missed a kick earlier in the game. And then just that you think Renegades have won. I just curious your thoughts on that and then kind of the renegades collapse here. It was something to watch because you saw him trying to get off the field as quickly as he could because there was somebody out there and all of a sudden he knows, oh my gosh, I'm not supposed to be on the field. And I think it was Aja Harris, and if it's not, I apologize, Aja, I don't want to, I'm trying to recollect. I thought it was five that was running off the field late for Arlington, and if it wasn't a genre, my apologies, but there was a player that was trying to get off the field late, didn't get off, and then he misses the kick and you go, oh my gosh, there's a flag down. And you knew right away, 12 men on the field, it's a no-brainer call. And Michigan, by the way, still had their super challenge, so if they didn't catch it, Michigan could have super challenged and had that called with the new super challenge rule this year in the UFL. So either way, that 12th Man was getting called and Jake Bates was getting another chance to kick that field goal. And you just know based on the story of Jake Bates this year, there was no scenario he was going to miss that second kick. I mean, he's been one of the biggest stories in professional football this spring and a chance for Jake Bates to, I mean he was one of the top 20 trending topics in America yesterday after he hit his third 60 plus yard field goal of the season. It's a crazy story for a guy who'd never kicked a field goal before to come out in week one, hit that 64 yarder and get to the point where he hits another game winner yesterday. It's really what this league is all about. It's all about giving guys opportunities to show what they can do and maybe they haven't had that chance before. But to your point about the Renegades, man, it's to the point for Arlington where you just watch and you think, what crazy way are they going to lose this game? Now we've all seen teams like that over the years where it seems like they're snake bit and despite the heroics of Luis Perez and a better running game than we've seen from Arlington yesterday, they still figured out a way at the end to not close it out. And I mean, your heart goes out to those guys because it's got to be incredibly frustrating week after week after week to see it come down to that kind of a thing again. And it's hard because obviously the narrative coming in the season, even from the kickoff game, you have the USFL champions, you have the XFL champion, Rene gets limped into the playoffs and they weren't. I was at the championship game. I'm not quite sure how they won that. I mean, obviously we have a lot of friends on the team, but to see the disparity here of the stallions being undefeated here going in and the renegades not, are you surprised the renegades were still, and I love Luis Perez, he's been on the show all the way back and Joer, he's still, we're not trying Lindsay Scott Moore, we're not trying, I know they had the third. It just feels like, I don't know if they're trying anything new now if they're just kind of riding it out. Yeah, I think I always defer to the notion that the coaches see it every day in practice and they know that Luis Perez is their best option because there's no way that if there was a better option, they're not going to put him out there right now. And I think for the Renegades, that's the best choice they have on their roster. And you've got Lindsay Scott, you're working him in a little bit more and he's, but yesterday we didn't see him throw the ball. He came in and he ran or pitched exclusively in that game. And I would be interested to see what he could do from a throwing standpoint. But again, I always defer to this from a football standpoint when I'm not in practice to see these guys, these coaches, I've never known a coach who's willingly going to put a guy out there that's not the best guy for his team and for his situation. And so I always assume that what's happening in practice is Luis Perez is clearly the number one option for the Arlington renegades and he got hurt yesterday by a couple of drops. Again, I mean there's just some inconsistent plays and it's a fine line in this league between winning and losing and they have always seemingly fallen on the losing side of that fine line. Speaking of the super challenge, that seems like a no-brainer, right? Is something maybe to work in here in a couple of years. I know if you want to go down the rabbit hole of the N-F-L-X-F-L kickoff or any that kind of stuff, but more innovations here coming from the league. I mean it seems like that's something we can challenge anything at any time, something to work towards here in the next couple of years. I dunno about you, Reid. I love the super challenge. I think it's great and I think there's such a strategy to it that we haven't really even gotten into yet there. The strategy of do I throw a flag for a super challenge on a play of my team to get a penalty called against my team when a play goes wrong, if for example, my quarterback throws a pick, I can throw a super challenge flag and say there was holding on my left tackle on that play, and they can go back and call a hold or they can call something that would negate a turnover, negate a penalty, negate something negative for your team with something less negative. Oh, I think my guy moved early. All right, well we called a false start, so this play should have stopped before it started. I think there's so much strategy involved in this and I think as coaches get more comfortable with it, we had a play over the weekend in the Houston St. Louis game where we brought in Mike Pereira. There was a play where Pass rusher came in, Domo Penu came in and hit Reed Senate pressuring him, hit him in the head. It wasn't anything deliberate. He just in the process of going after the quarterback, got him in the head and we asked him should they have used a super challenge to get a penalty called on that, which would've extended the drive. And Mike Pereira said, had they used it there, he would have given a penalty for roughing the passer. But again, I think it takes a certain amount of time for coaches amidst everything else going on to wrap your brain around, okay, now I got to think about the strategy for this. But in the NFL, you could almost have a designated super challenge guy on your staff. His only job is to come up with the super challenge moment for your team. We saw Bob Stoops use it in wonderful fashion yesterday. It gave the renegade a touchdown because they negated a pass interference on Sal Canella. I would love to see the super challenge go up to the next level because I think it adds a different layer of strategy now. I don't want to add it on in addition to all the other reviews, and I don't think the NFL would want that either. I think there's a way to supplement and weave it into the existing system that makes it even more interesting and exciting and the strategy just becomes such a big deal. I love the super challenge, big fan of it. I think that's an innovation that can continue not only at this level, but at the NFL level. It was the XFL game last year, and this is however many 30 CFL and XFLL games, but it was like Hawk's renegades. I think that Anthony Becton was like, they had a pick six or something. He's like, something had to have happened on this play. We're throwing it, we'll figure out what we want to call it on. But I think we talked about it at the time, it was kind of like survival, like the evolution of the immunity, the like here we're going to get the game playing, figuring it out. Do you like the kickoff? I know we haven't seen the NFL version of the XFL kickoff yet. Very divisive statement thing here right now. It is, and I'm not a hundred percent sold, I'll be honest with you. I was really surprised that the UFL didn't go with the XFL kickoff considering the NFL has adopted the XFL kickoff strategy. So I was really surprised that they went with the USFL kickoff versus the XFL kickoff. I know one thing, we get a lot of returns. The return game is alive and well in the UFL. And if you've got a good return, man, you're starting with field position at the 35 to 45 yard line nearly every drive. And from somebody who loves offense and somebody who loves to see that work into play. I do like that aspect of this kickoff rule. I like the fact that you have the opportunity to have the return game involved. I was just very surprised. And you're right, it's a very controversial topic amongst those of us who enjoy the football year round is well, where's the kickoff? What should it be? I'm anxious to see the NFL implement it and see what it looks like at that level this fall because that's going to be a change and it's going to be something that everybody's going to have to get used to the USFL. Now, UFL kickoff is a little more of the traditional kickoff in that they just kick from the 20 yard line and then we have the returns that way. And you have certain amount of as to when you can leave and how far away from the line you have to be and all that stuff. But I will be very interested to see this implemented from last year's XFL at the NFL level. And I think this is a year to look at it and then adjust if necessary down the road. One more question here. I want to talk Houston real quick as you call that, and then I want to preview the Battle Hawks game before we get out of here. Houston really kind of disaster here really. We had the whole, Curtis Johnson was on preseason. I'm kind of excited. We had the rebrand and we're moving the teams, all that kind of stuff. But this team really can't seem to get anything together going. Thoughts on kind of the Houston trash fire? Well, I mean, and you saw their defense, I thought play their best game of the season this past weekend. That's not an easy offense to stop in St. Louis. And I thought they did a really good job of limiting AJ McCarran. They did a lot of bending but not breaking. But that offense has really struggled to get things going. And I like Reid Sunnet a lot. I think he's a talented quarterback. I think he's got a full grasp on this offense. They're just not getting anything at all from a rushing game. I mean, and with Mark Thompson on that roster, I keep waiting for that breakout game like you and I have seen the last couple of springs from this running back and there's just been nothing of any semblance of a run game that's come up for Houston. I mean through six games I think they've rushed for 340 total yards. I mean, I don't care what level of football you're at, and I know it's a passing world in football today at every level you have to be able to run the ball a little bit. You've got to be able to push the ball when you have to push the ball on the ground, you've got to be able to get short yardage on the ground in shorty yardage situations. And to me that's been the most surprising thing with the Houston roughnecks this year. Is there seeming inability to establish any kind of a run game even now with supposedly a healthy Mark Thompson who, I mean, my gosh, last year, Mark Thompson was the difference for the Houston gamblers then in the USFL 14 rushing touchdowns, almost 700 yards rushing. And this year, I know he was dinged up early and that hampered his progress. But I've been really surprised they've been unable to establish anything from a run game. And look, you get a run game going that helps everything on your team, that helps your quarterback, that helps your line play, it helps your defense without that run game, it's been really hard to do anything for Houston. And that's I'm sure been a frustrating thing for everybody there. I think they have talent, but they just have not been able to put it together on the ground. And that's where it's all, to me, that's where it started to be shaky In terms of, like you said, the biggest game here of the weekend coming up Battle HOKs going, it could be a championship game preview where that one would be in St. Louis, which we're going to be at, I imagine would be pretty exciting. But what do you make about this? It seems like the stallions ball hawks are there too, but the stallions are heading class shoulders. It seems above anybody right now. You've got the two best defenses. First off, and I know everybody talks to offense with these two teams, but the way these two teams have defended this season, I think is admirable. But I mean ever since Birmingham settled on Adrian Martinez, they have become this offensive juggernaut. And how smart is Skip Holtz where two weeks ago? How do they win the game? Well, Adrian Martinez wins it with his legs. So everybody's okay, we got to worry about this mobile, this guy's going to run, this guy's going to run. He comes out last week, throws for nearly 400 yards this past weekend in Birmingham's Win. So now when you're preparing for Birmingham, you've got to worry about Adrian Martinez running. You've got to worry about Adrian Martinez passing. You've got to worry about this Birmingham defense. I think Skip Holtz and Anthony Beck have done both tremendous jobs this year, and I'm so anxious to see this quarterback matchup between AJ McCarran and Adrian Martinez. Two very different quarterbacks. AJ's 33 years old, Adrian's just 23, 24 years old just out of college. So you've got two very different kinds of quarterbacks, different ages, different spots in life, but man St. Louis going to Birmingham, you'd feel like Birmingham would have the edge, especially the way they're playing. But I know AJ McCarran is going to have something devised. And again, I've yet to see somebody in this league stop Hakeem Butler. I mean, nobody seems to be able to handle this guy. He's six six, he's got good hands, good speed. He knows how to use that size against smaller corners to his advantage. That's a tough matchup for every single secondary in the UFL. And I'm fired up to see how Birmingham handles that because St. Louis has eight men and they have Butler two of the biggest bodied wide receivers in all of football to go out there this weekend. It's a fascinating game from so many levels and I'm so excited for Birmingham and St. Louis to get going on the field because I think we've really been looking forward to this matchup all season long. Yeah, I think cancel the season here. Let's just move to the championship. But it is crazy. Even during the Birmingham game over the weekend I was watching, they get all the sideline stuff and you're seeing Skip talking, they're talking Matt Corral's giving sideline commentary, and then you have, they're talking like, oh yeah, even JR Smith is involved in all this stuff. And you're like, Skip's so good. He has a whole quarterback room just helping to kind of coach up his quarterback, let alone what he's doing. It is an embarrassment of riches it feels like, for the Birmingham styles right now. It really is. I think the underrated other story with both of these teams is the culture that these coaches have developed. I don't think it's easy in a shorter season to establish a culture like you see with both St. Louis and Birmingham and a credit to Anthony Beck and to Skip Holtz. Now they have a lot of returning guys and that certainly helps that culture. A lot of guys who understand what they're trying to do, but to be able to establish that culture in a situation where you're together for just a few months, I think that's a real tip of the cap to those two coaches and the staffs that they've assembled in their respective cities. I can't tell you how impressed I've been with both of those teams and both of those staffs and my dealings with them this year. I'm excited to see what they do. Playing head to head this weekend. Well, Kevin, I appreciate it taking time here early in the week and working around my work schedule and everything else. That means a lot. And like I said, always good to see you back involved with all of this stuff, and it's a job, but it's also a passion here to come in to be involved in all this stuff. So it means a lot. So thanks for taking the time. Oh no, I love this stuff that Reid, I mean, shoot, we've been having these conversations since the Mega Bowl days a few years ago, right after Covid, and I look forward to 'em every time. So thanks for having me on. And you feel, I think I was sitting here, you feel good about this, you feel good. Where we're at now with the UFLI do, I really do. I really feel like there is. I mean, look, there are always situations and things that can be improved upon. Everybody knows that. But I think for a first year with two merged leagues, I think you've seen a lot of real positives and it really, look, I know I'm biased, it's my business, but I think you have to be really encouraged by the television numbers that you've seen for these games people are watching. There is an audience out there to watch football in the spring. We as a culture, we as a society, we love football and we love it all year round. If we can get it and there is that market for it, I think you've seen it reflected in the TV numbers, which I think is a really good base to build from as we continue to push this forward. Awesome. Kevin Coogler, Fox Sports, really appreciate your time. Thanks. Thanks For having me on Reed. Well, how did we do think it was a fruitful conversation with Todd and of course always enjoyed catching up with Kevin as well and getting his thoughts from the Fox sports broadcast perspective. And I thought it was interesting. Does Fox give you kind directions for the broadcast or do they trust you guys? Thought Kevin was great, thought Todd was great. Like I said, getting just a random email from me on a Friday afternoon last week, like, Hey, do you want to come on and talk some alternate football? So hope you guys enjoy. It's not always apples to apples here like the A FL and the United Football League, but I think ticket sales or ticket sales and marketing is marketing and advertising and engagement kind of the same no matter what, if it's a sport, if it's entertainment, property, anything else? So hopefully Todd's got some good ideas there. Like I said, let me know what you guys thought. Did you enjoy Todd's perspectives? Agree, disagree, kind of all of that stuff. We'll figure out what we're doing next week. I've been in conventions filming the last couple of weeks, so hopefully we will settle down and get you a little bit more CFL content and everything else like and subscribe. But we'll see you guys next time. Thanks and take care.

UFL Mid-Season Review: Alive or Just Breathing?

Well here we are back, just a Mike Mitchell episode today. That's all we need for this one here coming in hot. Do a little intro here and then we'll get into Mike Midseason here. UFL Review. What do we think about all that stuff? A couple news and notes like and subscribe. If you appreciate all this stuff, we're giving away two free tickets to the St. Louis, the championship game in St. Louis for the UFL. When we hit that, I think we're like 50 subscribers away, Mike. I think we can do that. But like and subscribe, give a thumbs up. CFO coverage will come next week. I know the draft happened in Vegas working 15, 16 hour days here Sunday through last night, so we will get to that. But today is Mike and the UFL and all that, but we'll get to that, I promise. Get some player interviews and all of that. I think we might have a Brock keyword sighting next week if everything works out. So I can subscribe if that entices you. Mike, here we are. UFL halfway through. I can't believe it. The theme this week at UFL Alive or just breathing, what do you think? Oh, that's a good one. Well, technically it is alive, right? I would say the thing of it all is I think we're all, a lot of people out there expecting the worst doom and gloom thinking maybe 2024, this doesn't work and maybe these two sides break apart or this is the death of spring pro football. But I think from the beginning I've been saying to everybody that will listen or that pays attention that this bought them two years. So I think 2024 is a bridge to 2025. We're definitely getting 2025. I know that this might not age well if all of a sudden we find out that there's some kind of like, well, you never know. That's why we expect doom, right? But every indication is that this is, at least they're not going to say this publicly, but it's at least a two year thing. Then we'll see from there. So the whole idea of the merger was these two sides coming together and trying to find some light at the end of the tunnel from survival mode to thrive mode. So that's kind of like the story there, but it's interesting. Quick side note, cool, that a former USFL an XFL player was picked first in the CFL draft. I thought that was kind of a unique thing that was washed over. They didn't really mention that that much. Of course. And it's cool to see a lot of these UFL players that have found, we'll see what happens. Training camps starting up in the C-F-L-U-F-L players that have found homes on CFL teams. There's some really good guys out there, Jeff Bette with the Argos, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So they got a shot with the ratio. You never know, but there's a lot of UFO guys that were just recently on teams that have headed up north. So CF L's an awesome league and we're coming towards that. So it's a busy period right now between the CFL draft, the NFL draft, the UFL, all that fun times, but busy times for sure. Yeah, and I was going to say, if you're tracking any of the stuff, Anthony Miller I know did a bunch of write-ups as well for Sports Illustrated as well. So if you're tracking, I was trying to keep track of all that stuff and Farhan was on and everything else with the CFL draft. Speaking of, and then I know the UFL sent out this week, like the Nick Novak specialist happening in the off season for 2025. I said, there you go. Confirmation 2025 season, and they're not quite, but ratings this week a little down. I feel like we've hit a watermark expectations for you in terms of coming from the league and then we'll talk attendance as well. But tv, I feel like we found kind of our little out marker. It really doesn't seem like anything's falling out. And I thought early on they were kind of exceeding expectations considering the heavy competition they had. A lot of people were like, oh my goodness, March Madness, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, we hit a little bit of a midseason lull this past week. The numbers weren't that great. They weren't awful by any stretch of the imagination. I think the key is big thing, I've written about it like a million times at SI is I think we know what the floor is with these leagues. It's contingent upon time slots who they're going up against, whether they're in prime time or not, whether or not they're on a big network over the air, linear television. Those are like, and we kind of know what the floor is. We're waiting to see if this league can hit a million viewers. We'll see this coming weekend, there's four games scheduled all on big network television, three I believe on Fox. No more split games in primetime, which confuse the heck out of everybody. I understand that they always do those regional broadcasts. MLB does it, NHL, et cetera, et cetera. So anyhow, I think it'd be interesting to see if they can actually, because we know what the floor is, if they can actually build upon this, when they get towards the playoff push, when they get to the championship game, I think everybody, it now expects championship game rolls around. The league's going to do over a million viewers, maybe 1 5, 1 4, 1 6 maybe. Who knows? It'd be nice to see a higher ceiling develop. You get what you put in. So in terms of promotion, marketing, the attention that's on these leagues in our bubble, these leagues mean everything. But in the sports world, they're still in that same kind of ignore mode. So you kind of notice it in the periphery, but it's not something that's really on the sports, a mainstream landscape. People forget sometimes the UFL is on. We had Rick on last week, Rick Cella talking about is it more USFL in charge? Is it more redbird in charge? Marketing to me feels more USFL. We're kind of bare minimum. I think social media has been really good this year, and I know we talked about that last year with the XFL and it'd be halfway through a game and you wouldn't even have any plays upload all that's all good. But what is your read on the situation and just your thoughts on that? Yeah, I don't see this perforating out into the atmosphere unless you're watching NASCAR or whatever on Fox seeing any of this stuff. Yeah, Fox and Redbird had shared interest and almost shared values. I know people read into the XFL losing 50, $60 million, whatever the official number is, but when you look at the Redbird XFL model, a lot of what they do is to save money. The whole Arlington setup travel, not paying taxes in Texas, three teams there. All of that is to save money. And we know about Fox, they've been in the money saving business with the USFL for a while now. So a lot of what they do is by default because it's bare bones now, there is some expenses that they're going to be cutting down upon in the future. We saw a little bit of that in the off season with seasonal employees rather than full-time. Their head coaches in order to coach in the league in 2024 had agree upon becoming seasonal employees and reduction in pay is crazy, but it's the reason why Wade Phillips is in San Antonio right now as Heinz Ward refused to sign a reduction in his pay, he's landed on his feet, whatever, he's found another coaching job in the coaching ranks, but Wade Phillips would not be coaching league. The Brahms would probably not be this good if they didn't have Wade Phillips and AJ Smith and all that. And Mark Lily Bridge has done a tremendous job with that roster. So I think this marriage, these are two like-minded partners. Disney's is a part of this too. We don't know their breakdown, but it's been reported. Sports Business Journal, Ben Fisher, that Disney is definitely part owners in this whole thing. You get what you put in. So hopefully at some point they'll be able to sit back and reassess and decide they're going to have to spend a little bit of money in order to grow this brand. It's not enough for them to just exist and expect growth. You're going to have to start planting some seeds and that's going to involve some money. Yeah, all of these, everyone seems adverse to taking any sort of wide swing or risk here, and I just don't, we saw that with USFL and like, well, we're going to go into some of the hubs. I never believed in year three we're going to have eight USFL teams in eight cities. That way it just feels like we're always kind of on this. We're on the edge here and it never really feels like anybody wants to kind of jump into the pool full feet. And I just don't know. I don't see what changes in that. I guess what needs to happen for them to be like, okay, now we got it. We're going to invest another a hundred million dollars. I don't know if people remember this, but I also, I reported this it seems like 20 years ago, but it's not. The XFL in 2023 was going to do a full on hub in Arlington with all their teams playing there just to save money. And then they decided against that. And I remember when I reported that they were thinking about a full on that means the ST playing in Arlington, everybody. And I remember when I reported that they were thinking about that, but they're shifting way. They're going to play in their stadiums. Danny Garcia, who's not on X anymore, I guess it's called, liked my tweet, which further validation of what I was reporting was accurate. So it's crazy. During this whole process, I think people forget there was a chance this merger wasn't going to happen. And I don't know the full details on this, but when Fox and Redbird submitted their paperwork, which I reported first back when I was with Newshub, they, the government asked for revisions and update on info. So it took a while. The expectation was that this was going to be approved by the government, but it actually took a while. And in the meantime, before they actually submitted the paperwork, they discuss so many different scenarios. That's why we got so many reports out there from people about multiple hubs. They legitimately talked about 12 teams. I was just talking to somebody this morning about this. They legitimately talked about 10 teams. They talked about Canton, Ohio as a possibility for the league. They went through everything until eventually the final paperwork was submitted. Once the final paperwork was submitted, they even debated up until the 11th hour whether or not to have the gamblers or the roughnecks. Well, I think they gambled poorly. And when I reported the eight cities, everybody jumped the gun in and automatically assumed gamblers, and then they put it on as their own work and as it turned out, they stuck with the rough next thing. Now we can argue whether or not that worked out or not. I'm sure we'll get into that momentarily. But I love the football aspect. I love these players. But you got to understand what these leagues, and I know there are a lot of people that are upset at me that I put out the attendance figures within the league. They don't like that The focus is so much on those numbers. It's not fun to look at sometimes when you only see 6,000 fans. But a big part of these leagues is big markers for them is how they're doing in attendance, how they're doing in ratings. I mean, you pay attention to NFL attendance, N-H-L-N-B-A, some cases MLB if a team's going really south. The whole thing with the athletics right now, everything's pretty crazy with Oakland losing another team and all that wackiness. But with these leagues, attendance and ratings are important and it's a barometer. It's a marker. As they build up, people have to also understand, you cannot expect you have to step outside the bubble and you put yourself in a family man's shoes in terms of spending money and put yourself in a sports fan's shoes. And as the weather gets better out there, it's nice out there today, at least on my neck of the woods, it looks like it's nice where you are. People have options and things to do. I'm not trying to make excuses for these leagues, but it is difficult if you're, I don't know how you want to list it, but the UFL is like what, seventh, eighth, ninth in the area. I don't know however you want to rank that. It's N-H-L-N-B-A-N-F-L, et cetera, et cetera. And then UFL, it's like a lacrosse league pickleball. It's kind of, I'm sorry, it's everybody out there. I love football to death. I'm paying attention to UFL more than the NBA playoffs. I mean go Knicks, who're probably going to choke in the playoffs. But I'm honestly like I'm here. I'm an advocate for this. I make no bones about it. I'm not a fanboy for any of these teams in the league. I have loyalty towards a certain teams since I was a child. I got it on, if you can see that faded Jets logo there. But when it comes to these leagues, I root for the league as a whole. So I'm actually sitting here, you and I are recording on a Thursday. I'm sitting here hoping that NBA games wrap up and that there's no big time NBA games on Saturday and Sunday, just so the UFL has a chance to do a better rating on the weekend. So I make no bones about it. I'm rooting for these leagues to succeed because I think they're great for the football landscape. It means a lot of jobs, a lot of working people in football. And as someone who's been an advocate of these leagues forever, my love through the NFL, the NFL draft college football led me into my love for the original USFL, the CFL, because I've monitored and followed these players. I understand how such a small percentage of players make the National Football League, and I think there's value in having these kinds of leagues. It's fun to me. And also the odds are so much against them that I actually root for the underdog. So this is the ultimate underdog. The likelihood is that these leagues are not going to make it because all of them have died a miserable death. And so attendance and ratings, it's not fun to look at. I know. And for anybody who's a support of the league, they don't like to see Birmingham and only 7,000 fans. They don't like to see whomever with 6,000 or whatever, Houston, Memphis, I don't know. But hey, those are the numbers. Those are the reality. I got to report it. I can't fanboy it up. So I mean, that's kind of the story there. So we'll see. In terms of these leagues building popularity, I think the leagues themselves are quality. I think what Redbird and Fox and Disney, they need to reassess and they're not going to go all in, but they need to see where they're weak and build some strength in those areas. You get what you put in. So they need to make more of an effort. If they want to see growth, they're not going to get it by default. Expectations for the league in terms of attendance, well, I guess first off, so because you talk about that and not wanting people, you get the Emory Hunts of the world, and I respect Emory tremendously. You watch this football to see fans, I'm like, well, but if the goal is to sell these leagues off in five years or 10 years, or at some point in the history of mankind, you're going to need to have more than 6,000 people. That's why I care about attendance is that you said you view it as kind of a barometer as well, but ultimately that is the goal. We don't care about. It's not the money we're making at the gate. You kind of have someone there that's interested in bringing these teams to market, right? And as far as the attendance thing, and I get where Emory's coming from with that, right? Because I'll watch football anywhere, any place, anytime. So for me, I get it for the diehards. But here's the thing though, and forget about the optics of it for the people who are casual fans that turn on a game and see nobody there. And the thing is, if you're watching a wrestling show, if you're watching a sporting event and there's no fans in attendance, there's no natural game atmosphere and energy home team road team, it takes away from the perspective of the game. It takes away, it decreases the value of it. You watch the St. Louis DC game this past weekend was probably the worst collection of games in the UFL. It wasn't that the play was awful, it was just kind of lopsided. Birmingham beat the crap out of Houston, St. Louis, that game, the St. Louis DC game, that atmosphere was fun. It got away from DC and the second half, it was 1712, they got back in it. And then obviously Battle Hawk steamrolled them. They got a big measure of revenge from last year. But that game felt like a great Sunday afternoon pro football game, the big plays. It was kind of fun back and forth. The crowd was into it. It enhances it when you watch it, when you watch a college football game and the crowd is going crazy, if you're watching a Georgia, Alabama game and there's a few hundred people in attendance and people are just walking around and nobody's a fan of the teams and they don't care, it decreases the interest of the game. It's just the way it is. So it's important from a business aspect, it's very important for these leagues. They need to figure out a way to create revenue streams. Now, I was on your big show when you were in Arlington before this season opener for Renegade Stallions, and I told you I shared conversations that I had that day with someone who had very modest expectations for the attendance. We went over numbers. I can't really, for some of these markets, the expectation was lower than the others. So for Memphis, the Michigan situation, because the late ticket sales, then they weren't sitting there going, I hope we get 20 K. I mean, everybody wants to get 20 K. But last year, because I'm aware of how poorly the USFL teams did at the gate that even when you see 6,000, 7,000, some of these USFL games were in the hundreds, and I'm not talking about the games that had neutral psych teams, whatever the stars play in Michigan or whatever. So they're working hard, but they're understaffed too. Like the Jason Ella am, I pronounce his name correctly, all those guys, that team is understaffed. And so they had a small window because like I mentioned earlier in this conversation, there wasn't a guarantee that the government was going to approve it. When they did approve it, it was like they had just a few months to get it up and running. I know they already had seeds planted in St. Louis and dc, but people forget, there was a lot of uncertainty with the XFL right after their season ended with the Vegas situation where the roughnecks were going to play. And then when the merger was announced or the intent to merge was announced, then it was an extreme amount of uncertainty who's coming back. It got to the point where when eventually the cities were announced and the who's coming and all that, and people were celebrating in St. Louis, yay, battle Hawks are back. They were never gone to begin with, but it was at a point where the leagues didn't know whether or not they would be approved and also couldn't. I know they did deposits and all that, and they ended up refunding certain teams, Seattle, whatever, but they didn't really. So I think this off season leading into the next, we'll see what the timeline in the calendar is, and the league has to help out their staff, the people that are involved in sales, they're trying. But in a perfect world, you'd have teams set up and you'd plant seeds. You'd have teams set up in each market pushing and you would take the entire off season to start planting seeds for community events, everything else to start selling tickets and promoting locally. So you have six, seven months to sell tickets. You shouldn't have to wait two weeks before the season starts to start actually pumping out or promoting to get ticket sales. So hopefully the bridge from 24, the expectations were modest at best for attendance this year. And so there was a hope that the USFL teams will pick up, maybe Birmingham will pick up. They freaking, they've gotten to the point where they're good enough where they should be doing 20 KA game. I can't quite figure that one out because for years I heard about how Birmingham's been burned by these leagues, but so many people said to me, Birmingham needs to have a team. Birmingham needs to have a team. Birmingham needs to have a team here. You have a team. They're really good, they're tremendous. They got NFL talent all over the place. You're going to see when the off season comes out, like 20 players signed on NFL teams, they're well coached, they're well run with Zachary Potter. So you would figure by now that Birmingham would've been a hit, a smashing hit. They have a good name, stallions, cool brand, et cetera, and they're, they're in a position where the stallions might actually make pro. We'll see what happens with the chiefs, but stallions might make pro football history something that hasn't been done in a very long time. Football team won in three straight championships. It hasn't happened since the Elks in the late seventies, early eighties, and the Packers before the beginning of the Super Bowl era. So anyhow, the expectation levels were modest to begin with. I think pressure's on though right now, I believe the league last year, the XFL last year, because the USFL didn't disclose their numbers, they were pretty bad. The XFL last year, I believe sold over 600,000 tickets. I want to say six for 43 games. If you count the championship game, which was like 22,000 San Antonio, I think the league right now is a little bit like 280,000 I believe. So at the halfway point, they're a little behind what they did last year, the XFL. So I think that'll help with St. Louis games. St. Louis is playing really well. It looks like we're possibly going to have seven St. Louis home games. I guess they got a few left now, and then of course the playoff game and then the championship game. So that might help the overall attendance when the end of the season comes. But it's definitely a topic and it's definitely a marker for fans to see whether or not the league is catching on. People who hate these leagues love my attendance tweets. They're like, aha, look how poorly they're doing. They really love the people who are CFL loyalists. They loved my attendance tweets. It makes me feel guilty for putting 'em out there, but I'm a reporter. That's what I do. People want to know. And then even when I put 'em out there, people think maybe they're fudged, trust me, they would not. I have done, I'm just a messenger here. But they would not be happy to let people know that only 7,000 people showed up in Birmingham that only 6,000. Those would not be, you'd want to fudge it a little bit better than that In terms of you're talking getting, we need to get people in these markets working, right? I know Michigan, they sent out, they're doing a meet and greet here on Saturday, but it's all contingent on, okay, we're going to fly in, we're going to go to the thing, then we're going to go to the game, then we're going to fly out. We can't keep people in these markets overnight or do any of that stuff at the end of the season when they lay off or whatever. All these salespeople anyway, I just don't see them doing the year round. I mean, I agree that that's what they need to do, but at the end of the season, a lot of these seasonal people, coaches, ticket staff, all that's going to go away. So I dunno how you build that off season at all. Right? And it's such a small window, 10 weeks plus the playoffs, whatever. I just don't know how you ever hope to build this. The only markets that, like you said with DC and St. Louis that are exceeding any expectations right now are the ones that have been around since 2018, And I think they're not going to do this, but you would hope they would. But you almost need team presidents in the markets. You need infrastructure there. You need to have headquarters there. And so that's money that's spending money. So you need boots on the ground. And I think whether or not they're willing to do that, so it comes down to whether or not you're going to have boots on the ground, like marketing promotion teams in each individual city to promote the leagues. Or if you're not going to put the actual teams in their cities to be there all season round or it comes down to spending money on promotion and marketing dollars, radio ads, TV ads, advertisements locally and then putting a budget towards that. If you're not going to put, because they're understaffed when it comes to ticketing and sales and they don't do a good enough job. That's tough for me to say, but they don't do a good enough job to begin with. I would be beating people over the head trying to tell 'em that tickets are available and all that they try. But I think I would go overboard, just sell, sell, sell, sell, sell to the point where you'd be annoyed with me. So anyhow, but I think it's a tough one because it's going to require them. I spoke to someone who worked in the other United Football League recently, and they said that they saw an increase once they started to put promotion and marketing in the individual markets. They used to put boots on the ground and it wasn't by any beads, great, but they saw an increase. So the other UFL, which people have forgotten about, but not too long ago, but I think that's what they need to do. They're going to need to use their resources and whether or not they want to do that, but you get what you put in, you're not, their whole thing is the crawl before you can walk strategy and then get to walking and then get to the running part. And they're still doing a lot of crawling in a lot of respects. And at some point you're going to need a boost so you can start walking. And I think if you got to go out swinging, if they're satisfied with this and they're okay with low attendance numbers and modest ratings, and they don't want to see the games average 2 million viewers or games average 20 k. If they're okay with this modest stuff, then all right. But if they actually want, I don't think they are. If they want to actually be a success, they're going to have to put in more work, more promotion. They're going to have to spend some money. They can strategically do it. Russ, Brandon, that team, they got to come up with a strategy might as well. That's what's happened to the leagues of the past. They swung for the fences and struck out immediately got into the red. So they're so scared of striking out, but at some point you're going to get to the point where you go, alright, do we want this to last forever and be a success and then we better take our swing. So I'm thinking if they don't do it this coming off season going into 2025, then they're going to strike out eventually. So I'm thinking that this off season is going to be a key for them. We'll see how they allocate their resources. I think they're going to need to step it up a little bit. They're going to have to take a couple of risks that maybe they've been trying to avoid for the last few years in this space. It is just like lack of consistency. Even in, I think it was, Andy and I were talking on one of the things like you have these eight social media people. They're working like Leah's on there doing this. Hey come, I'm here in San Antonio. We're doing all this stuff. Why doesn't every team do that? Why doesn't Jay do that? Why doesn't the people that do the, I don't know who does the roughnecks social media, even if you don't want to spend the money, there's certain things you already have people in place that you can do. And I don't know if it means flying the social people in early, let them run a table up on a Saturday ahead of the game for a Sunday. I mean, I like that we did the draft thing. I like that, but I don't know why there's not a permanent fixture in front of the Rangers stadium all the time. Hey, we're doing games here. We're doing games here. I mean, that is a huge conglomeration of sports and anyone that's been there, there's tons of stuff to do and there's restaurants and they're run a thing where you have a banner in Texas live all the time. I mean, there's just things you can do that I don't think, because people always say, well, you criticize, you don't want, there's things that they could be doing already that they're not. I think this little things like that, Yeah, they definitely need to do that. To borrow a wrestling term, you got to start acting like a little bit like an outlaw promotion. I know maybe they feel you're above it to handing out flyers. I Think they do. I think that they think that, yes, Yeah, they think they're above it, but I think you need to go above and beyond. Another thing that they need to do, and I've been saying this for the longest time, it's fallen on deaf ears. They need to embrace all media, especially people who are trying to cover you, like fantasy football, gambling. Just embrace all of them. These people are going to promote for you. They're going to end up working for you unpaid. So that's the thing. How do you sell tickets in the market locally? There's a lot of good people covering the league. I spoke with Greg Luca, who's in San Antonio. We've had some conversations, maybe I can't get into too much of that, but he covers the Brams. He does very good work for them. They just don't do the traffic there. There isn't a lot of local interest there in San Antonio. I think you need to be proactive and reach out to media members in each market. I remember the XFL in 2020, they had carte blanche. They gave to Rich Samini who covers the New York jets. So the New York Post, they went to media members and Stephanie Rudnick and that team did a very good job, humble yourself. You're a new league, you're trying to, these media members, they'll promote the league for you. So you need to roll out the red carpet. And I would do that with everybody who wants to cover the league. Don't shun them because they're promoting your league. They will promote your league. You'll be surprised if you start giving people access and information, how much they embrace your league even more and root for you to succeed. They'll openly work for you to succeed, for your players to get attention, for your coaches to get attention if you expect them to come to you. There's just not, especially with these new leagues, it takes a while. In the early stages of any professional sports league, it takes time for mainstream outlets and for a lot of outlets to start coming to your games and writing about you. And there isn't people clamoring right now to cover these leagues, not in the numbers that they need. So if you in each individual's market, target every media outlet, it's hard. Get every media outlet that covers you. Be transparent and give them information. Do it. The fantasy community do it. The gambling. You got so many people out there established to run all these outlets that are trying so hard to get these, use another wrestling term, get these leagues over. And so I think that is, if you're not going to put boots in the ground infrastructure in individual markets, have the teams there year round, all that you really need to Olive branch, put out the olive branch for even people who are ignoring your league, contact them and see if they'll do a story. That's what the XFL in 2020 did. Effectively. They reached out, they humbled themselves, they reached out to every medium, whoever was willing to cover. They reached out to NFL teams, they reached out to scouts, they reached out to every community to try to get them to cover the league. And so to, Hey, come on, we'll take care of you. Hey, come on. And first class operation from top to bottom. So they did a tremendous job. So I think you get what you put in. You're not going to get the numbers you want, the attention you want by just existing or being it not going to happen. Well, and some that's worked in local news. I'll give you a lot of these sports departments would love like, oh, hey, I have free extra content here to cover, especially in some of these markets. I mean are the Spurs, I don't even watch NBA, I assume the Spurs are out the, they're not playing. What is San Antonio talking about right now in sports, right? What are they talking about? What is St. Louis? What are they talking about? They're certainly not talking about football of any kind, but I just don't, you need to do that. And then what was I going to say? Because also it's not even like you got to send a crew out. All this stuff is virtual right now. At least take advantage of being in the hub to me and I'm not there. I imagine it's a little bit like summer camp. We're all here. You're kind of just part of this all the time. The coaches, and we had heba on, he had to do it on a Sunday because running, but we're kind of existing in this whole sphere for the 12 weeks or whatever in training camp and all that. It's like of any time that you can get players and coaches on, now is the time. It's not like five years from now I'm like, oh, well, I'm off on the weekend. I'm going out of town. Or what are you doing on a Tuesday after practice? You're in the hub in Arlington. Give these players, give these coaches on. That's what I don't get. It's not even like you got to send people out to do this, pull it up on your phone, have them call it from the locker room. It's not like CFL does that. Hey, we'll have, I can't even remember who it was. He just sat in the locker room after practice for 10 minutes. You could hear people walking around. It was cool, but that was a free thing that didn't cost any money. And here you go. That's free promotion out there. That 10 minutes is someone's time, Right? And the credit to the CFL Lucas Barrett, shout out to all that group over there. They'll reach out. They reached out to Anthony Miller and myself to interview CFL, combine players and all that. And so set up interviews and they reached out to us, Hey, would you like to interview these people? Would you like to interview these coaches? Would you like to interview these prospects? And so that was really cool. And they're appreciative of the coverage and they extend the olive. It doesn't cost you anything to do that stuff, by the way. So it's a matter of hustling. Now I understand they're understaffed, but I think they need to reassess their position and what they can do from a PR standpoint, what they can do from a media standpoint. In a lot of cases, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. I know this is the 800th first impression basically between the USFL and the XFL and all the reiterations. But yeah, I think that's a big factor. I think the more media members that cover the team, your attendance will go up. That's a trick. They promote your games by default in local papers. I know papers are going by the wayside, but in online media, so it'll help more people come out to the games. Well, and I think that there talked about this with Greg Parks. There was that whole gambling podcast that the guy went on the rant about not being able to go, and I wouldn't have handled it that way. I mean, I think we can talk about that, but I think that the league is afraid of we're going to send someone on a podcast and they're going to get burned. We saw what happened with Who was the guy that leaked the cities and the XFL? The DPP for Orlando. Was it he? Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. I'm forgetting the gentleman's name. It's passing me at the moment, but I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, so they're worried about that, right? And I understand that, but then you just black bar that person and they're never able to do it. I think that's what they're afraid of, right? Well, we don't have time to go through all these different people that want to talk or we're like, we don't want to deal with how many gambling pocket. They're afraid of that where just let them do it. And then if something doesn't work out, then you're like, what is the worst that happens at this point? Keep Butler. Yeah, no, We're not going to ask for social security numbers. We're not going to ask for passcodes or anything like that. There's no a secret information Or do what Brian still does and just, he'll just sit in the background and work on other stuff. And then you're just listening. And if anyone mean, if you don't, you can be on the calls with a lot of these. I mean, I have that with the CFL people sometimes if they want, or when they had on, when Heimbach was on Bianca with the renegades was on there. I mean, that's fine, but then just keep that on in the background. If anyone's doing it, you can call in. And I could even have on Streamy yards people sit in the background and listen and be able to say, Hey, don't talk about, but at this point, we're expanding cities right now. There's no secret sauce. You're hiding at this point. We're week five, week six of the UFL season. We're just trying to talk about football here. No one's starving and talking about living conditions, whatever the league that Sam's, we don't have players living in hobbles at this point. Everyone I think is being taken care of pretty well. Yeah, thank goodness for that. We don't have the craziness that we're seeing. Unfortunately in the arena football, they talk about dropping the bag, dropping the ball. Anyhow, that's a conversation for another time. But unfortunately with a lot of these leagues, you see that financial issues, everything else, they're unable to. They talk a good game, but they're unable to back it up. And then we'll talk football here. We've done a lot of attendance and TV stuff, but are you surprised with the damage that the SFL markets did, especially with Birmingham season one to two, them not. And then with these SFL markets, with the Memphis and the Michigan, I never would've thought that the hub and all of that would've hurt Birmingham. It seems like as much as it has where they cannot get it, I, and I know it's still a high watermark compared to Houston, but they can't get anyone to that stadium. I don't know what's going on with that general area. At least we saw Fox release the numbers, at least Birmingham locally is doing well. Ratings wise. They were one of the top regional markets that's been watching the league. And I know part of that is Birmingham was the first game of the season. They've been in primetime slots, et cetera. So of course their numbers are going to be a little bit better than some of the other teams. But it hasn't translated obviously to the box office. I'm not, there's a reason why only three USFL teams survived this merger. I know the gamblers are part of it, but not the gamblers brand. The gamblers never played in Houston. So the only home stadium teams basically Birmingham, Michigan, the numbers Michigan. I always thought the Panthers were an awesome brand from the original USFL, but I was surprised they chose Michigan and Ford Field. That was a unique and curious move. And so as far as Birmingham goes, they've been disappointed from day one and they said it publicly in terms they don't understand why they haven't taken off there. So people don't like to hear it. The people who backed the stallions, God bless you, I'm glad you do. I wish there were more people like you. They need to do better. Everyone knows we kind of like you grade them on a curve. If Michigan or Memphis tomorrow does 12,000 a game, we go, whoa, nice. If Birmingham does 12,000 go, oh boy, come on Guys. And people don't understand that too. I mean, yes, you have to grade these on the curve. They're not all equal franchises right now. And like St. Louis for example, we sit there, there's a lot of people, I get it, they did 31,000 in the last game and they're like, oh man, I wish they could have done better. And you forget, Hey, 31,000 is pretty freaking awesome. That's five Memphis. That's not bad. 31 K is pretty good, but they've set a bar now, right? So you got Anthony Beck on social media to halt. They're trying to get the St. Louis fans to show up this weekend for the Houston game. Not that they don't show up, I'm not saying that, but they wanted to build up that number, get in that 35, 36, 37, 38, maybe past 40 range. But there's different curves here. Birmingham is one of those, to me, one of the biggest disappointments I expected. I knew the numbers last year. Like I said, there were some games in the hundreds. I knew the numbers. No matter how many spatulas you gave out Michigan and Memphis, I expected this when I saw the six, 7,000 stuff. I was like, yeah, all right. I wish it was better, but I didn't expect a great leap from 483 to like 20,000 in a year. So I'm sorry, but to me, Arlington and I understand they're own five now, right? So they're win list. There's not a lot of reason to go there. To me, Arlington, it's not quite the Birmingham situation, but you would figure since it's the league's hub, that they would do much better locally there of promoting and marketing and being able to sell tickets and get the word out. And to me, the renegades have been a disappointment in the league. Their last game wasn't bad attendance wise, it was okay, but I think they should do so much better now. I think it's unfortunately their own five. So I don't know how you're going to convince so many people to come out to those games. I hear you. But I think Arlington's been one of the disappointments in League, San Antonio, whatever, drew over 20,000 fans in their home opener last year. Unfortunately, unfortunately in local media, they had stories coming out that people, employees were getting fired and people were expecting that. So it didn't really help matters. And then they were really bad, the Braas. But the Braas are a really good team this year. They're exciting, they're fun to watch. So you'd hope that those numbers will go up as the season goes along. Maybe they might. They might. But it's not to smash it that it wasn't the a f five years ago now. And so there's definitely, you grade these teams differently and Birmingham to me is one of the teams that you hope as the season goes along, that those numbers start to creep up and they start to do better and better that they have a home playoff game that has a 23 K or 20 4K. They should do that because you got to wonder about that lease. You can't lose that Birmingham brand. But I believe that lease expires after this year. So we'll see what happens In terms of the difference, and I was at the USFL kickoff in 2022, that felt like a hub. There was branding around there. They had signage and they had the US FL vault. It felt like that was the home of that. And the players were staying literally right across the streets. That kind helped all that stuff. There is no, and people talk like, oh, the XFL or the UFL hub in Arlington, that doesn't exist. It's not the same. It doesn't feel the same. You would not know it exists. You can sit at Texas live across the street and have barbecue and not realize that this is there at all. I understand the comparison there, but people, unless you've been to both of 'em, it's very different. But it is. You would think that it would draw better, but it's remarkable how it does not in exists there. And all those teams are there locally in Texas, you would hope, because Texas is such a great football place that by now they even adopted the name Arlington rather than calling themselves Dallas to try to ingratiate themselves with the Arlington area location. So anyhow, but yeah, some of these teams and cities have underwhelmed and that's why everyone's always calling for relocations and all that. But we'll see. Two more things, and I want to talk to bras and stuff here with the quarterback. I know we're not surprised that Houston is not succeeding this season with the rebrand and all that stuff, but I don't know, to me that's like what a swing in the miss. And I understand that politics were involved in that merger and you got to keep four and four and all of that. But I mean that killed that franchise. I mean, I don't see anybody in the comments on our videos and our team stinks now and they give us all this stuff and they expect us to come out. Do they reverse course on that? I don't think you can, but I mean either. Same with the kickoff here and changing that whatever before the season. But this to me was a huge swing in the MIS that I think has egg on their face. In hindsight, they should have just stuck with the gamblers. If they were going to keep the gamblers players, gamblers coach, best gamblers players from last season, they should have just said, Hey, gamblers have their own stadium. They're going to be playing in Rice. Come on out. We don't know how we're going to do Come on out. It would've been a different feel, right? Even if they got six, 7,000, 8,000 be like, Hey, this is their first time playing at home and they're trying to build their brand. This is their first time actually being there. Once you knew Wade Phillips was out in Houston and you weren't keeping the rough Next players, I think at that point they should have stuck with the gamblers just done the four and four. Don't create this weird confusion because that's what happened. Basically, it's like you're not really rooting for the roughnecks. You are already changing from T-D-E-C-U to Rice. You don't have Wade Phillips. It's not the same team. Be like if the Jets all of a sudden all their players sauce, Gardner, all their players go and they move on somewhere else, the entire roster. And now they're the, I don't know, they're the Cleveland Browns, whatever, you're going to have a lot of jet fans going, what the hell? And they're not playing in the same stadium. So it created a lot of confusion. So in hindsight, they probably should have just stuck with the gamblers. If you're going to keep the gambler staff, the gamblers players just keep the brand. These are not the real roughnecks. Now maybe over time they'll grow into it, but it was awkward to begin with from Jump Street. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too. It was a poor choice, poor decision. I would've stuck with the gamblers brand. It would be a different optic. Right now if the gamblers, gamblers were finally playing at home and they're only doing seven K, but they're not winning games, so maybe they can build it up over time once they start winning and all that. But it feels like they failed the Roughneck brand, which wasn't the hottest of things last year. They were pretty good. They made the playoffs, but it was much hotter than so anyhow. But it's just the way it went. Well, yeah, you lost the roughneck. I wouldn't say you lost all, but you lost a non-zero. I would say a larger portion of the Roughnecks fans. And then it wasn't like there was this huge Houston gamblers contingent there ready to embrace it. I mean, I know that there's some Go-kart driving or whoever. I fans of this team, but it was the least of both because you lost and then it's like you leaving your wife or the neighbor that's already not interested in you at all. It wasn't a very good situation. No, not at all. Final thought here. We get a lot of people on here. They got to relocate. They got to relocate. What is your thoughts on that here as we get, and you see some of this, I don't know if we add teams. I don't know if we relocate after the season, but what do you think? Honestly, I think you have to consider it. There's no way you can't consider it. Once you make that move though, that's it. Once you relocate a team, because the problem with these leagues is it's hard to get faith if you go into a new market. You have to choose the right one too. So it's tough. Once you send the message that a league is shifting their teams and relocating teams and there's no stability there, then there's no reason for the new markets to believe that you're going to stay there. And it creates a perception that this league is going to go away quick. They already failed. They're just grasping. Its straws trying to find a solution. You really need to think it through before you make that kind of decision. You also could look at the TV numbers at the end of the year, regional markets, all that, see how the market is doing in terms of, it's just funny. Every year I saw the Fox release their top whatever top 10 markets, and I keep seeing Tulsa and Ohio, Columbus, Ohio, they keep sprouting up in these things and I'm not advocating a Tulsa team, but they're watching. So I mean maybe it's a little bit of the Bob Stoops aspect with the Oklahoma aspect. I don't know, but they're watching. I know if they actually had teams, but I think they needed to assess it. A lot of this comes down to business decisions. It comes down to locking down venues and what the rental costs are going to be, all that. And so I think they need to consider it, but once you do it, once you pull that lever, press that button, that's it. That's it. You cannot, I saw that with the original USFL. They were relocating every five seconds. The renegades played in 70 different cities. Everybody, they were trading franchises, was doing all that stuff. It created tremendous instability and it made fan bases think, well, this league's not going to be around for much longer, and why would you invest in the team that just abandoned? So you assume it's just going to move it anyway. Once ticket sales are bad, oh, we got to move this to, so you got to plant your seed and then just put whatever your resources into it to try to make it work. I'm not a huge fan unless there's a few, there's a couple of San Diego and a few places like that you can find. I'm not a huge, there are markets that will embrace this league, but you have to select the right ones and then once you're there, you're there. So it, we'll see. I think Memphis, as crazy as it sounds, now watch this will age poorly. But I think Memphis, I think you could make that work. I know that sounds crazy. I'm definitely on the outside on this one. You could make that work. I think you obviously have to have a good team, but I also think you need to put in money and promotion and marketing. I think that's a market that it could work. To me, adding the Canton team or relocating or the Nashville Tuners or Tulsa, I would do anything in my power to get a team on the west coast of any kind. And I don't say it's got to be, I don't care if it's Seattle or Portland or Sacramento or Oakland. I mean even Denver would feel better. Just something that's just not in this mishmash of the southeastern part of the United States. That to me, when they show the map and you're like, there's just so much of the country that you're ignoring here. And that's why just, I know Andy wants San Diego, but jumping on the Oakland, if they're, I know the baseball thing and it's not quite the same, but it's too much that they're missing out on. I would do anything to get a team anywhere remotely near the west coast. All right. And I talk about so many times, the floor in the ceiling. One of the reasons that these leagues have limited ceilings in terms of viewership is because it's only eight markets. But you got to have, if you want to maximize your viewership, it's not like the NFL where every market watches the games, watches the Arizona Cincinnati game. So if you want to maximize your ratings, you have to be in the right markets that want these leagues to exist there. So if you're going to have only eight teams or 10 teams or what have you, that's a big thing with television and viewership too, is the market share. Not having a New York or New Jersey team is a factor. Not having a team in the West Coast is a factor. You want to be in the biggest television markets. Well, even because if you're doing only, let's just say, right, because I know people like to rag on the New York Guardians, but you would kill right now for an average attendance of 15 K for these teams. By the way, the guardians had close to 30,000 fans of their two games in the dead of winter. But even if you have only 10,000 fans in the New York game, that TV rating's going to be higher because you have that market watching the New York, New Jersey market. Same thing on the West coast. So they're limited themselves by not having a West coast presence by not another northeast team. I think. So they've limited, so if we're up to me, it's not my money. Again, they're not on the West coast because they're trying to save money, but they're not on the northeast because you have to figure out that whole venue situation and all that costs money. But if it were me, if you're trying to get bigger and better and trying to get higher ratings, I would definitely consider a West Coast presence and a New York presence as far as I'm concerned, to make this league have a higher ceiling. You'll have more viewers. The highest rated non NFL games, the New York Guardians game, by the way, that's the highest rated. I just got to say it was on Fox Sunday afternoon. It wasn't the opening game of the season. It actually had higher ratings than the opener for the XFL in 2020. And that was on Fox on a Sunday afternoon. So that market helps. That's one of the biggest markets. So right now, the XFL, the USFL, the UFL, they don't have a lot of big TV markets as far as they're going. They need to have a little wider reach. So if they ever get to the expansion or relocation business, I think they need to consider not only hitting areas that are watching these games, the regional markets will tell you which areas have an interest, an appetite for this. If you do the data from the a F until now, you'll see there's a trend. There are certain markets that always watch, even when they don't have teams that should tell you something, use that info. And so if we're going to relocate, we got to have a West Coast presence, I think. And I know a lot of people are against it. There's a New York bias or whatever, but I think it's important. Well, whatever you do, generals, guardians, whoever it is, I think eventually if this league, I will know this league has made it when they have a New York or New Jersey team, and that's my opinion. I will know if they get to that point where they actually have a team there. It's just going to help the overall, it helps the over league too. To have a New York team in the league itself, you need somebody to hate that you want to beat. So it's really a big factor for these leagues as far as ratings and attention goes and driving interest. So anyhow, we'll see if they can get to that. And I know we've talked about this and I think Greg Parks is going to write the article as well for UFL board, but the markets that they have right now make no sense at all. If you asked a hundred people on the street, what eight markets do you think that this new football league is going? Well, there's going to be three in Texas and they're going to have Michigan. They're going to, it just doesn't. And I know that how we've gotten to this point. But yeah, there needs to be at some point there needs to not just be like, well, we have the protectives, at least for Birmingham or whatever. At some point there needs to be some thought process versus just like, well, it's cheaper to play there than it is to play somewhere else. I mean the three Houston teams and I or the three Texas scenes, I know we've gone about that, but it makes no logical sense why these are the eight markets and you're cutting out two thirds of the country. And it's like a crapshoot sometimes with these things because a lot of people who are casual UFL fans will say, why are they in these NFL markets? And they got a point, right? For sure. But you would hope with the UFL that Birmingham and San Antonio, which are non NFL markets, would actually do better than they have. So sometimes there is an argument for, we got the NFL, let's go to all non NFL cities, but sometimes some of the non NFL cities don't hit the way you think they will in the, Sorry, because there's a reason the NFL teams aren't there some of the time. There's a reason why they don't want the NFL isn't in some Of these markets. It's tough. And in St. Louis has been great. Awesome. They deserve that. It's an awesome sports city. And because the NFL spurred them, spurring them and treated them the way they did, that's given 'em ammunition to embrace this league even more battle hawks, as it turns out, it's kind of a fun brand and all that whole car, they've embraced it. It's cool, right? Anthony Beck is awesome, all that. There's a lot of things to love about the Battle Hawks brand and who's behind it, all that. But it's not a guarantee that if you just choose, Orlando wasn't knocking it out of the park last year with the Guardians. I know that team was awful. San Antonio hasn't been a killer. They should be doing better. I love San Antonio personally. I thought it was a very cool choice when the XFL said they were going to go there. It just hasn't been a, but it hasn't lived up to obviously what we got in the af. And a lot of people expect it. People talk about San Antonio legitimately as a potential NFL. But I'll tell you what, when you see the attendance for the bras, you wonder, I know the NFL brand is so untouchable right now that if you put it anywhere, it's going to do okay. But I do think that they need to start doing market research on what markets are actually interested in their league. I'm not saying they should all of a sudden go to New Mexico and Tulsa and all that, but hey, like Columbus, Ohio, that's a great football state. So they have a nice stadium option there in Columbus Worth looking into. Last question here, we'll get you out. I appreciate you taking the time here during the day. Speaking of the broadness here, quarterback situation, what's going on with this? I know we have the signing. I was traveling yesterday and I don't even really know all about this gentleman and everything, but what's going on with that? And I think Tom Flacco got waived, right? I saw the transactions. So just kind of catch up on that. Yeah, so it's out there now. So last week I was told that the brass were interested in signing Jayden Delo. He has off field issues, a pretty serious one involving rape. So it's a delicate situation here. Not a great from a PR aspect. Him and a teammate supposedly, or a high school friend or whatever, coerced or forced a teenager to have sex with them. And so that was found out by Texas State and then he was kicked off the team. He's very talented player. I could see why Mark Lily Bridge, he has experience in the run and shoot. He has success there in Arizona. So I could see why they'd be interested in him, but I was told last week to not talk about it yet because they're still working on it. So it's out now. So I guess the team will release that information on Thursday. We'll officially announce the signing. Could be a dicey situation. Talented player. Delore would come in right now, would be quarterback three would be inactive A, we're halfway through the season. So there's a question of whether or not he'll get on the field and even play. You would assume, I mean Dormy wasn't that great last week, but maybe down the road they might make a change. But I think it would take time for Delore to step in and be the starter there and we're getting towards the end of the season. So it's an interesting signing from a talent perspective. I totally see it from a PR aspect. This isn't a Chad Kelly situation. Chad Kelly's being accused of basically harassing an employee there in Toronto, but he's not. Look, I'm not trying to Yeah, but there's Different levels here. Yeah, there's different level. I hear you. So this is kind of a different situation altogether. So it's a tough one there. I see why they would be interested in talent wise. If the league had more attention nationally, there would be a lot of people that would be very upset that they're entertaining signing someone like this. Well, no. I mean it's some pros and cons of that. Yeah, it's just weird to think of any PR that if he's even going to hit the field or not. So just kind of odd that way. But Mike, I appreciate it here almost now we're here and they're busy and dealing with family things and everything else, so I really appreciate it. Like I said, I like and subscribe. Get us over the 3,500. I was trying to get Tim Capper on this week to talk arena football. It's his birthday as we record this, so happy birthday, Tim, if you've made it this far. But maybe we'll get Tim on next week. I want to do a little bit of that. I don't, we not full on Arena league football arena, football league, but there's a lot going on there. And then obviously with the CFL stuff. Mike, anything else from you before we get out? No, there's some great things going on in indoor football. I'm so wrapped up in pro football, obviously, but you got TJ Edwards, the fighters, all these cool teams out there in the IFL. And it's a shame with the A FLI was a fan of the Arena Football League during the NBC kind of resurgence, that kind of era. And so it's unfortunate to see how things have gone there. You want as many of these leagues, even if it's indoor, which is not my bag of tea, but you want as many leagues exist and thrive and do well. And so it's kind of the story. By the way, I would hope that people out there would subscribe. You need what, 50 subscribers right now, Reid? Is that Where, I mean, it's 1000th of the battle hawks or whatever. I know there's a lot of negativity and sometimes I know it's easier to get likes and fan service and subscribers if you preach to the choir, if you play fan service. So sometimes Reid has some guests here that are pretty harsh and have some pretty strong opinions and be negative. A lot of these people that come on here, I don't always agree with their opinions. Like last week's show, I won't get into all that. But this stuff, these are people that actually passionate and care about the lead and want to see it succeed. So I think that hopefully that doesn't turn people off. I hate to be doom and gloom with these leagues because such a huge fan of them. So anyway, Reid, thank you very much for having me on. I appreciate it. Awesome, Mike. We'll see everyone next week. Like I said, stay tuned. Should be another good one. And we'll see you guys next time. Thanks.

UFL Week 5 Results + Reactions! Winner and Losers From UFL Week 5!!

Well here we are, a special weird setting here, kind of funky white balance, but we are here live in Las Vegas. It just flew in. I thought I would have lots of time to get set up for Andy and I show today. I ended up being scrambling down. I had to get some water here and I got a beer. Andy's going to catch me before the hangover here in Vegas for a change. But let's bring in Andrew Murray. We can talk through everything. First of all, Andy, how are you doing? Great. I'm happy to see you on a Sunday sir, and I'm glad you managed to get in just in the nick of time. Yeah, I've got the, I should put the photo up. I've got my light here from the room and we got this awesome backdrop. You can see the stratosphere there in the distance. Not a bad setting here. The stratospheres there, the sphere made it in. John here, John Lewis guns. I didn't have time to find his shirt. I ran downstairs to get some de other, came back up, watched the games today. Exciting. Lots to get to, lots to get yesterday as well. We had another double header and kind of all that stuff. This table's going to kind of move as I type here, but Andy, have we recovered from the Rick Cella of it all? If anyone has missed, I don't know how you could have missed the episode, our episode Friday. I knew it would be controversial. We lost some subscribers. We gained some subscribers. I think we're net up overall but fiery episode with Rick. Yeah, Abdul, check it in here. Phase of the UFL, Andy Murray, Andy. Have we recovered from Rick Sella? I mean I thought I was the poison in the well last week and apparently Rick was the sucker punch. I am just kind of enamored in what he had to say and sort of what he had to say and how he said it. He had a lot to say but I mean your episode overall had a lot of really interesting casts. I know Rick was going to get obviously the most attention, especially considering that now he's officially somebody that works in the CFL, so that was going to be something of a point of contention in terms of perspective. But Rick has been all over the place and you've been in multiple leagues in multiple settings. He's a great scout. I really don't have any problems as far as me. Rick is a really good guy and I think I respect his opinion. I knew it was going to draw the ire of a lot of people, so hopefully people have had a couple of weeks to, or a couple of days I should say, to cool down for that whole experience. Yeah, have you missed that? Yeah, Rick, formerly with the IFA, he's now with the CFL. He is a football scout. Lots of good just quality feedback I think for the league. Rick kind of pitched it as a free kind of marketing session on that, so if you've missed that, but to set the stage here, Sunday night, we normally do this either Monday or Tuesday. We have attendance today. We don't have TV ratings which obviously come out Tuesday. I'm here in Vegas. I'll be filming I think tomorrow like seven to nine, both Monday and Tuesday all day. So just wasn't feasible. So appreciate Andrew, Andy making time here. The face of the UFL coming on and doing all of that. I think let's first Jen is checking in. We got everyone checking this in. Yeah, everyone's excited Sunday night here. This is good Phil checking in and act. Let's talk attendance first. I have some thoughts about that and then we'll get into the games. I saw a lot more of the games today on the flight than I did the games yesterday. We were working and then get ready for the Mariners game so Andy can fill in but have enough to talk about with all of that. Let's put this up first. Attendance came out via Mike Mitchell today, official attendance numbers. Arlington the Saturday game, 10,283. Good to see a little bit of a balance back there. Houston here, a little scary. The 6,285 DC today. I thought a really good crowd. I even had a text from Sam Schwartzstein saying, is that true? I said, yeah, I mean it looks pretty full to me. And then Memphis was 7,600 on that. We have Abdul here, I want to do his a little more context on that, but thoughts about that Andy while we get to that. Yeah, for Arlington, I mean at least they were able to recuperate some of their losses from the last time that they hosted a home game against the DC Defender. So you have a few more people there, but I mean overall this is an audience that is going to be witnessing a product that is not going to be sustainable or satisfying enough because there are no and five team. So we'll see if the record plays into them in terms of how much attendance they have. The remainder of the season, they have two more home games. So we'll see if that is able to maintain that 10,000 people floor for Houston. I mean it was sort of ominous a couple of days ago when Houston started putting out tweets about let's try and get a to 10,000 and I'm thinking 10,000 is the bare minimum for some of these teams and there's already a squad that's saying that 10,000 is a goal. That's a bit frightening just to be quite frank. And look again, I know Rice Stadium, I know it's not that formal stadium that they're going to be in when they eventually go back to the University of Houston and they finally get done with the renovations but still not extremely enviable and I don't think this is something that they can really rest their laurels on or really be okay with going forward because 6,000 and declining is scary time numbers. I mean we're talking about Vegas Viper attendance numbers from last year. You're talking about some of the lower end spring teams maybe in a f. I mean this is a crowd number that needs to be boosted. DC I'm not surprised by DC is fantastic. They've done their job, they're great. Audi Fields is just ruckus. Even though that we saw some history today, I think that the audience is still going to be always remaining strong. I think they've built a good enough brand. See again what I was saying last week, they built a brand, you know what they're about. I think everybody that watches spring football or is not as super familiar with it know that this is one of the best atmospheres in spring football and has been for quite some time. And then going to Memphis. I mean that's sort of where they've been at this season. Sort of the same base mark for them. So I mean that number that we've been seeing overall as far as the USFL attendances not averaging in nearly as much as the XFL attendances, even with St. Louis being taken out is still very much prevalent. And I have those numbers here to talk through as well. Let me know. My internet should be good If I disappear, just talk for a second, I'll come back, but it seems like it's pretty decent. Forgot to mention off the top as well, the plan is getting Mike Mitchell on this next week. We're at the halfway point of the season. We'll do kind of a welfare check. I might try to see if the Tim Cappers of the world can come on. There's a little bit of arena football news coming on as well we might talk to, but I want to hear Mike's thoughts about this. I know he said preseason and during the season kind of 10,000 is kind the bare minimum we want to hit with all that. So I want to get Mike on for all that stuff. I really co-signed here what Jacob is saying with this, and this is what hurts the most about the Houston of it because Houston was kind like the tent pole franchise of the XFL 2020 especially. And then the XFL 2023 had the success in there. You didn't have quite the hysteria with the PJ Walker. And to see this now come down, excuse me, is really sad to me. I know Philip is, I know Philip is kind of co-signing that, but it's hard to see where it's like not only have we lost maybe what could have been a good XFL, it's almost like the USFL poisoned that market side of it and this like, well we got to keep the whatever. I know we had Paul res on two weeks ago talking about this, where is the USFL carrying its weight? And in this regard it's almost dragging down that market because I think if it was the Houston rough next with Wade Phillips and nevermind what you would have with San Antonio with that and what that team would look like. But if you had that team there, I think they would be bolstered up by that. And I think it's almost now it's a double due. It hurts anyway. And then the US L is kind of dragging it down. It really is not a good look. I think they've just lost their identity completely. And that's the thing, I mean you've taken their coaches, you moved them to a different city, you've taken their brand, which I know it's the roughneck, but really it's the gamblers in disguise. That's really what it is. So you've changed their identity as far as the team and as far as what their familiarity is with the market and then obviously moving stadiums. So there's a lot of loss in translation collateral damage here. But most significantly again is the fact that I don't know who this team is. I mean this team is not playing well, but also I don't know what this team is about 2020 high flying offense. They start five and oh and then last year they're seven and three. They're again pretty good efficiently on offense. They've got a good defense. Wade Phillips has a calling card, he has familiarity with the Houston market. Obviously he's been in it for many, many, many, many years including with his father Bum Phillips. And so that familiarity is kind of gone. And with that goes any sort of familiarity with the fans and I just don't understand what the strategy was here in terms of also taking the team and literally changing conferences going from the XFL to the USFL. I mean it just feels, I'm sorry, it just feels wrong. Watching them and thinking this is not A-U-S-F-L team, but I'll say this and this is going to probably ruffle some feathers. They play like A-U-S-F-L team in the hub. That's what it feels like. There's this, there's almost this homogenous feeling sort of in my opinion from my opinion, between a team like Memphis, Houston and Michigan where it's just sort of glob of, I know you have talented players, I know you have good players. I know there are good coaches that are on these staffs, but I don't really know what your identity is as a team. Michigan is starting to figure it out as far as being a defensive minded team. But again, Houston, I have no idea what they are. Memphis is just a mess. I really don't know. Birmingham is the one that has the clear identity out of all of them is by far the most successful team out of all of them. And I think there's a reason for that. So for Houston it's just more it's brand confusion and it's the fact that I don't really know what they are as a team that I think plays into this quite a bit. I want to do a little bit more attendance here, but for Houston in general, is this a personality? I mean is it a player issue? Is it a Curtis Johnson issue? Because I mean the gamblers weren't great last year and we followed this mixed match, but what is it about this team that is just so miserable to watch? I mean it's quarterback playing. I don't think REIT sin net's necessarily a problem. I just don't think he's really going to be the solution defensively. I mean this team has completely fallen apart. They just do not have the same juice that they had last year. You don't have a Trent Harris, you don't have a Genie Harris, you don't have these cornerbacks who are picking off passes and you don't have this premier pass rush anymore. You're getting run over by teams. I mean Michigan ran them over. Obviously Birmingham just has way too much talent offensively for them to handle. I know they won that game against Arlington, but really I thought that was more about Arlington shoot themselves in the foot. I don't know what they really do quite frankly, I just don't really know what they're about. The gamblers at times I thought just suffered from horrible inconsistencies offensively but had good defensive players and last year they were much closer to getting to the playoffs than they were this year. But now I just don't really know what they have. It's both sides of the ball that are just completely unwatchable. I don't really know a player that you can really stick to. Most of the time there's just, again, not really a lot of identity. Mark Thompson is supposedly your star player and he's just now played his first game and I don't think he really made much of an impact. So I don't really know what you hang your hat on if you're Houston, If you're tuning in here, checking this out for the first time, we're not normally live here on Sunday, just remember we like and subscribe. Get us up to 3,500 subscribers. Like I said, had to hit a little pack and forth there with the Rick Sara tells of it. But you would sit with Andrew Murray at the championship game. Two free tickets. We have 50, we need 50 people. I'm so tired of talking about this. Just like and subscribe on that. Michael Payne checking in. Yes, having a little PBR here. Just got into Vegas, so enjoying that. And we are going to go, I think I'm going to go to Yard House after this. I think that's the plan. But speaking of, we had this Abdul posted a couple of weeks ago about this and we talked I think with our show last week, but to kind of put this into context here, so the UFL average overall 12,570 fans and we'll get into the games here. I have a lot of thoughts about the US L conferences as a whole, but just to put a pin in this XL conference average 17,000 XFL conference even without St. Louis, 12,500 USFL conference, 8,200. So I think we're seeing there as we've talked about this kind of the dragging down effect of that XFL continuing that to reiterate before, no surprise that it was the 2020 franchisees that are kind of carrying that. I did want to point out and then we'll go back to Andy. Yeah, John Rain. Rain, man, it's rain and I think the carwash was having to buy two, get one free sale down the road and I think Celine Dion was playing two counties over and yeah, it's a lot. It was rainy, it was beautiful. Beautiful in the Arlington though, I think Andy, excuse me, Anthony was reporting anything else on that before we move on to the games? I mean, yeah, weather will be somewhat of a factor depending on where you are. Again, if it's thunder lining, it's something you can't avoid. But that Birmingham situation, if you know it's coming then you're probably not going to show up to the game. But as far as rain goes, I mean it really depends. Some fans are okay with it and other fans, but I just don't think that can be really the crux of why you're not drawing fans. It's perfectly fine outside and it's beautiful. There's the same number of people. So where are we getting at here? That's kind of my question. Well I think John, I mean to be fair, John's been a little facetious, but yes, I want to continue. I'm sure he is. And that's the thing, by the way, if you're having a car wash on a rainy day, I don't know what's going on. I dunno sure what your priorities are, but That's why it was a sale. We got to get in there. That's why they're having the sale. But it just goes to show that, look, I've read a litany of excuses online and some of them are probably valid and some of them I sort of raise my eyebrow. But again, it really depends on how much the fans are willing to go through with it. And DC look, the DC defenders had some games last year because they had the calendar pushback where it wasn't super nice to go to DC games where it was cold or it was rainy or it was just kind of nasty. And fans not as many fans want to show up. So of course the healthy amount did, but not nearly the same attendance numbers that they have had the last two weeks or the last two times they've played at home because now it feels like it's spring in dc. So that's also part of the calendar thing, again, going back and forth of when is it too hot, when is it too cold, when is it just right, the Goldilocks syndrome, when are we going to have the magical porridge that comes all together and is able to make this fine for everybody to attend a game? And I don't think that really exists, but you can try and thread the needle as much as you want. I just don't know what other factors that could be with Memphis if we've been told that Memphis is a good market and I'm sure that there are people who want to support football in Memphis, but it just hasn't come together yet. There's just not been that same flare. And I don't know if it's again, brand identity. Is it people not knowing that this team exists? Is it people choosing to do chores rather than going to a game? I don't know. It's really hard because it is. It's like the Goldilocks because okay, if it's too nice outside, people don't want to go to the dome in St. Louis if it's too cold, I am so sick of it. And every week and you get the tweet and I got a lot of flack from my tweet, I guess it was last earlier this week, but St. Louis, we had a blowout game like 14 to one and there was nobody there. And I'm like, oh, this is the same team that is supposedly drawing all these people away from the, because the battle hawks have gone down week over week. The opening weekend they had 40,000 whatever and then last weekend they had 31. It was about 10,030 decline. I go, this is the same. You can't have it every way. Well okay, we did really good against whatever. And then I'm tuning in to highlight and I understand it's a blowout game on the week. I understand the context of that, but you don't get it all the same ways. You don't get, this is responsible for drawing away this way. But then when I point out there's only 6,000 people at the game the other night, it's like, oh, well see, that doesn't really matter. There's always going to be some excuse. There's always going to be some reason about it. But I don't know, I think Rick pointed out a lot of things on the interview this week where there's a lot of lack of marketing. I know that there's been conversations in our group chat with certain people talking to team social members about, hey, maybe marketing isn't to staff this time, so something's going on XFL continues to carry the attendance at least that way. I think it would be pretty grim right now if it was still the USFL conferences. Yeah, no, I agree. It would not be something that maybe even they would report on if it was just the SFL to be quite honest. And I see why, because they're not the biggest numbers on the planet and who knows what the numbers were last year. Obviously we'll never know, but maybe certain few what the numbers really were last year in those hubs. But for now, I mean this just kind of shows me that it's a carryover effect of the hub model where there was a lot of attention putting into, well, let's just slowly get the teams out into their cities, which in theory worked and then able to get some sort of local notoriety and able to get people into the stadium, which again in theory worked but not to the level that I think people who watch TV and watch games on TV expect. That's the thing, it's a TV product and I need people to stop pretending like it's not a TV product. The whole point of it, that's what they're trying to sell to their audience. It's not just people who show up in the stadiums. If people show up in the stands, it looks great. Awesome, fantastic. You need both, you need to have people who show up are able to talk about it, are able to be part of the atmosphere, but then also advertise that to your television audience saying, look, all these people are here and checking this out and watching this and are really excited about this, you need to sell that to your audience. And if it's not there, if the energy's not there, it's just harder. It's a harder sell. It really Is. It's a harder sell. And I talked with Rick about it too, it kind of makes you feel like a loser. You're sitting there, you're like, there's 6,000 people here, we're in the rain in Memphis, our team plays like crap. It kind of feel like a loser watching this. I think it's all intangible stuff. But again, what I always get back to, and I'll just flip over to this again and then we'll move on because I want to talk about the games. What person is buying a Memphis franchise that is drawing 7,600 people? That's not, if that is the long-term goal that we are selling these markets, I don't care about anything else that is what needs to be. So that's kind of where I'm at. I want to make sure we get Gemini here. We got a super chat from them. Lee needs to spend money and advertise if they want fans, period. Yes. And I do not think that they are doing that. Let's go on, we can do any other questions about any attendance at the end? Andy, here's a question. I'm going to get this screen share up here. We talked about this in the group chat. The USFL conference is horrendous. Why It's bad. I'll tell you why. It's because Birmingham has a fantastic GM who is stockpiling this team of talent. They have a great coach and Skip Holtz. They have a way of just sort of understanding what they're trying to get out of their team. And that's even with them platooning quarterback with Matt Corral and Adrie Martinez. Even with that dynamic, they're still undefeated. And now this week they finally play our Adrian Martinez and they just run away with the competition. But this has been going on for three years. I mean they've lost three games total in the last three games in the last three years. It's crazy. That means it's crazy, right? I mean it should not be that much parody, the XFL. We've seen parody, we've seen teams take shots or even the good teams or the teams that we think are the best get knocked down at some point. And I mean that happened to DC last year. They lost a bizarre game to the Orlando guardians. They only win the entire season. Came against dc, which was just the weirdest thing ever. But it happened. And then they lost the championship game to an Arlington team that was below 500. So I mean we've seen more parody in the XFL compared to the USFL and I think just tells me that their staff is just so much more cohesive and so much more put together than any other team here. And even if the New Orleans breakers stayed around, I don't even think they'd be catching up to them either. Sorry, they wouldn't have stayed in this fight either, and I just don't really know why other teams have not really been able to pull their weight other than talent evaluation or coaching or knowing exactly what they're getting from it. But Birmingham is just running circles around everybody, whether it's running backs, whether it's defense, whether it's whatever quarterback they put in there. I mean basically if they win this year, they're going to win with three different combinations of quarterbacks at this point and it's kind of ridiculous. Well here you go. So jabon here, how has the SFL conference hor around this? The FL has a winless team and the defenders get blown out. Am I wrong in that? I mean is it just wrong? Maybe it's just my bias. It feels like when you look at the Sands, I will correlate there, but we have two teams with one win on here. There's two teams with one win out later, one team with zero wins. I don't know, to me it just feels like the USFL, at least there's a little bit of action here in the XFL conference. I feel like it's going to be Michigan and here by Birmingham by default it's probably going to be Michigan unless Memphis gets their stuff together. But you got case cookies and you're dealing with that and we can talk about all that today and the other guy playing and Houston, we've already talked to the Chris Johnson, am I wrong in that of you and the XF Ls a stronger conference? I thought the whole point of moving all these we're combining all these teams was to get better talent and now a lot of these teams just don't look very good. I mean to me there's more of a question as to who can win on a game by game basis than the XFL. I mean I know the braas are leading the division right now, but I don't know if they ultimately will by the end of the season. It might be the Battle Hawks. I don't know. The playoff spots are completely solid. I mean DC's not looking good. Could they still make a comeback? Sure. But I still don't know. In between the battle hawks and the bras, which one's going to win the conference with the USFL? I mean there's no question. I mean the stallion should be favored by double digits against every one of these teams on any given day and it doesn't really matter. I think they could easily, I think Birmingham could easily run the table against this entire conference. Now they do have to place the Mexico team, so that's going to stop maybe stymie their mission a little bit. The big big one coming up in two weeks is going to be the Bow Hawks going to Birmingham. That's going to be a humongous matchup. So we'll find out then. But as far as in the conference itself, I just give absolutely no chance any of these other teams because I've seen it. I've seen it the last three years. They just can't keep up. They've fallen flat and Birmingham just has all the answers. They push all the right buttons and we'll see if they can push those buttons against all the XFL teams. They obviously had a fantastic showcase against Arlington, the opening game, but now we've obviously seen that Arlington is the worst team in the XFL and potentially the worst team in the entire conference. But even then, and I know they just lost them, but I still would rather watch and take the renegades over the roughnecks. I know that's extremely controversial. I know, I know. But I just do not like any of the teams in the USS FL conference outside of Birmingham. Jacob has a question. Is it possible for DC to take the second USS L spot? No, because like coach back to put on the thing, hey, oh yeah, they're changing the playoff rule this year because remember he was all PPO about them. Hey, win at home, win against the Sea Dragons. In your end, it's not. It's the top two in each conference. That's why we're going to have XFL versus USFL. I don't know, like I said, cancel the season. Let's move to June here. I mean it's going to be battle hawks against. Well, and I don't know, I mean even the braas have the conference lead right now, but it really feels like it's going to be the battle hogs versus the stallions. It feels like they're coming up. Well we'll see. This Braas team I think is going to throw, could be the monkey wrench in the operation. Again, I'm sure the league is begging and pleading and praying that the Hawks host the championship game and hosts the stallions. They would love nothing more than that. But I think as far as offense goes, I mean yes, this Val Hawks scene looks really scary. They have the entire arsenal, the entire compliment of weapons that they need around Agent McCarran to make everything work out. I mean, in my opinion, they've come off back to back weeks where they should have scored 50 points both weeks, which is insane to say, but that really is a mark that they should have accomplished the last two weeks and kind of got in their own way. So for the SFL, I just don't really see it. It's not really home field advantage that really matters. I just think Birmingham can play anywhere. Anytime they could play on the road, they have the right game, the right team to play on the road. Even better on the road than at home to be honest. Yeah. Alright, let's get in here. Let's get into the games. Speaking of that, right, the last one, I got these all in order here. Last one, Michigan versus Memphis here. It got a little close there. I was watching and I about turned it off. I was on the plane and the Mariners were getting ready to come on and I said, well this is about Memphis made a little bit. I know they had that turnover and said, but it really didn't look even be the same place here as Michigan. What did you make of this Weird game? Just a really weird game. I mean Michigan goes up 19, nothing. They decide not to go for a short field goal and by foregoing it at the end of the first half they give up an 82 yard touchdown pass to Davon Davis, which Mike, and I'll say this and I don't want to speak too much for Mike, but he was going on about how Joel Clad was just flaming, flaming Mike Nolan for and rightfully so. I mean it was just an error decision. That's the thing that's I'm talking about with some of these USFL teams. I just don't see these correct decisions being made by the coaching staff. So the head coaches in comparison to Skip Pol to has pulled all the right levers, but regardless, west Hills looked great. The Michigan Panthers got when Danny at Lincoln did enough in place of EJ Perry and this team I think is probably the second most well formed team in the USFL. They should probably be the second seed just based on how they played so far. As far as Memphis goes, I mean man, they're offensive line. It's is a collapsing wall every time they play. It really is a detriment to the quarterbacks case. Cook is obviously getting hurt, playing behind it. Troy Williams running for his life and Troy Williams Drew three touchdowns, good for him, but two interceptions as well. The guy that I really just love to highlight here in this game and really just for the team in general is Kanaku. He's been outstanding as the safety for Michigan. He's awesome. He's been everywhere. Loved the way he plays the game and I love that he's just been so rangey and just been able to cover all of his bases. He has made some tremendous turnovers this season and I really like his game a lot. But this Michigan team I think is so solid. I have no doubt that they should be the second seed. I just dunno how they measure up against Birmingham and they played Birmingham seven point game, but that was when Birmingham was still platooning quarterbacks. If they're playing Adrian Martinez, are we going to get the same results? We'll see. I want to say too, and speaking of the Joel Clack kind of hammering on, I like his, going back to the conversation again with Rick last week and talking to a different broadcast. I like Joel knowing kind of the history and even the fake punt. I like, Hey, they did this last week and how do you not? It's the over, it's the over it's. I like Joel talking about football stuff. I was on the plane and I just had it on. It was easier just to listen to the game than it was to have it on with just the wifi. And I thought this is someone, even for just the most basic level of a Joel Klatt, even in the NFL draft week, let's just put this in context. He's coming off the NFL draft week and then to be able to still have his research done to go into that, I thought it was really good. I listened to Joel, he was on Brock and SOC here or in Seattle, not here in Seattle, but in Seattle this weekend. I'm like for him to be doing all that stuff to pre-prep for the draft and then still be able to come in and be prepared to do this US L Sunday, Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon game. Let's give a shout out for Joel Cloud. I thought that was good. Oh my goodness. I mean I couldn't even believe that I was seeing him on my TV and NFL network doing the draft cover and thinking you've got UFL games this weekend, buddy. He's had two back-to-back days of UFL games and incredible feed by him. He's just a machine. I appreciate his hard work and I appreciate his acumen for not only the game but the players individually. He knows these players, he knows these teams. They talk to these players and coaches. He does his homework. And also I really like that he's not afraid to be critical of everybody here. I mean, he's really the poster child for color commentator in this league. Kind of how Greg Olson was in XFL 2020 is just this great standard of being very professional, knowing what you're doing, doing your homework, caring about the players and the coaches and the league. And even if there's not a ton of history there, you can at least go off something as far as just the week before. I really, really appreciate that and I love that we need more of that. Honestly, we need more of that in this league and I hope more of that comes, but there's going to need to be more figures like Joel Klatt and some of the other broadcasters. I think there's also kind of an issue too where especially in spring leagues, we don't want to criticize because we don't want to make people look dumb. I don't know. I feel like sometimes, well it's spring football that maybe we're still figuring out the rules and when you have Jim Zorn back in 2020 and going for the wrong, I think went for three or whatever after all these, what's the score and what's going on? I think we don't want to make them look dumb sometimes. So you don't criticize and you focus more like where you would maybe criticize and the Andy Reed, what are you doing there? Why would you I like that. We're all big boys. Everyone's been around you. I'm like, Nolan's been around the block. We can talk about all this stuff. Or whoever Coach Flip, I think it's okay to do that. Jake Bates, not a great day bound to happen. Missed a couple, but I didn't like that where they're like, well he made 60 58. 58, you couldn't hit a 58 yard field goal. But it didn't end up mattering here. Michigan kind of really took care of business. Any other thoughts on this one? Really didn't seem close. I know Memphis got some points there at the end, but It really wasn't. I mean Michigan just had the game plan out for this Memphis team and all they had to do was just rush the quarterback and they got, you could rush four and pretty much do whatever they needed to on defense. So yeah, just more so. I mean you watch the Memphis games just to watch John d Felipe's face turn into a strawberry because that man gets hot during games. He really does. So for me, that's pretty much the only interesting factor here with Memphis games. But as far as their competitive level, I am about ready to just go ahead and stick a fork in them because I'm not really feeling them the rest of the season. If they keep having injuries at quarterback and if they keep playing like they do. So inconsistently, I'm going to go back and say that San Antonio Drive at the end of that game for them to pull that game out. The Chase Garber's Miracle man, I think that broke this Memphis team because they have not been the same sense. The other thing, yeah, the case cus he was okay to play but they didn't want to play. They didn't want, I mean were you okay with that and kind of how they handled it. I mean I want to keep case safe here and just to get kind of thrown to the slaughter grid, but were you okay with them sending him out? No pun intended. I want to encase him in bubble wrap because that's all he is allowed to be in for the foreseeable future. Otherwise he's going to break all the rest of his fingers and toes if he goes back in there. All right, let's switch here over. So this was the big, am I right on my Yes. Okay, so let me get, I got the right time here. I thought that this was going to be a little bit more, this was the big DC's never lost to the Battle Hawks, right? They've never lost at home. They did both today. This wasn't close. I mean, we had AJ McCarran were resting at the end of the game. What did you make of this? I mean, I sense some other YouTube personalities right now with the DC defenders showing This was a curb stop. But honestly, St. Louis was letting DC stay in this game for longer than they absolutely deserved to. They went up on them in the first half, they were up 17, nothing. And then they kept kicking fuel goals and kind of became clear that they weren't really able to put DC away. It was 1712 at half. Really the most critical point I think is when Matt, a friend of the show, Matt McCrae unfortunately doing the field goal off the upright and from that point on, DC lost all the rest of its momentum. But really DC just did not do the little things well, they got punts blocked. I mean their special teams blocking on punts was terrible. They got absolutely bum rushed by the St. Louis defenders. George was running for his life. He turns the ball over three times. I mean, he just was having a rough go of it. They could not keep a sustainable run game for the Battle hawks. I mean you don't even have Darius Shepherd, Jor Pearson's in and out of the lineup and it just feels like they just have too much. I mean, Hakeem Butler was just a man. He catches that EDR touchdown pass and runs away from the defender. I mean like it was basically they were playing with their food today I think is what the battle hawks were doing. And they scored 45 points. Like I said, they should have scored 50 easily. This team has so much weaponry offensively, I love it. And for AJ McCarran, he just looks so calm and collected back there even when things aren't going well. And mind you, St. Louis had injuries on the offensive line. They're getting banged up on their offensive line. They had a couple of shuffling points there. Some guys coming in out of the lineup. They need to make sure that's solidified if they really want to be in their serious contention spot going forward. And especially in two weeks when they faced Birmingham. But so far, I mean this Battle Hawks seemed just, they look like they meet at this year. They were probably so miffed last year being seven and three, scoring all those points and then not mattering in the end. I'm going to say it right now. I think AJ McCarran is your outright MVP, far none. I think he's played well enough. He's playing an incredible offense. It may end up being best player on best teams syndrome as far as the XFL goes. And everything's just sort of come together for the St. Louis team and I think they can play better. Like I said, they haven't even played their A game, in my opinion this entire season yet. To my cha gr here, I'm not the biggest battle locks guy. I just think it's a lot. It's the same and caused a lot, but this is good. I'm glad they have a good team. I mean they came in, they kicked the absolute snot out of DC here. We had a question earlier when we were going through attendance. I mean DC doesn't even really resemble the same team right now. And even it was the sideline, these sideline reporters like Coach Jordan Temu is your highest rushing player right now. Is that your game plan going in? Would you like to get someone else going? They're like, yeah, we'd like to get someone else going here. I'm like, guys, can we, you caught an interception, how did you do that? But I mean, Tam running the route, but they just couldn't. I dunno, the fall off this year with DC is just incredible. I mean, you don't have the exfo leading rush a Abraham Smith that doesn't help. You don't have Derrick King who is really kind of that wild card that you could throw in at any moment and sort of mix up the game plan. No Lucky Jackson. I mean there's a number of weapons that are just missing from last year. You can't throw the same people and you don't have the same proficiency of a run game mean they don't have the same calling cards as they did last season. They were able to put up points at nauseum last year. And also again, their defense has falling apart. I mean, Greg Williams is just throwing whatever he can out there and a lot of times it's not working. I mean, these steam routes are getting abused by these receivers. I cannot believe how easy some of these pitching catches are coming. Especially from St. Louis, who again, I think was determined to do this. And let's say it right now. This is the first loss dcs ever sustained at home. This is history. Audi Field has finally fallen after many, many attempts by other teams. Finally the other team got the best of them. And that's a tremendous feat. And for St. Louis to do it in such a way, I think speaks volumes to their team. But for DC I mean, yeah, this isn't the same team. This is their first time being under 500 going into week six in their entire history, they were three and two the first time, obviously last year they started off odd. They were five and oh. But this time it's just not the same team. And for them there's a lot to figure out, but they got to figure it out quickly because they play San Antonio at home next week and if they don't win that game, they will pretty much be done. We got some starred comments coming in here. I want to make sure we get to, I don't think this is the Chad Johnson, but Chad Jonathan has actually been on the show. We had did have back on episode two, I think it was. We had Chad actually on the mark cast if you want to blast in the pass. But definitely not the same DC team from last year. Gemini here. I don't think the sideline reporting got any better this year and God bless and I love Cole and I love all these guys, but some of the time I'm like, I dunno, I feel like it's kind of Brock Heward or no one to me. And maybe that's just my Seattle bias and all of that stuff. Denzel here is AJ McCarran the best player in the league. Yep, yep, yep. And then John Lewis here who was at the Battle Hawks game last week, battle didn't need to save any offense for next week since they play Houston. Hey, watch an upset. That would be cool. I would be excited to see that Houston come in and flip the table on Battle Hawks. Yeah, Maya, how the turntables have turned. But I look back into the ESPN broadcasting thing for a second. If I have to hear about the over under or the spread one more time from this crew, and look, I understand sports betting is part of the zeitgeist, it's just part of the culture now that's fine. But like you said, to your point, hearing them continue to pound it as far as the team needs to worry about losing by less. It's like no, the team needs to worry about winning. I can't hear anymore about how they're feeling about covering this webinar. They don't care. It doesn't matter. And the audience, not all the audience cares either. If you want to remind the audience about maybe some of your pre bets, maybe in the third quarter or fourth quarter, fine. That's okay. If it's friendly competition between you and you want to remind the audience about that later on in the game, fine, but they just continually use it as a crutch and it's a crutch that I think is easy to kick over because I don't think it's really that sustainable. I really wish that they had other talking points besides that. They got to go back into what's this player doing? Why isn't, tell me why it's not working for DC this year. They Don't know that would take too much research. They Don't. They got to do their research. Let's talk. Why is Fred Keiser's offense not working Well, and I love that story they had about Keis. I mean the thing that he survived in the middle of the season with obviously getting the cancer detected early. That's an incredible story. But they didn't really do enough with that afterwards about talking about the teams and what's going on and the chip on the shoulder that St. Louis teams played because like you said, there just would be a lot more research involved. I'm not saying they don't do their research, but they just rely on certain elements a little too much that I don't think are supposed to be the calling card for why this league wants to be successful. It's like those progressive commercials where the guy, it's the kids that have now become their parents and you don't need to print out the map to go, you use your phone, but it's like that guy like, oh, I got the kids to become their parents. It's like that. It's like they have a call from on high. We need to talk about sports betting. We need to focus on that. I will tell you this, only hardcore people are betting on this league and those people don't need you reminding them. The over is hit. The under is hit. I mean, these are the people that are the Cody Mains of the world that Eric Eger when he was doing, I mean these are the people that know they don't need you telling them that the over is going to be hit by. They've got, I'm not even the sports better to know all the vernacular to get into that, but they don't need telling them. The over is five points away. The people that are actually betting on this leak, because spoiler alert, not a lot of people are betting on this leak, but the people that are do not need anybody that is involved in the broadcast telling them what's going on because they already know. I mean, I have a comrade of mine who does BET regularly, and he always asks me like, okay, how are you feeling this weekend? I'm like, well, I know a guy who would probably be able to give you a lot of advice on that. And it's literally just Mike Mitchell writing his articles. That's all it is. I read his article and I'm like, Mike's probably going to be right. And I just tell that to my friend, and I mean by God, I was sitting here last week saying, well, I think DC is going to be able to pull it off and defend their historic record at home. And I was flat wrong, and that was not the advice that I passed off to my friend. What I did was I read the game preview from Mike who said, oh, it's going to be 27, 23 Battle Hawks and thought, okay, well I'll pass that along and said, because Mike really, really knows this team and he knows all the matchups and not saying I don't do my homework too, but Mike is savant when it comes to that. So of course I'm going to pass that along. But that's literally just reading an article. There's no insider person for this information. And the only people who are going to seek that out, like you said, are the people who really care about the betting aspect of it. And those are few and far between. It's not the general audience, but ESPN talks about it. It's the general audience. No, and like I said, I'm turned off because I don't bet on any of this Gemini here. You can tell they're for money. I mean, it's just like they don't have enough stuff to talk about in a three hour game. They don't have enough stuff to talk about. So you just, it's a crutch and you revert back to it like, oh, it's over. It's over, it's over. And we had, where was it? Abdul here, especially when it's on the screen the whole time, I don't need you to tell me what the over under is on the score by the entire game. I remember when that was a big deal back when the XL 2020 did it. It's commonplace now. Jacob, your question about head coaches we'll do at the end. I think that's a good one to get at the end of the stream here. I have it started. Let's go back here. I wanted to just make sure I have the order right. So the first game, well, I guess these were the simulcast games. Do you want to talk about San Antonio or do you want to talk about Birmingham first? I Know because they were both at the same time. Let's go ahead and talk about Birmingham and Houston. Just get out of the way because I mean, I bet mean we knew this, right? Look, Adrian Martinez is the spark plug. You got to keep this guy in here, this whole two head. How do you like the UFL putting out their tweet a few days ago saying, wow, they got this two-headed monster, Matt Corral and Adrian Martinez. And I'm thinking, what two-headed monster? I mean there's really one head that's really spearheading this entire offensive juggernaut that the Birmingham stallions are, and it's Adrian Martinez. I mean this guy is electric with the ball. My God, he is so quick. I cannot believe how much of a threat he is on the ground because he's just so much more faster than some of the other players. You see him in the open field and he is just quick, this is going to sound like a really funny analogy for your audience, but Adrian Martinez is the Trey Ford of the UFL. And I say this not lightly because here's why. Trey Ford, fantastic athlete, amazing running ability, good arm has shown a lot of propensity to uplift an entire offense when he's in the game. And yet the coaching staff, Chris Jones, namely, refuses to play him for whatever reason. And that's a whole conversation for another season. We'll get into plenty this year. Same thing with Adrian Martinez. He is obviously giving this team an entire spark. I mean, you can't defend every blade of grass against him. You're trying to, and it's really difficult because he can throw he run, he can do a lot of different things. You can run RPO with him. You could run that Wishbone set they do in the backfield with three running backs. You can do all kinds of things with him and under center. But Skip Holtz is really determined to put mackerel in there and give him tape. And I respect that. But Mackerel has just not gotten it down to the red zone. And I think it would be a detriment to this team to continue the platoon because Adrian Martinez just makes this offense hum. And they make them dangerous and they make them lethal and they make them look like the scariest team on the planet. And I just don't really want to see that be jeopardized just for the fact of, well, we got to put in another guy and continue to give him opportunities. And look, this whole league is about opportunities. Of course you want players to get all kinds of opportunities. I'm not saying that I don't want them to, but when there's just such a disparity in terms of the performances of the offense when there's one guy in there versus the other guy, I mean, I would just continue to roll with that. I mean, St. Louis isn't sitting here being like, well, let's throw in Manny Wilkins in. Just see how AJ feels about that. A couple of plays that would not go Well. Give some tape. He needs tape's. Give Mandy some rapture. No, you're trying to win. Yeah, you're trying to win. Exactly. You're trying to win and you're trying to dominate and that's what Birmingham, Are you trying to win? Are you trying to win or are you trying to hit the over? Oh, well, I mean if corrals in the over's not going to hit, I'm just going to tell you that right now. But you can start putting that be in immediately. You cash that ticket. Look, this Birmingham team just has everything they need. CJ Merri. Maribel's great. Obviously Ricky Pearson's been really good. He's started to come on in the season. Anything they really do on offense, Jay Sternberger is just probably the best tight end in this league. There were a couple of candidates, but Sternberger has just been awesome in the past game. And that touchdown pass that Martinez had to him was beautiful. The place to touch on that was amazing. So I mean, this was just going to be a wrong from the beginning. The roughnecks never had a prayer. Just speaking of the re forward, if you're into this now, if you've gotten into all this UFL stuff, CF L's coming soon, I was just like, we're going to have a two week overlap and then we're going to be in, it's a lot of fun. It's just like this, I mean there's nine teams, but it's really eight. It's four games every week. It's really fun, really manageable. Follow right Thursday through Sunday a lot. Especially during the summer before we get into the NFL. Really fun. So just if you've never tried the CFL. We'll be talking about it on here. Andy will be on, I know we'll get hussy back on and hopefully Evan if his schedule, but really fun to get to all that stuff. I know the thing with Birmingham here and losing J, not even losing JR right, kind of injured and losing the spot, whatever, it's really like that Jesse Pinkman meme and breaking bad. How does he keep getting away with this? How does Skip Holtz now and now, I mean he almost has two quarterbacks, but like you said, Adrian Martiz and they're like, again, here you go, Magoo and J Jamar and all of this and navigating, I mean is that a testament to him? Is that a testament to the scouting there and Zach, excuse me, Zach Martin, who's the guy's name? Zach the kid, Zach Potter. I mean is it Zach Potter? I mean, what is it about Birmingham that allows them, just like, I mean without a hiccup here. I mean I think the thing that's the, Zach Potter has done an incredible job of continuing the stockpile, this team with talent in the trenches, the perimeter, and at quarterback. Adrian Martinez is the guy you've watched at Nebraska having incredible rushing days, but you knew he wasn't going to be an NFL quarterback. Now he believes he's going to be an NFL quarterback from a scouting perspective. That wasn't really the grade on him, but this is a chance for him to improve his tape and really improve his game and maybe make himself more enviable from some of these NFL teams and Birmingham really gives the chance to do that. But look, I think it's not only the scouting, it's also Skip Holtz. Skip Holtz is kind of running into that territory that Joe gives did with the Washington Redskins where he won three Super Bowls with three different quarterbacks, which is an incredible feat. It really is. It's so hard to win with a different single collar. It really is. And for him to do it three years in a row, first you have Jaymar Smith and Alex McGoo who's backing him up, who isn't developed enough as a passer last year, McGoo comes in for an injured Jaymar Smith is incredible, wins the MVP award and is just outright the best player in the league. And now this year you're, you're kind of experimenting, you're seeing, alright, well I don't really need JMR Smith. Maybe I got something in macro or something in Agent Martinez and it seems to be Martinez now. I mean he's a bit of a quarterback whisperer and he is so good at not only knowing what he wants but also being able to control the people around him as far as their emotions and also, or not control, but be able to manage them I should say. And being able to keep that in line the entire time. I mean it's so hard when you have so many talented players who want to play and they want to be in there. They want to be able to contribute, but at the end of the day as a coach, you got to decide, look, this is what's best for the team and we need to win and this is how we're going to win. And that is such a testament to him. I am just blown away that it's been so successful and honestly there's got to be a college that's going to call Skip Hold at some point, right? There's got to be some team that sees this and realizes, man, he's really, I mean he was good at Louisiana Tech, but he's clearly hit another level in this league. Yeah. What does it tell you about the USFL that Skip Holts ran circles around teams for two seasons still here when the UF Ls in anything else with this one? Let's get to the last one because I'm, I'm hitting this strip here on a little bit. Let's go here. So San Antonio, continuing on here. I got this on here. I know Anthony Miller was at this game. I don't know how many people were in the press box for this one. What do you make about this? I mean this is basically the ambience of a morgue because the Arlington renegades have been buried officially. I buried them last week. Well, this was just the service after the burial because this is pretty much the end of the Arlington Renegade season. Their defense is just not there. It really is not. And Quentin Dormy good for him. I mean he comes back and he's performed fairly well instead of Chase Garbers, obviously you got enough weapons there with the bras with someone like Elise Mack for example, catching that touchdown over the middle and running it in Jordan Lovett's really good. I mean he's kind of come on for this team as far as a running back goes, you still have Stevenson, you still have a number of guys you could run the ball with. The Brahmas are solid. They're set. They've got, again, they have their identity, they play really good defense. They just seem to be, I mean this is technically the real Houston roughnecks in a lot of ways it's just transferred over to San Antonio. So I'm not surprised that they're successful. And so it really speaks to the fact that they're able to keep pace with the battle hawks and now they're in a fight, they're in fight to try and win this whole conference and maybe host the XF LS conference championship game, which would be huge for them because they definitely don't want to go into the battle dome. So we'll see what happens there. But for Arlington, I mean I can't pin this on Luis Perez. Poor guys play his heart out. I mean you see him with his kids afterwards. You saw him hang his head at the end of the game. Just so disappointed. I can't really pin this on him. I mean he's trying his damnedest. He gets that touchdown pass to Jordan paying to try and cut into the lead, but I just don't think he has the team this year. This is just a lost season for Bob Stoops and his staff. Really frustrating. I know. I mean Greg Parks was on this week as well with Rick talking about stoops just can't motivate the guys and maybe he should move on. I mean, is it a stoops issue? Is he need to hold the players more accountable at this point? It's possible. I mean he's had a couple of rough starts. I mean remember he got off to a under 500 start in the original USFL or the original XFL, excuse me, in 2020. In 2023. Obviously they finished the regular season four and six, but they catch fire and they win the whole thing. So kind of making up for that and we all knew that there needed to be more consistent quarterback played for that team to win this year. Whatever these athletes have been allocated to or whatever they lost, it's just not been there. Maybe who knows? I mean Stoops has said and expressed that he likes this kind of job because it's not as rigorous and as taxing as college football is. But who knows, maybe he wants to coach elsewhere. Maybe he wants to coach at a smaller college or maybe in high school or which I don't think would happen or maybe it just goes back to the desk. I don't know. But it is deflating for him and the staff. It is just the fact that this team is oh and five should not be the case. I think they should at least have a couple of wins and I mean obviously that game against DC was so devastating for them from a mental standpoint. I just think this team, as Anthony has written about before, is just so undisciplined. I mean the penalties have piled up, they have uncharacteristic turnovers, they've just had a really rough go of it and who knows? We'll see if the staff, if Bob Stoop and the staff moves on, really that's really one of the biggest questions going into the off season is what happens to some of these staffs so they don't perform. What does the league nudge them to seek other opportunities or do they just get the benefit of the doubt? No, that's good that curtails in. We have our conversation here at the end. I want to make sure we touch on. Philip here says, said my roughneck out of it. I'm a Braas fan now. No, Philip bus is full. I told you from the preseason I said this. Oh no, it's a rough next week. This isn't even, this is the zombie roughnecks. This isn't even, oh no, we don't care about that. We care about no Philip, you have made your bed and that's just it. This is rules of it. Question for you and I want to get to Jacob's question here. I have PIN before we get out of this Dormy coming in, right? Obviously the Chase Garber's injury. We've got Kevin Hogan here and he was signed. Is Dormy doing enough? Is this our future here? I mean is I've been brams the whole time. I like Philip here. So I mean this is my team. Are we okay with that or how do you feel about the quarterback situation for San Antonio? Well, I mean considering that Dormy almost won the job over Garber's I think speaks to how much depth they had at that position. How okay they felt about making that decision. So yes, I absolutely feel confident enough with Dormy as far as being in the playoff race, I think they're set now, especially if they against, as I said, if they win against DC next week, that's pretty much it. I mean they've pretty much almost guaranteed themselves to be in the dance at the end of their regular season. But as far as do we expect something from Garbers? I know he obviously had a serious injury. I mean in theory he could come back at some point, but I don't know if you really want to bet on that. I think you just kind of roll with Dormy going forward and I like Dormy. I liked what he brought to the table last year. I mean that game against DC had five total touchdowns. He had the three rushing touchdowns, the two passing. He was incredible in that game. He had a really good game against Vegas last year as well. I think you roll with Dormy. I think again, the thing that I mentioned last week, he has the downfield passing game element that garbage doesn't really rely on as much, but garbage is more about quick accuracy, intermediate routes, screens. He's much more about keeping it all in front of him, which is fine. That works too. And that works in AJ Smith's offense. But as far as getting the ball down field, dormy does a much better job of that and he's much more aggressive. So we'll see if digression bites him in the butt in the end, but I don't think so. This offense I think should feel confident enough in what they're doing to roll with him going forward. Phillip, here I am still diehard roughneck just your hand to maybe you can be in the short bus in the back. That's full time bandwagon. Theres will be there and then we'll we'll try you along real quick. Looking ahead here, so next week and like I said, try to get Mike Mitchell on. If I get back and Mike, we'll try to get that scheduled for Thursday for the Friday episode. Birmingham going into Memphis could be a little bit of a blood about there. Houston going into St. Louis could be a little bit of a blood about there. The Renegades versus the Panthers. I expect the Panthers to take care of business there. I mean, not that they have a home field advantage and then like you said, the San Antonio, I mean does DC drop two at home? I don't know. This is exciting. What do you think about week six? Yeah, I mean the clear matchup you look for here is bra as a defenders because again, the braas could end pretty much any hopes that the DC makes the playoffs if they're able to win in field. I mean that would be pretty shocking to have two straight home losses after being 10 and and having such a staunch home field advantage of your dc, but very possible could happen and this team I think can do it on offense. DC has not shown to be very good on defense. It's very possible that that is going to be what transpires next week as far as all these other matchups go. I mean you're just kind of hoping that you don't get upset. I mean if you're the stallions, you really want to be dropping one of the showboats. I don't think they will. I still have a lot of confidence that they're still playing Adrian Martinez. Hell, even if they play Matt Corral, I think they'd still be fine because Troy Williams and this offense for the Showboats, despite having certain skilled position players that I really like, like Darius Victor and Jonathan Adams, I just don't think they're going to have enough firepower at home in front of a pretty me crowd as far as it goes. As far as the number goes, it's going to be 7,000 plus probably again. And then other than that, I mean a lot of these matchups are just pretty much favorite versus not favorite in terms of just disparity as far as who's going to be what I mean Houston, I mean you're walking into the Aldo to get sacrificed. I'm sorry, that's a rough matchup, but you're basically walking into a trap. It's not, or not even a trap. You actually know it's a death trap. It's what's going to happen. Comment here. We have a judge Jackson. Yeah, he's, I don't where the, I don't make the standings so they haven't updated them for today. We're alive here. I don't have it updated here with all this stuff, so we do the best we can on here. I don't on the UFL website, but yeah, I don't know. I think, yeah, I mean if you want to bet the overs here, if you want to bet the favorites. John Lewis here says, good luck in Vegas. Hope he hit the over. Yeah, I think you're pretty safe picking the chalk picks next week for all this stuff. I don't know. I mean to me the defenders is just such a disappointment this season I think compared to any of the teams. I think Arlington caught fire at the end of last year. I don't know if we expected their repeat that, but I don't know. Is the defenders, is that your biggest kind of disappointment this season? I suppose so. I was not terribly surprised that they had a rougher start because they lost so much talent last season. I know Mike Mitchell kind of did a good job of briefing us on that maybe to a fan that maybe follows it a little bit more casually. It is a bit surprising and I understand why. I mean you go nine and one and now you're starting off two and three and you're losing home games. I mean that's quite a drop off, but it is disappointing in terms of that's one of your signature markets and they're not playing that well. But other than that, anyone who is else disappointed, I mean I'm actually really disappointed in Arlington. I thought Arlington would at least have a few wins by now and it's sort of demoralizing to note that they've played so undisciplined and they've been just unable to get it done at the end of games. I'm really disappointed in them honestly and especially when they got run over by the stallions at home that first week. I expected a lot more out of kind of for me, the most disappointing team this season so far. And then just looking at the times here, yeah, we have a noon, so nine nine in the AM Pacific and noon on Saturday Pacific, 3:00 PM Eastern and then Sunday afternoon and then, yeah, no real primetime games. I wonder what they're scheduling around next week. I don't think there's anything crazy going on. Maybe I'm missing that. I know Mariners are in Houston at night, so that'll be better for me to watch that. But I odd kind of timings next week. A lot of early games. Unless there's something going on Cinco tomorrow weekend, I'm not truly sure, but I mean there's going to be events going forward. There'll be, I know obviously NBA playoffs are still in play here. Of course they had to work around the NFL draft. Yeah, it's the derby. It's the derby. That's why The derby. We got John Lewis. I like having a sigh producer here. Yes, okay, the derby. Well hey, remember last year we scheduled alongside that and got whatever it was the one good rating the US FL had all Season. Well the problem is that was NBC, so that's not going to cross over this time. That's that's one bugaboo there. But again, so that's presumably they're at least scheduling around that to not be same by same. Yeah, I believe so. Also, I just wanted to point out one comment earlier somebody was mentioning about how San Antonio is the leader of the conference. That's true. One really important matchup is going to be coming up at the very end of the regular season, week 10 San Antonio goes to St. Louis that could decide who hosts the championship game at the end of the season. So for both teams, they need to keep winning and keeping pace with one another. Now for San Antonio, you want to keep that edge, and same with St. Louis obviously, but the deciding factor may very well come down to that week 10 game for both of these teams. So look, just the message for both of them is take care of business, bow hawks, take care of business, it gets roughnecks, don't play around too much. And then San Antonio, you're going to the Michigan Panthers, or sorry, excuse me, you're going to the DC Defenders, which is a wounded team and you should probably win, but I would not be surprised if DC comes out with a little bit more fire in this game. So you're going to see maybe a bit of a rougher matchup there. So for the battle hawks, they could potentially end up after this weekend being ahead in the conference. So keep that in mind. Yeah, here Gemini says, Arlington's making us look bad for XFL teams. Champ, that only really matters on the interwebs. I mean, did not even, Adrian Martinez wasn't the Birmingham quarterback last year. I don't know anyone that actually watches it knows that Arlington winning was pretty remarkable as is. I was at the game, Andy and I were at the game. I don't really know how deep he lost that game. So the last question we had here, and I've had it pinned Jacob Ho to talk about this. Do you think there'd be a head coaching overhaul for the UFL off season? It seems like half of them are collecting paychecks or and up to it. Part of that to keep in mind is you're going to be seeing the XFL coaches go to more of A-U-S-F-L salary, right? That's why Heinz Ward dropped out this year as he didn't want to do one more year and then get reduced because XL coaches are getting paid more. And if you listen to Rick Cella, that may or may not be a good thing, but I don't know. Does Bob Stoop, I know Bob Stoops likes his time of year and all that, but does he want to coach you to reduce salary because all of the XL coaches will be taking pay cuts next year going into that, regardless of that, do you think any of these teams are performing bad enough that you think they need to get rid of anyone besides, I don't know. I mean, is Curtis Johnson on the chop block? He might be. I mean this is two straight seasons and the results have not been there for whatever version of the Houston team you want to call it the gamblers, the roughnecks with the gamble next. So they haven't really been able to perform correctly. We'll see about Bob Stoops. Maybe he sticks around. But again, as you said, the pay cut is certainly something that's significant and keep an eye on that. For San Antonio too with Wade Phillips and that staff, that might be something that's untenable for them as well. But for St. Louis, I mean Anthony back I think loves this job. I think he loves being here and I think he's going to stay at least for a little bit. Skip Holtz again. Skip Holtz could easily get hired away because I think someone could pluck him and give him a really good position or a good coaching job. But that's up to him. I mean, Mike Nolan, someone like Mike Nolan is, he's just going to hang around for a while and just kind of cruise with this kind of like how Jeff Fisher was and even Jeff Fisher eventually left. So same thing with Kevin Sumlin. It really depends. I think you're going to see a little bit of a shakeup probably, I would guess. I mean you might lose two or three head coaches, but it depends on the motivation. Like you said, the money is a big part of it. It really depends on what they're trying to get out of this league and what they're trying to get out going forward after this league. If they can use it as a billboard for them to get better opportunities. Yeah, I think the salary discrepancy is going to be more at play next season in terms of some of these coaches getting let out than anything else here as we wind up 10,004 field next Saturday, Vicente, if they get 12,000 people into Ford Field, DME, I'll mail you an authentic spring league practice squad jersey. So that is how confident I am that they're not. But yay, maybe they do. Hey, maybe Michigan, the 750,000 that was at the drop, seven, 750,000 people were to watch Roger and insane, insane numbers for the drop that they can't get 6,000 into Fords Field. You mean the whole weekend? I know the first night was okay, the first night Was I saw today attendance was 750. Yes, for the weekend. But yeah, the one night it was quarter million, right? 250,000. First night was 275,000 people and had to close off the gates an hour before because people were just trying to flow in and they were overwhelmed. It was an insane number of people to watch. Go for it. Sorry. No, it was an insane number of people to watch Caleb Williams and all those other people get picked. It's kind of insane. Maybe Ford Fields is closing in the gates. We can't handle it. It's too many people we can't handle that. Appreciate it. I'm going to get out of here. We're going to go track down some food. Appreciate Andy making time on Sunday. Appreciate all of you guys checking it out. Hopefully at least it won't be Tuesday. Maybe we get a little bit more legs out of this. I know we like having the TV ratings to talk about, but we got to talk about attendance and everything else. Like I said, hopefully Mike next week maybe we'll get Tim Capper talking to Rita Football. I'll reach out to him. I get back Wednesday night, so we'll figure all that stuff out. Appreciate it. Yeah, John, great show. Go check out John's stuff. John did a fun blog. I watched his Battle Hawk's blog. That was fun. And then I'm sure John will have some more get rid of the Michigan Panthers U USS FL, which I don't know why I am like Mr. Negative U uss FL when John's like the USFL has a Michigan Panthers problem. Like hey, I think he's the real hater. So appreciate it. Andy, anything else? No, Reed, go enjoy yourself. Seriously. Go have fun. Yeah, Well I got not that many hours. 7:00 AM tomorrow. Work's coming. So appreciate it. We'll see you guys next time. Cheers.

Is UFL Living Up to Expectations?

Hey guys, welcome to the Mark Cast. Read. Here is the UFL Living up to expectations. That is the theme we are tackling today as we approach the Midway point week five of the UFL 2024 season. Can't believe we're already there. Big show coming your way today. Happy NFL Draft week a weekend. Lots of excitement going on. Hopefully by the time you are listening or watching this, I have pre-ordered my Jaden Daniels, Washington Commanders Jersey here, pick number two. Pretty anxious today. Here Mariners are playing the Rangers. We got the drafts coming up tonight. A little anxious right now so hopefully this episode goes well. You guys enjoy it. I'm going to give you a little trigger warning here if you're one of those people. Gets a little triggered by a little criticism of the UFL. Just fair warning here. Haven't talked with Greg yet, but boy have I talked with Rick Cella this morning. I don't know if I was ready for Rick here at 8:30 AM Pacific on a Thursday shot out of a Canon. Rick Cella all around football guy, all access football. He's now a scout with the Edmonton Elks been around a lot. He was part of the IIFA for a while. So Rick certainly knows this stuff. Has been watching the UFL games, went to the UFL, Arlington Renegades DC Defenders game and said Reed, I have a lot of stuff to get off my plate and did he? So just, it's a great interview, very constructive, but boy, Rick's got some takes, so just hope you're ready. I assume Greg isn't going to be his fire. We all know Greg Parks the fiery contributor for UFO Board, but hey, maybe Greg's going to have thoughts as well. I don't preface any of this like come on and talking negative about the league, but we're sharing our thoughts. We're halfway here through the season. I can't believe it. Halfway to the St. Louis championship game, speaking of which, like and subscribe. We are, I think the YouTube cleared out some bots or something actually losing subscribers. Maybe it's just all of our fiery hot takes, but trying to get to 3,500 subscribers by the UFL championship game. We are giving away two free tickets and then you'll be able to sit with the professor Andrew Murray at the championship game. So like and subscribe. If you're already subscribed, give a thumbs up to the video, tell the algorithm and comment all your hot takes and commentary against Rick and Greg's hot takes here today. But big show, like I said, Rick Cella, Greg Parks contributor for UFL board sharing his thoughts is UFLA, meeting his expectations, exceeding his expectations for the season. And then always appreciate Darryl Davis as well coming on from Saskatchewan, one of the few Canadian provinces that is not represented in the NHL playoffs this year. Darrell talking Sean Lemon's indefinite suspension for gambling, the Chad Kelly and how does that investigation relate to the Sean Lemon investigation talking the CFL draft coming up next week and the rough riders and everything else. So I will let you guys have at it. Please enjoy the episode If you agree, if you disagree, that's good. Leave your comments, leave your feedback. I respond to everything so appreciate it. Like and subscribe. We'll see you at the end. Well here we are a busy week here. I have my commander's hat on. Hopefully as we listen to this, I guess I'm pre-ordering my Jaden Daniels jersey. We'll see how we feel about that. We can get Rick's thoughts, but we have Rick Tel here, busy football man, all access football. He's a scout with the elk up in the CFL. We wanted to have Rick on during the UFL kickoff and then obviously busy with travel and all of that. So now we get him one-on-one here. Rick, how are you doing? I'm doing great, man. The best time of the year for me. So buckle up. Well no, because Rick said, he goes, Hey, I want to talk some of this UFL stuff and I go, well isn't this, well no, I've done all this, is the work's been done, we're getting ready for all this stuff. But now we're talking, we're going into UFL week five first off, just how are you doing? And then let's get into your thoughts on the season. I'm doing great, Reid. Thank you for asking. Hopefully you're doing well. Listen, I have never been to a Canadian football league game and I'm getting ready to gear up for my first CFL training camp. We report on May the eighth, so I'll be departing for Edmonton and man, I'm looking forward to it. I feel like seeing it on TV and experiencing it, coach Chris Jones had told me, Hey, you really don't understand the waggle until you see it live in person. So really looking forward to it, man. It should be fun. Yeah, Edmonton, they need to kind bounce back this year. I think they need to sign a few more quarterbacks I think this week and all that stuff. I think we have have nine quarterbacks going, is Cardell Jones being called again for that? But anyway, we can talk a little CFL at the end, but let's get into this UFL. The theme this week is the UFL living up to its expectations. So what say you, you're a football guy. Yeah, so in terms of on the field quality of product, I think it's great. I think it's a step up from the level of competition. I think there's more continuity there. The games are exciting and they've always been exciting to me and you see a lot of games come down to the wire, which is great. The ratings are good too, right? I'd love to see the advertising dollars, which might make it sustainable. But then I had the opportunity to attend the game Arlington DC at Arlington a couple weeks back. Didn't pull out my scout card or my media card. I wanted to go and experience it as a fan. I was there with some friends and wanted to just see what it's all about. I'll tell you, and I don't want to make this out to be a hit job on the UFL. In fact, I know they listened to your show. I know they've rejected my help numerous occasions. So through the power of the Mark cast, we're going to offer them free consulting. But man, they just missed the mark on so many aspects and I'd love to dive into some of them. I don't know how much time we have, but for example, the first thing I'd noticed upon walking into the stadium is that I don't think they know who their audience is because what I noticed was most of the people are really not there for football. Most of the people want to enjoy a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, take their family out to the game, have a local tune to root for and not have to pay the NFL cost of experience. And so you've got fan bases there. There was one crew behind the end zone, okay? The Renegades, they're all dressed up robot uniforms, they're going crazy. Anything the renegades do, they're cheering man. Now, I'm not sure they know any of the rules. It came down to the end, they were completely quiet, they didn't know it hit 'em. But my point is the crowd cheers the loudest when they're throwing around a free. And so when I go there and I understand part of the problem is they negotiated bad stadium deals. So I don't know how much of this they can control, but we bought our tickets, I think the two tickets that came out to like 45 bucks in total for the both of us. Awesome, cool, we're in. Then we get there and the cheapest parking's like 50 bucks. So now the parking costs more than the seats, which to be expected I guess at a sporting event. Now you go to the game, we get a couple beers, $8 bottled waters, $12 beers. You have two, three rounds, a couple waters, you're in the hole, another a hundred bucks. So I said, man, this really is not fan friendly to a family of four that wants to go spend an afternoon and hang out and watch a good football game. And Melissa High School, I had a workout there right down the street of Stones throw away from Arlington Stadium Reid, I'd be embarrassed to tell you how cheap I can get that stadium. It's a $35 million facility. It holds 12,000 Fannie in the seats. Why don't we work on filling out that venue first because they reported 8,000. I'd be shocked, shocked if there was even half of that. Then I went to the Frisco fighters game later that night. I actually felt embarrassed for the UFL, but it's by their own doing. But you go to the Frisco fighters game, there's maybe a thousand people in the arena, but there's more ambiance, there's more atmosphere. And guess what? After the game, you go on the field, you get to shake the player's hands, you get free autographs, you get to have that intimate fan experience. There's none of that going on at the UL and I think they missed the boat. Louis Perez is somewhat of a local legend down there. You wouldn't know that he's playing in the backyard right there hanging out in Arlington. I didn't see one Texas a and m commerce shirt. How about maybe giving out some tickets to the youth teams, to the Texas a and m commerce football program? And I'll tell you another thing, I don't know if you talked about this on the air. I'm sure you're aware of the figures. I know what the numbers are for the head coaching salaries. What a joke. They don't have NFL money, but they have money to be successful. They put it in the wrong areas. The stadium contracts, terrible deals. The head coaching contracts, terrible deals. First of all, if you don't want a coach in this league for $400,000, take a hike. See you later. Because I tell you what, nobody came to the game to watch Bob Stoops stand on the sideline. That guy's collecting a retirement check. No offense coach, I'm not out here to make enemies, but this is common sense Logic 1 0 1, every head coach makes $400,000 and I just cut the head coaching budget by 75% by doing that. You do the math. So where they're allocating their resources are just terrible business decisions. And this has been a completely, I've talked to the people. This is completely A-U-S-F-L operation, right? Entirely In terms of management, what do you mean in terms of yes, the People who are calling the shots are the USFL folks, the XFL. This was not a merger, this was an acquisition, so I've got a lot more. But man, those are just simple things that they can get. I know the guy there that owns the biggest Harley Davidson right down there in, I'm not even from Texas, but you think if you gave away a free Harley Davidson or did a Pat mc, McAfee kicking halftime show entertainment, you think you might fill up some seats and have the crowd stick around at least for the first half. I mean it was an embarrassment reed. There was not even 4,000 people in that stadium. And I hope they get it together and turn it around. But I mean there's so much fixing up to do and then you go down the street to Frisco. Yeah, let's stop down a little bit here. I'm down as good. I had to get that off my chest. It's been weighing on me for two weeks, man. I want to see this league succeed. I want to see them do well. Yeah, because we want to be constructive about this as well because gotten a lot, and even on the show on Monday we get a lot of like, well you guys, you re on it, but what are the ideas? I like having tangible things. I said I would have a table out front of the Ranger stadium every second of every day there at Texas Live. Hey, do you know there were Rangers games there this week. The Mariners are in town. Like, hey, did you know there's football played here literally across the street coming up this weekend. But to me the UFL here is in a weird spot because like you said, in going into the CFL, they get that community, right? We're diving into the community, we're investing and I know we do a little bit of that, right? I think they had a homeless, the people in Arlington, the players went and help the local homeless shelters in Arlington, which was great, but I don't care about the Memphis Showboats players going to the Arlington Renegades. We need to do that in Memphis, we need to do that, but they have the money to do that. So you're kind of stuck in this area where I think they're doing a lot in trying to do a lot in Arlington, but there's those other seven markets and they don't necessarily make sense anyway. It really Doesn't cost a lot to do grassroots marketing though. To your point, I could have a couple of Arlington Renegades runners and the parking lot of the Texas Rangers stadium giving out free tickets to kids. I mean, how many people does Arlington hold? 40,000 people. And you can't even put 4,000 grassroots marketing starts with the youth. If you don't make fans grow up with this and like it from a young age, people like you and me aren't going to just discover this thing and become interested because there's no name brand value. You've got to start with the youth and they've done none of that. And I'll tell you what, good thing we weren't hungry. We were already out 250 bucks just from a couple of soda pops. I mean imagine if we wanted to eat that's not family friendly. Well, I'll also say when I was there for covering the kickoff game, we had to purchase our own food and beverage as media members, which is another Conversation in and of itself, but I don't want to say that politely, but yeah, it feels like, and we talked about this last week on the show, how do we get these media members? Because people sit there and they go like, okay, who's watching the crowds? Who's watching the crowds? I watch the crowds because that tells me if there's a level of interest in the markets. We're not trying to just attract the national market, we're trying to attract local. And ultimately the goal here, as they've said is we want to sell off these franchises in the next four or five years. Well, I don't see 7,000 in Michigan or 7,000 in Memphis doing that. So how do you get these media members not in Arlington to hop on these media calls to cover this stuff? There's no practice. I dunno how you get these people that are working at the Fox affiliated in Memphis to care about the UFL. So I pitched an idea where maybe you should kind of make me the media reporter for the league website and have me kind of going behind the scenes, bringing you the stories and the interviews and going behind the scenes kind of thing. But they don't want to spend the money there. They want to go pay head coaches through the roof. But the problem is, Reid, if you notice beat coverage has dwindled down, how many Texas Rangers beat writers are there? Probably not a lot. So no newspaper or local media outlet is going to pay a guy to go cover Arlington Renegades or the Memphis. There's just no return on investment there because it is a niche market. It's a niche fan base, but it's niche enough where you can survive. And the question I ponder, we never see anything about the advertising revenue that they generate on tv, but my big question is are they doing the league a favor by putting the games on the legacy channels? Because as soon as they go to cable, whether it's FS one or wherever else, you got to go looking for the game. I mean the audience drops significantly. So is it like are people just finding this thing on A, B, C and Fox because it's on easily accessible and yet when you have to go find, I can log onto the UFL website and see it's on FS one, but then only 200,000 people bother showing up. That's a bit concerning to me. I don't know. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. No, and I do, I think obviously, and that's been their touting point this season as we've consolidated, we're prioritizing the time slots. But to your point, yeah, I think there's half a million people that are always, I mean the Spring League mega bowl on Fox three years ago drew 450,000 viewers and that was Brian Woods and a cardboard box in his garage putting together a league. So I think that it looks better in that way, but to your point, when you move it off to the ones where we have to seek it out, it's not becoming a destination. We saw that with FX last year. I just wanted to stop down as well with the beat riders and the lack of that covering, I don't know if it was kind of going online. It was like the sports gambling podcast. They got denied credentials to go cover one of the XFL games. They're like, this guy just went on a tirade I didn't want to comment too much on, but they had difficulties and we're blessed that Mark is pretty well accepted with all this stuff, but they had challenges getting credentialed for all this and to your point, he's like, who is covering this league? We're not sending out people from San Antonio to Arlington. You need to focus on the internet shows, the podcasts, the other things at this point, because there's not that many, as you said, Texas Rangers, reporters also covering Arlington or anybody else. I agree and maybe because they're a gambling website, they got denied credentials, but at this point the league should be embracing that element too. I mean I would be broadcasting that talking about the odds, the end game odds, whatever over during the broadcast because it's another element that gauges fan and keeps you interested in the game and by refusing to acknowledge that, again, you're just cutting off a whole nother audience or demographic that if you got somebody that wants to come and cover the league, I mean listen, I'd be opening the Senior Bowl let's, everybody in UFL could probably take a page out of that playbook In terms of I know more constructive things here you'd like to see. I know you had a list of items you wanted to get through. Anything else you wanted, make sure you did your chest here. We had stopped down. Well, I mean other stuff is kind of just, I mean I think they're doing a good job with the talent and the on field product, but again, just like an operation standpoint, how do you make this sustainable? How do you make it profitable? The TV ratings, yeah, they might be able to squeeze or milk another year out of this read, but do you want to sustain or do you want to grow? Because I haven't seen anything that they've done that tells me that they want to grow funny. It's like I hear talk about expansion. How about you master what you have? I mean give me a break. There's one market St. Louis that draws fans and it's only because it's a passionate fan base that had an NFL team robbed from 'em. I had a chance to attend the St. Louis Rams game that is a passionate fan base and the battle hawks are drawing out of default not because of anything that the league did. No. Yes, and we made that point as well. The DC and St. Louis, it's no surprise that the two legacy franchises that are around since 2018 are the ones that are still carried. But you even saw it was last week, St. Louis, they were down 10,000 week over when they had their opening weekend and you always get, well, it was sunny outside and the Cardinals were playing and there was a gas station opening up down the street and Mariah Carey was playing in the county. There's all these different things and I forgot that was what I was trying to reach to before you were talking about you pitching to be the media reporter. I like that they had that Josh Lewin do it last year. I thought that was good. I thought he was too busy. I didn't think that he had his fingers in too many different things and I don't think he had enough time to do what that position could have been, but I like that that at least they had a weekly podcast. At least they had a weekly blog articles, recaps interviews with the coaches even I think it should have been that times five. Let's do something every day, but at least you had that. You want to connect with your fan base. How do you do that? You tell the stories of the players, you tell the stories of the league. Okay, and I saw one of our buddies, Juan Lazano, who's a very well-known agent, said basically the broadcasters are a joke and I agree. I mean I tune in and these guys are on there smiling and just shooting out the side of their neck like Acho, love you baby, you came on my show. Good dude. But don't sit up there in front. You even know who any of these guys are. You never saw any of 'em play. You don't know anything about them. And so why wouldn't you have a guy like Emory Hunt or myself, I've scouted and communicated and spoken to almost every single player in the league. I know them personally. I know a lot of their families. I know their agents, their trainers. I know everything about these guys. I've hung out with them too. Nobody knows 'em more than I do, but they want to go hire some big name phony, try 'em out there and show up with these game notes and just read. Somebody makes a tackle. Well let me look down and see what college he went to. So-and-so went to Washburn University. How about that guys? It's like there's no pride, there's no homework. These guys just show up and just shoot the breeze throughout the game and it's an insult to the fan base for people like you and I who are tuning in that really want to see Kavante Turpen and what this guy's going to do next and if he has a shot to go to the NFL and this kicker, that's the other thing that just is really mind blowing to me. There's teams now being investigated for tampering on the kicker baits. You have a stipulation in the contract that doesn't allow the players to talk to NFL teams in season. Give me a break. That's the best marketing you can have. Listen dude, you're telling me that teams are going to be in trouble for contacting the kicker. What a joke. The best marketing you can have is this guy talking to an NFL team and they wouldn't know innovation if it slapped him in the face. I'm sitting in the stadium wondering why they don't just change it back to the kickoff rule, which they created that the NFL changed. You would have people that would just be tuning in for that, but they got innovative slapping them in the face and don't even know it. So how do you bring the horse to water? You can't force 'em to drink it. I mean these guys, no offense, some of these guys running the show are dinosaurs. I said it, sorry guys. The times have passed you by Do you find, because we've had a lot of comments about between the Fox and the ES ESPN broadcast and I'm always like, normally I'm doing a lot, I'm on my phone. I'm not always like I get a little a DD going on the last week I was watching the Battle Hawks game and it was on ESPN and I'm on the treadmill so I'm glued in the whole time and was no, it was not Tom Luen bill who was a friend of the show. It was a gentleman that was the lead play by play that insistently talked about the over or under of the game the entire time and like, oh we we're going for two here. That's going to help with the over. It's like no, they're going for two to try to win the game, right? They're going for two to try to score points. So do you find that across the board? Is that because people like Joel Klatt and Kurt everyone, do you like the Fox crew or do you think that's across the board or is it ESPN issue? I like Joe Klatt because he does college football broadcast and he's seen some of these guys so he comes across as more authentic. The rest of 'em, there's a lot to be desired. Are you including Seattle Sports Legend and Brock Huard in that mix? Yeah, I think he's coming on the show in a couple of weeks. I like Brock. I think Brock tries some stuff. Yeah, he's not terrible, but I think Clat, you can tell respects the job. I'm not sure ho puts in as much work, but he does have a little bit more familiarity with these guys. I think the college broadcasters are better for it, but there's a lot of talented dudes out there that do know these players and it would be beneficial for the league to investigate that. Well, and we've talked before about even doing these drafts and everything and I think they go like, well who cares about the supplemental draft? Well, it's because no one knows. You got to find people that knows who these people are and then they can talk about it. If you put out their press release, it's one of those and it's like, I don't know, it's never hit. And I've seen the heights of the XFL YouTube back through 2018 to 2020 when I was a fan and nothing has seemed to get to that point ever again. And it's because of this like, well this is what it is. We're just going to put this out. We're just going to do this. We're going to do it on a Sunday. We'll send out a press release. You got to build this up if you want people to care about it. There is absolutely zero fan initiative. And if there is, I mean I challenge the UFL to provide us with a list of what their fan initiative includes because I mean if I had to go off of their actions, they hate us. I mean thank God they got the box scores fixed this year, but they hate us. They don't do anything for the fans. They do nothing to cater to the fan experience. They do nothing to enhance the whole situation. How many years have they been doing this? How many years? They knew they weren't going to fill up Arlington Stadium. You know how many first class facility, high schools and again, you probably don't even have to pay much. They might just want it for the publicity. And I'll tell you what, man, these stadiums are nice down there in Texas and Florida's got 'em too. California's got 'em too. So it can be done at a smaller scale and a much better fan experience. And I think again, if you want to grow then that's what you need to do. You need to grow the gates, you need to grow the merchandise. That was the other thing too. I had to walk probably more than half the stadium to find the memorabilia, but again, after what I paid, I just really wasn't feeling a $50. And so again, you should be given this stuff away. A T-shirt should be no more than $35 for a UFL T-shirt. I don't know, call me crazy, but if you want people to wear that and buy it and grow the game, that's what you need to do. What do you, and I don't want this to be and because believe me, we could rag for a long time on all this stuff and just Common sense, I'm not ragging Marie. This is common sense stuff that me and my entourage in the stadium throughout the course of the game solved a lot of the league issues. Just common sense. So who do you put the on this on about? Is that USFL side there of saying like, Hey Fox, we need to invest more in this. To me it's always this. We saw at the XFL last year like okay, we lost money, we cut a bunch of people Fox, okay, we're accepting the XFL coming into this kind work. Like nobody, we all seem gun shy to be able to take the plunge. When I went from working my full-time job to doing what I do now, you take a jump and you go, I'm going to lose some money here for a little bit. I'm going to build it up on the other side. And I mean you're someone that does a million different things at some point. Is that the issue? What do you think the issue is? Well, the biggest problem with a lot of these leagues, we saw it with Bill Poon, I think with the Alliance League is that football guys are just that and should probably stay on that side of the field. When you have football guys making business decisions, it's a recipe for disaster. You need somebody to come in here and look at this operation as a bottom line business and not just strictly as a TV reality show, right? This is reality TV programming at its cheapest for A, B, C and Fox. That's what this league is to them. But when you have the football guys saying, oh, well I know the guy over at Arlington, we can get a stadium there. Hey, let's put a team in New Jersey and play in giant stadium even though nobody gives a crap about this team. It's just like, and I remember having that conversation with the guys at the time. I'm like, yo, dude, why don't you maybe put 'em in the Metro Star stadium? It holds 25,000. You might have a little bit more of an ambiance. I mean they couldn't get 2000 people in the Meadowlands. What a joke. But it's like are you that tone deaf to your own product? How many years you been doing this? I don't get it. To me, I said before, it is that balance of I think they want to view themselves as NFL light and I think that they need to be more of a CFL brand. We are really investing here. I don't know. We talked and trying to get stories out players. We did get Darryl Johnson on Riot. I mean that was super appreciative. The league set that up, but some of the times, some of these team reps I email every week like, Hey, we'd love to talk to, I know we're setting up all these coach, we're doing all these, the virtual calls that three people are on. I go check this out. That's the benefit to me. I need to have someone on here for 20 minutes, 10 minutes, we can talk and kind of go through. I can't do a media scrum for a podcast and they're like, oh real, we're trying. We're busy. I'm like, I don't know what you're busy doing. Then maybe if it was explained to me, I would understand and then they're like, okay, I'm not seeing what you're seeing but where it's like, I don't know besides setting up the Zoom calls every week, I don't know. It's no time for you. I deal with Matt Baker with the BC Alliance all the time and I go, I text Matt, Hey Matt, anybody in the world you have to talk to today? I'm sitting in front of my computer all day. I can hop on at any point of the day and talk to you and he'll go, Hey, so-and-so Reed needs you for 10 minutes before you leave practice today, call in on your phone, call in on the computer. It doesn't need to be this 1995 Controlled agenda. It's a controlled agenda and they've given me crap. Again, they hate their fans because the mark cast is the best thing going for the UFL. It's the most watched podcast show. Don't say they hate their fans. No, They don't. They hate our fans. I'm a fan of the league. You wouldn't guess it by what I'm sitting here saying. It's frustrating, but I'm actually a fan of the league and they've done me a disservice by their coverage. The whole operation, the procedure, how they go about their business. It really is not a fan friendly league, but to deny you and I interviews and access that comes from Darren over there. I put out some stuff once they got their panties in a bunch over the silliest thing. I'm like, this is a good thing for the league to be talking about this, but they don't know a good thing from a bad thing. What they need to understand that any publicity is good publicity for this league and they need to stop trying to control the narrative and dictate who can talk to who and all these director of personnel guys and head coaches, they're scared to talk to you and guys on the record because of the directive. Again, that starts up top from the dinosaurs running the league, the management, I'm not going to name names. You can go see who's calling the shots. It's not just one guy. They've got people that are just too old for the position. Football has evolved. It's a young man's game. If you look what the NFL is doing, all the coaches and GMs now are under 40. It's a young man's game and they got guys that are twice the age of that calling the shots. That's the problem. Let's get some positives through here before we get out. You said you liked the football, right? We got some matchups this weekend going on. I think, what is it? DC is going into Birmingham or is it the other way around here? Birmingham with redneck. What is it? We got the doubleheader battle hawks at dc. That's how I knew there was one game I was looking forward to there. What's striking you in that way just in terms of some positivities coming out? No, the positive thing is again, the talent across the board is way up. I think the rule changes then tweaks that they do implement and have the fourth and 12. I think the NFL needs to look into that. I know the Eagles proposed a fourth and 20 similar type of rule, but how cool is that? And that means, hey, you could be down double digits with two minutes left to go the game. I was at the DC defenders at Arlington. They were down by 13 points with two and a half minutes that came back and won. That's exciting. I love that. You're never out of a game and again, I think the more uniqueness and creativeness, they should be trendsetters rather than trying to say, oh, well we want a more traditional kickoff. Like, no, he hate me. That was the most innovative thing you did was let players put their own nicknames on the back of jerseys. You should be embracing that. That is what connects you to the fan. That's what sells jerseys and merchandises not, Hey, you can buy this 23 jersey for the year 2023. We're going to print a million of 'em and sell to 'em. I'm like, but again, I just wish this could have all been avoided, but on the field product is exciting. I think the opportunities that the quarterbacks are getting right, you're seeing a lot of quarterbacks showcased and that to me, I go back to the World League, I was a really big fan of the World League back in the early nineties. Guys like JTO Sullivan and Kurt Warner and those guys may have never gotten a whiff of the NFL had it not been for the World Football League. So I think quarterbacks, when you look at what's going on with the draft, I can identify about half the teams in the NFL that would probably like to upgrade their quarterback. Well, I think it's very cool that you have a developmental system for that position because I think that's one of the biggest benefits that the UFL is doing and I would say offensive linemen, it won't get talked about, but developing offensive linemen is probably one of the biggest needs right now in the NFL. If you saw what the NFL did with their Canton program, they were just developing, Mike Tyson was up there just developing offensive linemen. It's a big crisis right now, finding good quarterbacks and finding good offensive linemen, and that's what the UFL is there for and that's why they need to get those contracts. If the NFL team wants to talk to a player in season, that should be welcomed, that should be embraced. Not like, oh no, you can't talk to our guy. He's under contract, bro. The whole reason why he signed up for your league is to get recognized by the NFL. Do you get it? So there's some good, I tune in, I watch every game. I'm glued to it. I love it. I'm a fan, but I want to see it stick around and if they don't make some of the changes that were suggesting, then it was hard to sit there and I stayed to the end, but it was hard to sit there and look around and say, yeah, this is going to last. Come on, step your game up and I'm available guys if you want to call me. No, I get that. It is a little disrupting. I remember we did the show two years ago. We were live and Dorothy went out. Well, we were doing the show walking around and she called in and I'm like, oh, there are a lot of people out there. Then this year I was looking out, I'm like, then you show up and you're like, oh, I just kind of walk in and I'm here. I get what you're saying and it's not the be all, end all the audience, but it is. You're like, I just feel like kind of a loser here. I don't know. I always feel like sometimes I care a little bit more about this, but I want to circle back real quick. I want to make sure anything else about this kickoff? Anything else that we talked, you talked the innovation, the fourth and 12th and all of that. Andy's been on our Monday recaps, pounding this fist, all these under in the yards with this kickoff. People say they like the kickoff. It's exciting, I would say, and Andy would say, well, now it's expected you're going to get a big return. So it's kind of negating that. What do you make of that? And just we want to give these offenses more of a headstart, but now it's like you said, it doesn't look like it does in the NFL is going to be. And any other thoughts on that while we have the football guy on? Yeah, I like going back to the old rule and I don't know why you wouldn't just change it To the XFL rule because I think each league said we have these eight things and we have these things and we got, and it was, well, Football is a game of adapt and adjust, right? They're trying to again, fit a square peg into a round hole. I will say I like being innovative. I like the different tweaks of the game. We should be looking for change. The thing that is really good, what they do the best is probably the challenges. The NFL could certainly learn a thing or two about the swiftness, the transparency, just the whole process of how they do the challenges and replays having inside to the audio and listen to that conversation. I think that's the way to go. I mean, I love that. Well, you even get people like Mike Florio on like, Hey, and he hates all these spring leagues. This is the most transparent in the review. And if you can sway him with some of this stuff, I think that that's a good, if you can turn some of these naysayers because people sit there and then I'm sure the comments on this video will be that say, oh, just complaining and people are sitting there we're the people that are, Mike's not watching this stuff. These people aren't watching this stuff. They're just, I'm Not complaining. I'm annoyed and irritated because I expect more. You expect more because of who's involved. You expect more because of the position they're at or who's behind it. I mean, just because Of the money that's spent, the money that's put into this, it doesn't equate, it doesn't add up. From what I see, the results can be a lot better and there was really, again, no effort again put into it seemed like they're sitting in limbo land with everybody in the dark for how many months? Players, coaches, executives, the communication, transparency. I don't think they're as stable as they want you to believe they are. And that's why you've got, when you see what I saw, you're like, damn, that's concerning. I know they're bleeding money. Well, why aren't they doing these simple things that can help costs? That's How I look. That's good. Anything else you want to make sure you get to before we wrap up here? I appreciate your time. This has been fiery. That's good. I like it. I had a lot of, Hey, if you didn't know, I had a lot of coffee this morning. That's good. We're burning the midnight oil for the NFL draft. I'm excited. But the UFL has been fun. I can't believe it's halfway done. I know, right? It's halfway done. But again, having the NFL connect to the spring League, connect to the CFL, we got a couple weekends this year. Last year was the best year of professional football in the history of the world. It went 52 consecutive weekends with pro football being played on the weekends. Man, that was unbelievable. If we can get it back to that, I'll be a happy camper. I want the league to succeed. I think they have another season in them, but again, the TV ratings are good. You still have to sell the advertising and until I see those numbers, until I see the gates and the merchandise improve and the fan experience, again, Frisco fighters, you get banged for your buck. Now when you go attend a Frisco fighters game, they're giving away food. They're giving away merchandise, they're letting you on the field. They're interactive with players. It's everything. The UFL is not. And I think they might want to maybe check out the Frisco fighters and attend one of those games. To your last point, and I agree, it gets to this, oh my God, we're halfway through the season and I always feel that way. And it's like you said, okay, we're going into next year, and I thought I will at least give Gerald Johnson credit when he was on the show saying We're doing the best we can this year and then we're going to make the push for next year, right? Because of the merger. I understand all that sentiment and everything, but I said, we're halfway through the season now. I always get with going back to these interviews and stuff like, okay, we just need to get through training camp or we just need to get through this. We just need to get through that. I don't know at what point right now we're halfway through the season, then it's going to be next year and then it's going to be okay, well, we just got to get through there. There's always a lack of urgency that I think that the spring football maybe needs, if that makes sense of like, Hey, we need to do this now. We're not going to have an opportunity to do that. Oh, they are at a crossroads right now. Whether they realize it or not, I'm not sure they do, but they are at a crossroads as we speak. I want them to see the $50 hat. I bought three or four of these Reed, this is how they came in a box with no protection. The brims are all warped and crooked. And I could have had my guy Anthony Beck send me one for free, but I spend $50 on a hat. I can't even wear it. It's an office decoration and every hat, I don't know if you could see the crookedness of the brim, but that's how they show up. $150 worth of hats. And I can't even wear the damn thing. I mean, I don't know. They hate their fans. All right, Rick, I appreciate it. We'll get you on again. This has been fun. Long time. Kind of. Did I go Too harsh read? Did I go too hard? No, I don't care. It doesn't affect me. Everybody else gets affected by this. My life is fine. It is, it is. But I think at this point, I think our subscribers know what's coming or what's not. But because we, Monday, we get all these, or I guess it was Tuesday because when all the ratings come out and the attendance and there's a lot of this and that and that, and people, I don't know. I'm here. I care. It's certainly not the $9 that YouTube pays me or whatever. We're going through it. So Rick, I appreciate it. Like I said, hopefully while this airs, I have my Jay Daniels jersey coming in the mail and hopefully the draft of the weekend is exciting for everybody. So Hey, the draft is the best time of year. It gives hope and optimism to all 32 teams. And by the way, who's your prediction? Is it Birmingham and St. Louis are looking like the contenders here are going to run through the league or I think so. I think Birmingham has got it pretty much square in hand. And then yeah, I mean Renegades and we're going to talk with Greg Parks about the renegades and they have just kind of fallen off here. And the Brams, we'll see they brought in that what Kevin Hogan or whatever. We'll see with quarterback with Dormy and all of that. And then, yeah, but out of Battle Hawks right now, Andy Murray said they were the most exciting team since the roughnecks in 2020. And speaking of quarterbacks, I think EJ Brown went down and they brought in Another EJ Perry. Yeah, Yeah, from Brown. And who did they sign? They signed a, Yeah, that just came down. Another quarterback that was intriguing. Oh, Bryce Perkins. Yeah. Yeah. Exciting. He was there hanging out with Sean McVey for McVeigh a couple of years. So Virginia dual threat. I'm looking forward To it. Well, that's the one thing I'll say is at least these coaches are trying, they might get paid too much. And that's the XFL coaches, the legacy, and people want to make sure we touch on that. The XFL coaches got this legacy contract and that's, They're going to hate me after this episode. Well, sly, Hees word isn't there and everything else, but Rick, I appreciate it. We'll see you next time. Well, here we are back busy NFL draft day here. I've married, just beat the, I'm sweating here. I'm very excited. Recorded my intro. Greg Parks here. UFL Board, first of all. Greg, how are you doing? I'm doing well, Reid. Thanks for having me on. It's good. So we're doing kind of a check-in this week. Is the UFL exceeding expectations. Now, I don't want to spoil, we have Rick Ella's interview as well that I did this morning. If the words the UFL doesn't care about their fans comes out of your mouth and you'll be doing better than Rick Cella is doing. But I want to get into your thoughts. First off. I mean, I saw everything you posted with Arlington and everything else, we'll talk teams, but from a broader sense, is the UFL exceeding your expectations? Oh yeah, that's a really broad question. I think that the on field product is about what I expected, I would say significantly higher earlier in the season than what we saw from the XFL, which we expected. We expected. And that's what all the talk was from the coaches and the players and really the fans too leading up to this season was that the combination of the USFL and XFL where you're taking the cream of the crop from those leagues, the expectation was the quality of play would be higher. And I think for the most part it has been. I think the only place that I would say it hasn't met expectations is with the attendance. And I know we're going to talk about that. I know you and the professor, I heard you, I'm sorry, the face of the UFL. I understand that's his new nickname. So I know you guys have talked extensively about it in the last few weeks, and I know I'll be giving my thoughts on it a little later on too. But the ratings have been pretty good. There are a lot of other pieces that I think have been good. And I think the important thing to remember when we talk about attendance or when we talk about all of this other stuff that goes into it, the marketing and things like that, realistically, this league kicked off a little more than two months after it was actually announced. And so I think we need to take a step back and remember that because as much as both leagues said they were going forward while they were negotiating this merger, that wasn't really happening. I mean, that everything was basically on pause in terms of the behind the scenes stuff in terms of the marketing of the league and everything like that. Teams were still making transactions and everything, but there wasn't a big ticket push anywhere to get anything out in the off season because everything was so focused on the details of this merger. So realistically, it was a little over two months. And then you have the Michigan Panthers, you could make the argument that they might be the most disappointing in terms of ticket sales, but they were also selling tickets a month before, less than a month before the kickoff. I mean, they had a very late start because of some behind the scenes issues going on there. So I think when you take those into account, I still don't think attendance is by any means good, but I think it's a little more, you can put a little bit of an asterisk on it as opposed to just throwing the attendance out and saying, it's just terrible. To me, it still feels like we're not taking advantage, and I don't know how we take advantage of these local markets and we're playing in the markets. We're not really doing anything else in the markets. I know that Houston posted, okay, we're doing teacher appreciation. I'm sure you appreciated that. And Dorothy by Mike, Hey, do I sent a screenshot? I'm like, Hey, guess what? But we're having all the teams share do charity work in Arlington, right? But we're not doing anything in any of these markets, which I understand. I just don't know how we attract fans of these markets, media members of these markets. If you live in Arlington, you can come to the practices, but otherwise you're basically shackled to, well, can I get on the Zoom call or can I get an email back from any of these reps? I just don't. If anything, I feel like that is something very easy that could be done at this point to kind of help grow that of let's incentivize the Detroit Free press to cover more of the Michigan Panthers by giving them all that, or let's get Memphis involved. I just feel like there's little singles here that we could be hitting that we're not, while we're trying to grow all this other stuff. It's a low bar to clear, but I do think they're doing better than last year in terms of that because if you're following social media, Twitter and Instagram, they had to the city a day before the home teams do, and almost every week they're doing something in the community that day before. And I think even the Battle Hawks stayed behind an extra day throughout the first pitch at the St. Louis Cardinals game. There was pictures of them at the children's hospital the day before and videos of that. So I think, but again, the downside is you can only do that five times because you're only in your home city five times unless you're going to go, there's no bye week, so you can't go in the middle of the week. So I think given the hand that they've been dealt where they are in Arlington, for the most part, I think they're doing better than last year getting out in the community and being seen. I know I just hopped on Instagram before I was on here, and it looks like the Michigan Panthers have a setup at the NFL draft in Detroit. They have a little booth there. So it's those kinds of things that give me hope, I guess, that things could get better. But I just think the Arlington hub just makes it impossible to be in the markets as much as you would like to. And I'm not sure what the battle plan is on that moving forward. I think it was a three-year deal when the XFL originally signed it with the City of Arlington, and I know it's saving them a ton of money. So you have to do that balance. Is the money being saved by having everybody there in Arlington Worth maybe not getting out in the community as much as you would like to? So, and the only people that can answer that is ownership. In terms of, I guess, and we've talked about this before, the USFL kind of adopting this model now of doing this, we talked and the whole attendance of it all, and I know we make a lot of it, but to me it speaks more to is there actual genuine interest in these communities? Are people coming out? And I want to get your thoughts as it relates to wrestling, which I kind of told you in the dms, but to me, I look at it, no one's going to want to buy any of these teams if there's only at Birmingham that's been there. This is three years now, they've been there, they've been playing every spring around the same time. 12,000 people. I mean even, okay, we don't want to talk the storm game last week. I mean 12,000 for the kickoff, their home opener. That doesn't speak to me. It's like, well, if I live in Birmingham, this is a hot product I got to get involved in. And I think it's hard for me to pinpoint any one thing. It's hard for me to say, this is the fix. It will be better if they do this. So if you asked a hundred people in these cities why they don't go to UFL games, you would probably get 25 to 50 different reasons. And so there's no one thing you can do as the league to solve that. I think the UFL needs to control what they can control, and there's always going to be competition for sports. There's always going to be, as you note, a gas station opening up down the street. There's always going to be something in the city happening that is going to take away potential fans from your game, you cannot control that. You cannot control the time slots that ESPN and A BC Fox give you for the games you cannot control, at least not yet. When the stadiums are available for you to book for the schedule, that stuff is out of your hand. So if I'm UFL ownership, and I know we're problem solving greed, we're not just complaining, we're giving solutions here on this show, but control what you can control. And a lot of that is marketing. And that's why we always come back to that when we talk about the UFL, whether it's nationally, whether it's locally in these markets, you have to have boots on the ground. You have to market as much as possible to get fans to just know that your team is playing in that city, let alone trying to convince them to come to a game. So I think that's the thing that the UFL can do. They might not be able to touch all of these other things, but that's something that is within their control that they can do. And it goes back to how much are they willing to spend, how much are they willing to spend on hiring people to put in these cities? How much are they willing to spend on a marketing budget in these cities? And I hope that after this year, that's something they reassess and they say maybe we need to reallocate some funds to local marketing to beef up that aspect of these teams so that people in these cities know about it and are interested in coming to these games. Yeah, I mean, I used to work at the Fox station here in the NBC in California. If I was, and we have full-time team reps now, I would be following over myself to try to get NBCA CCB like every week. Hey, especially where you're not asking, Hey, we got to go drive a crew out to go do this. You could do a Zoom virtual interview in the newsroom, but to have, even if you don't want to deal with the podcast and the internet shows, and I don't know if you followed all that sports gambling with them getting yelled at about not getting credentialed, but call the newspapers, call the TV stations, call this, have everyone on there every week. I mean, it takes no time at all to take a phone out at practice 10 minutes after and pop on and do a quick five, 10 minute phoner. I understand the point of these virtual, Hey, we're going to have the media call, but get these people on, get 'em calling out. You have a lot of personalities on these teams. I think you said something in one of the recent Mark cast that really intrigued me, and I think I've got a column idea rattling around in my brain whenever I get 30 seconds and could write something down. But it's how these cities were chosen in the first place and how that might be problematic in and of itself. So you go back to 2020 when Vince McMahon restarted the XFL, and I remember that there were surveys done about what cities were hungriest for football and which cities were support a league like this. And they had, I also remember a picture, I don't know where it was posted, social media or whatever, but they had cities basically applying to get noticed and request a team and they made their pitch for having a team. And when the XFL returned in 2023, it was basically, well, we own this ip, let's bring these teams back. Danny Garcia wants a team in Orlando. Let's put a team in Orlando. Jerry Cardinal wants a team in Vegas. Let's put a team in Vegas. And then you had the USFL, which as you mentioned, it was IP driven. It was 1980s driven. We bought these trademarks, we own them. We own the USFL. These are the markets that we're going to go into. And I mean not even really go into them, but just use the team name for half of them anyway. So that's kind of a backward way to select which cities are going to be successful in this league, which cities are going to support a team. And I think you're seeing that haphazard way it was done reflected in the attendance. Now the numbers aren't going to change overnight. And it's really interesting to me how much patience the league is going to have. How many 7,000 crowds are they going to draw before they start looking somewhere else? And you're not going to go to from 7,000 to 15,000 overnight. It's going to take years. How dedicated are you to the Michigan market to be able to put up with seven, 8,000 person crowds for the next two or three years until you're able to build that community or able to build that team? So I think, I hope that they have that level of patience because I think it reflects poorly on the league when you have teams moving. And I know people after one week of poor attendance, people are already kind of fantasy booking moving teams. And I'm like, what kind of message does that send as a league that you are so willing to pull up a team and move it so quickly? I remember back when the Arena Football league was still up and they were moving teams every year. And it's like that's not a professional way to conduct yourself and that doesn't give off professional vibes to the fan base at large, much less the fan base is in these cities. So I don't think the attendance is good. I wish it was higher, but I also don't think the solution is to move in year two. No, I agree with that. It's hard to me. I go back a lot of times we've talked about this has been going on for a long period of time and people that are involved now aren't necessarily haven't been following it the whole time. And even if I wasn't podcasting, I mean I was surprisingly for me, but pretty hardcore in all this league stuff back listening to Mark Perry back in the day and Alan and Brian and all that stuff. But to me, I always look at people involved now and it's Jeff Goldblum and Jurassic Park and it's like, well, you have this now, but you didn't do the, and I'm not saying the people involved right now aren't doing work, but you haven't been a part of this the whole time. You never had to learn why we are the way we are. And now we're here with these markets and you don't really understand why we've gotten here and why Well, this should be working better and this shouldn't be working better. Well, you didn't didn't do the work, so now you don't have the education that you learned in the last six years. Have Vince McMahon or whatever still been involved in all this, some of these markets, like you said, San Antonio burned and you hear all the time, well, we're not going to go back because we feel burned. Okay, well if you don't go back, then you're going to get burned again. You need to go. But I feel like that's how I look at the UFL kind of management ownership right now. It's that Jeff Goldblum yelling at the scientists that have engineered the thing. I'm like, well, you haven't done the six years of research to get to this point. You acquire the league, right Fox. You're like, well, this worked before. We want to do that. People like football. Well, there you go. Well, you didn't. There was a lot more Sam Schwartz scenes and the a lux of the world. A lot of work went into this behind the scenes to get it to a point that maybe you're not privy to. And I look at the XFL in its marketing strategy such as it was in 2023, and it seemed to be here's the rock. He's a movie star. You like, here's Danny Garcia, this businesswoman breaking boundaries. Here's football you should want to watch. And it's like it's not that easy. And you have to give more of a reason why fans should spend three hours on a Saturday or Sunday watching or why they should spend 25, 50, 70 $5 to go to a game. And the other thing that you guys brought up on the last show was as far as the USF FL teams, the ticket prices little steeper than the fans are used to. What kind of damage did Birmingham being a hub do and just kind of that overexposure of football in that market, what kind of damage did that do in the USFL? So like I said, there are myriad reasons why the attendance is the way it is. And I look at guys like Corey VE who did a fantastic job. He's one of the hardest working guys on social media. He was Orlando's ticket guy last year in the XFL, but I think he's in charge of Birmingham and Memphis this year. And it's like, that's great and God bless him. But I think you need people who know those markets. You need people who know what works in those markets and you can't stretch these guys that thin unless you just are kind of poo-pooing attendance for this year. And maybe the UFL is want, maybe they're going to take a mulligan, a self-imposed Mulligan on attendance this year and maybe in the off season we'll see a rededicated effort to pooling more resources into local marketing and getting fans in the games. Maybe it was just about getting the product on the field, getting ratings at a stabilizing place on tv. And then attendance is a worry for year two. I dunno, but I can't assume that ownership is real pleased with the attendance in most of the markets right now. One of the many reasons to have you on was because I was talking with Michael, Michael Payne, one of my friends wrestling, and we all did all the WrestleMania stuff and I was talking to him about you've really saturated these markets for Birmingham two years now. And then the other ones, like you said, you would paper wrestling events back in the day W cw, we just got to get people in the front row we're giving out tickets and a W. And he said, he goes, you should ask Greg about that. And his thoughts of how long does it take to reverse that or just your thoughts of how, because it's a very similar practice to kind of what the US FL did with wrestling. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that of self degrading the price of a ticket for that and then now wanting people to pay a double or whatever it is. And I think we're seeing the results of that right now, right? Based on what the USFL was doing, they had priced their games at a certain rate and when the merge league comes in and prices it higher than that, you're seeing fans in that market not really take to that. And so I think as I said, 25 or 50 different reasons why people aren't attending the games. I think that's probably one of them. I don't know how high that ranks, but certainly you're seeing efforts to discount tickets in Memphis and Birmingham. I know there was $10 tickets that were made public on social media. So the league is tacitly acknowledging this problem by discounting those tickets and giving the BOGO deals and everything like that. So when you do see seven, 8,000 in the stands, you have to take into account, well, how many got there? Because if a buy one get one, how many got there because of a $10 ticket? So you're not even getting the max revenue from those 7,000 people who are in the stands. So again, I don't know what the league's marker is for attendance. Maybe when you have Mike Mitchell on next week, he'll be able to give a more accurate picture of the league's thoughts on attendance. But yeah, I mean you want to get as many people there as you can, but it's going to be a process. It's not going to happen overnight. You have to understand that St. Louis and to a lesser extent dc, they're outliers. That's not the norm to draw 30,000 or even 15 to 20,000 consistently the way these two franchises have done. You guys talked about the reasons why those markets have caught fire the way they have, and I agree. I think the other thing too is those fans have an identity. CAW is the law. It's the blue and white, it's the rabid fandom. It's filling the dome. That is the identity of the Battle Hawks fans, the defenders have the beer cup, they've got the lemons, they've got all that stuff that is their identity and people want to be a part of that. And the other fan bases don't have that same identity yet. And perhaps when they get closer to that, maybe we'll see the stands fill a little bit more In terms of your thoughts of crowd stuff. And I promise we'll talk football here. His Rick was on and talking. He was at the Arlington game. I was at the kickoff, which was higher even than the one Rick went to. But low attendance from a TV viewing standpoint, I know EW is dealing with this riot and nobody's going to the thing. Does that energy translate on tv? My thing besides franchise and all this, if you're a casual fan, you're turning this on, nobody's there so affects the viewing on tv and then if you're there, I kind of feel like a loser. If I look around and there's 4,000 people. I think it affects both sides of that. How do you view the lack of attendance where it's affecting the most from a TV perspective or an in-person or where do you see it? I think it's tv, but I also understand people who are not affected by that. Yeah, no, but I think it cuts both ways. I think that there are people who just want to watch football and to use the old Rod Woodson quote, they watch football played on a highway, they don't care. They just want football. And I think that's kind of the Emory Hunt when he brought up the attendance. I mean, fans have that attitude. There are certain fans who do. To me, I think it affects, I love watching St. Louis Battle HOKs games and DC Defenders games a lot more than I like watching Michigan Panthers games and as do in part to the crowd. I think they add something to the games, add something to the viewing experience, even watching at home. And I do think you're right for the casual fan who's tuning in, they don't want to watch something that feels like a cold product and a EW can kind of get away with it because there are ways that you can shoot inside the arena that doesn't make it seem as empty. There are smaller arenas they can go to, or even if they draw a couple thousand, it looks full. You can't get away with doing that in Ford Fields. You can't get away with doing that in the Alamo Dome. There's only so much production trickery you can use to mask those empty seats. So speaking personally, it does affect me, but I also know that there are people out there who empty seats do not affect their viewing experience. I just think there's different expectations, right? You watch a baseball game on a Wednesday afternoon and you understand, okay, there's going to be not as many people, but also the people that are there are going to be invested in it. I do think, I don't know, I think we're getting better energy crowds than maybe we got with some of the papered USFL crowds where it's like, Hey, we're just here. But I think the people that are there at least care, feel like they're invested in it. Do you feel like, so football good, has the football been at a level where if you're a casual tuning in that this league is justifying its place in the landscape right now? It depends. I think there are some games that have been rough, but there are some games that have been pretty good. There are some stretches of good games that have been bad. So it really all depends on when they tune in. So we're kind of getting into the midpoint of the season, injuries are starting to hit. We're seeing quarterbacks go down. We're seeing other skilled position players go down. Luckily we're getting players like Jako Pearson and Mark Thompson back, so that's going to help the offenses. But I think the level of play is fine. I don't know what the general audience expectations are. I don't know if it's kind of NFL or bust for them. I also don't know how many people, casual fans are going to tune in when they don't really have an attachment to any of the teams. That's the thing, and that's what takes a long time. And that's why another one of the arguments against moving these teams right away is you got the Green Bay Packers who have a waiting list of season tickets that didn't happen overnight, that's established over decades and decades and decades and spring football just hasn't been able to get to that point where they've created that history with these teams. So ideally you get to do that where when a person tunes in to watch the Battle Hawks and the defenders, they know the history of that rivalry. When I watch a Kansas City Chiefs game, I know what I'm going to get. I know what a Kansas City Chiefs game looks like. I know what a Miami Dolphins game looks like just because of their history and I know having watched them, this is the kind of team they are, and you don't have that really in the UFL yet. Teams are trying to find their identity over time, and that's only going to happen when you have head coaches that are there for a while when you have players that are there for a while, and hopefully we get to that point with these teams. Well then you're also battling players. This being the spot where maybe this is the last time that players play and then they retire. They use this as a jumping off point or it doesn't take off. And coaches, I mean, then you're battling that on that side as well from NFL Teams do that too. I mean, there's turnover every year on NFL teams. It's the same for UFL. It's just instead of free agency like they have in the NFL, they're moving on, they're retiring or they're moving to the NFL. You have teams like the Battle Hawks and the renegades that are bringing 20 some players back on a 51 man roster. That's not bad. I mean, that's pretty good, I would say. And you have to take into account that this is a merger year, so there's more player movement than usual coming on and off teams. So I would expect that number to be even higher next year. Renegades. Is that your biggest disappointment of a team this year thus far? Oh, without a doubt. When I was doing my power rankings for the teams and I was kind of assigning numbers to each position group, Houston came down at the bottom. So not surprised that Houston was struggling, but I'm really shocked at Arlington. This is not a team that lacks quality players. And I think that's what's so surprising about it, and it's even doubly surprising when you have a head coach like Bob Stoops, college football Hall of Famer. If there was ever a coach that you think these players would respond to, it would be Bob Stoops. And if you ever thought that there was a team that this would not happen to, it would be a Bob Stoops coach team. So it's really hard for me to understand what I saw on Sunday. I saw players that the tackling was atrocious. It was almost like they were not trying, I don't want to put that on them, but it did not look like it looked like effort was an issue, to be quite frank. The offense not being on the same page and everything like that. I was stunned at the quality, partly because they had been in every game up to that point. They took Birmingham to halftime and they played 'em tough there. They lost on a couple other last second things, and you wonder if that mentally gets to a team. But yeah, I was surprised at what I saw on Sunday In terms of parody of talent across teams. Are you seeing that or not? I feel like that was the pitch. Hey, we're getting all this. Every team's an all-star team. To me it feels like we kind of have the battle hawks, we have the stallions up there, DC's figuring it out. There's a big drop Houston runs and obviously the renegades. What do you feel about the parody across all eight teams? I think it's okay. It's impossible to have complete parody. So for what they're doing, I think it is good. I think the XFL conference has a little bit more parody than the USFL conference where it feels like Birmingham and the team lucky enough to kind of stumble into that second playoff spot. At this point, Michigan's dealing with quarterback injuries. Memphis is dealing with quarterback injuries, Houston's dealing with quarterback injuries, but I feel like they're coming out better on the other side with Reed Sunnet who's performing better than the Jared Guano was when he was in there. So that may be actually a bright spot for Houston. And then in the XFL conference, you've got St. Louis, you've got dc, you've got San Antonio. I group them pretty closely together right now, and then you have Arlington, which is oh and four. But talent wise, when I look at their roster, I don't think they should be this far behind the other teams in that conference, which is partially why I'm just stunned at the oh and four record and the performance. So I think the XFL conference teams are grouped a little closer, and I think it's going to be a little more interesting in that conference when it comes down to it, because I think there's a lot more up in the air. As good as St. Louis has played, we've seen them last year kind of stumble at inopportune times. That's what caused 'em the playoff spot. So I'm not ready to crown them yet. I want to see a little more consistency from them over time. But Birmingham's just going to run away with the USFL cover. I don't see anyone in that conference really stepping up. Well, and then this week, I mean they're going into dc right? So that'll be an exciting game kind of. No, sorry, excuse me. I keep doing that St. Louis going into dc. I keep in my head, I keep thinking. I'm like, oh, geez, whatever. Yes, I do agree. Running away with it all. Last question here. So Renegade's biggest disappointment, who is the biggest surprise here? Maybe because for me, I thought the bras were going to be duty. They were good. And then Chase got hurt now, now we're dealing with quarterbacks switch upstairs and we're signing guys and everything. And I mean, he was around last year. He is not really the most exciting player, but he seems to be pushing the ball. Who are you pleasantly surprised by this year? I figured San Antonio would be good, so I can't say I'm real surprised by that. I don't know if there's any team that really jumps out at me as a surprise. I'll say this, I thought Birmingham was going to be good, and they were number one in my rankings of the position groups, and they're not infallible. It took 'em a last second field goal to beat the defender, but to be four and o at this stage in a league that, as you mentioned, parody is important. It is surprising. And I expect them to go five and o against Houston though. Who knows? We could have an Orlando upsetting DC situation this week. I think that would be the apt comparison for this game. So Birmingham, I expected them to look good. Maybe not this good. So maybe that would be a surprise. Other than that, I mean other than Arlington, like you said, I don't see any other real shockers this far into the season. Ask me in week eight, maybe my answer will be different. We have a little bit more of a base to go on, but through four weeks, I wouldn't say I'm really surprised by any team's performance. Well, there you go. Well, Greg, appreciate it making time, the NFL draft week and everything else. Yeah, exciting night tonight and then everything else. So hopefully anyone actually watching this, I really appreciate it right now. Well, no, there's so much fighting for attention, all that stuff, so I appreciate it. Good luck with that. Get your mock picks in. And I know Mike Mitchell's big on that too, and I don't know, whatever he submits to the big nationwide thing or whatever. But anyway, good luck with all that. I hope it works Out. Thanks, Reed. Appreciate it. Well, here we are back here. Had Dave Naor last week getting back into the CFL coverage draft coming up next week. Sean Lemon in the news with everything else going on, Darryl Davis Here're at Saskatchewan. How are you doing, sir? Great Reed, how have you been? Haven't seen you since cock. I know, I know. We're getting back into the season here. We made the jumbotron, I guess at Jordan Everly's thousandth game ceremony, so that was probably the last time you saw me. They're on the broadcast where I sent you the photo. I can't remember, but yeah, big times here. And we kicked off the CUFL season. We're halfway through, so now it's time to, it's almost June. Can you believe? What's the countdown here for the CFL season? Oh man. Rookie camps open May 4th, don't they? And I think four or five days after that training camp opens. Everything's moving earlier all the time, right? They've talked about trying to get the Great Cup game earlier. It didn't use to start till June, but now there's certain things in May, so that is a little bit of an adjustment. We still got hot NHL playoffs going on big time, so it's going to be a bit of a change getting started earlier and earlier every year in the Canadian Football League. Well, it's hard because right now wanting to talk CFL, a lot of the people I would normally talk to, the Farhan of the world and the Jason Gregors. Not that you're not, but everyone's covering NHL now. It's just kind of hard where Saskatchewan doesn't have that as much. I mean, obviously with everything else, but I figured we could get you on this week. Big news. I guess first coming out, the Sean Lemon of it all was kind of weird where, and I had kind of forgotten that he had pseudo retired two weeks ago coming out obviously probably expected something like this. What's your thoughts on this and how the league's handling It? Wow, it's really wild. You're right. Sean Lemon actually signed a year new contract extension about a month or so or two months ago, and then two weeks ago announced his retirement. Obviously knew that he was about to be discovered. It's a weird situation. 2021 is when it happened. Sean Lemon was playing with the Calgary Stampeders bet several times. It sounds like small bets on CFL games, including one parlay that had the Calgary Stampeders involved. That's a no-no. The worst sin can you can probably get involved with in any pro sports is betting on your own team, legally, illegally, anything like that, because all of a sudden the integrity of the game is at risk. So to prove that Commissioner Randy Abro suspended Sean Lemon indefinitely, it's funny how the case didn't come up until three years later. It was a 2021 incident. It didn't really start getting investigated until 2024 when they found out. And they have obvious proof, and it sounds like they've done a pretty thorough investigation, obviously a better investigation than they're conducting on Chad Kelly it seems like. But they're doing something and decided that they better suspend him indefinitely, which is weird that you would think that somebody who is betting on his own team, even if it's with his team to win betting, that would not be a lifetime ban. That's the first thing I would expect. They've done it with Pete Rose, they did with the, I know it was a long time ago, but this is when it all started. 1919 Chicago White Sox. It goes back, you cannot have anything to do with the outcome of your game other than trying your best. So if you're making money off your team, losing your team winning, that's a cardinal sin. And I'm surprised that the CFL didn't say that Sean Lemon was suspended for life, I guess at the age of 35. He's played a long time. He's played with almost every team in the Canadian Football League. I guess they figure he's done anyway, but I think they could have sent a stronger message and probably should have sent a lifetime ban as part of the announcement. Does this, I mean the obvious question, this Mars, his legacy, but in terms of you get a lot of guys that go up to the CFL and maybe we're trying to make some money or extend our career, whatever, someone like him who has played, like you said, for so many teams, multiple Gray Cup winner here, I assume not going to be included in the CFL Hall of Fame. Is that something that, because there's various levels of players in these leagues, right? And he's someone that's been very invested for a long time, did not have that be an honor. I wonder if that affects him. I got asked that yesterday, Jamie and I asked me that on our radio show in Regina on Rocco, and I'm a voter, I'm a Hall of fame voter, and I'm not supposed to get into the specifics of how we vote, but he did ask me how I would consider it, and I am free to talk about that, what Sean Lenon did as a player betting on his team. I might be inclined to still say, you know what? That didn't have anything to do with how well he played throughout his career. Is he a first ball hall of famer? No, I don't think he is, but he might be considered somewhere along the line. Would this hurt his chances? Of course, it'll hurt his chances, but does it make him for sure not eligible for the Hall of Fame? I don't think so. I think that you could still consider it, and as a voter, I would look at that and say, you know what? His career was pretty outstanding. He might be worthy of the Hall of Fame, and I don't know if I'd be able to convince other people, and that's part of the deal when you get around to it. But did the betting have anything to do with his career? Not at all. So yes, you can think about, because there are character clauses in all halls of fame. How was this person a criminal or was he he a horrible person? Should he get in? No, he's never really tarred the CFL with a bad brush until this incident. And if it's just a small bet, I'm starting to think, you know what? Maybe he still is Hall of Fame worthy and it is an interesting discussion. Rita, there's one that you bring up that justifiably so, because I've been wrestling with it a little bit, I won't have to wrestle with it for three more years when he does become eligible, but the rest of the committee will have to wrestle with that too and decide I would be more inclined to vote Sean Lemon into the Hall of Fame than I would Andrew Harris. Andrew Harris cheated according to using, he was using performance enhancing drugs. Is he a hall of Famer, sir? The way his numbers reacted? Of course they are. He is. But he's also been suspended for cheating, which made his career even better. So when you balance the two out, I think the lesser evil of the two is gambling as opposed to cheating on your lifestyle and breaking the rules that are put in place for every player. I think that's very, this is actually a really interesting debate here. I know he is signing, I think it's today, signing with Winnipeg to retire as the one day with all of that. This is very interesting. I wonder if everyone would have your openness to having Sean Lemon be able to go in, but then Andrew Harris continued to play and win and do it is different in that way too, where he came back and was able to, I don't know, resurrect, I mean a lot of the drug stuff was kind of not the drug, but the performance enhancement was a lot before we were involved in the CFL. So it was a little bit before my time, but where he was able to come back and resurrect that, does that change that at all or no? A little bit. You're right. He won a great cop afterwards, so he only tested positive one time. I know that the drug chain tests and the CFL have been kind of inconsistent over the years, but finally, if he had been only using it, maybe he was only using it that one time, and maybe he did get caught using something that he shouldn't have and got suspended for it. But in my mind, that is cheating. I'm a lot more sympathetic to gamblers. It's an addiction read and sports. I've been writing this a lot for my newspaper regenerator posts that gambling has sold. Its to, I'm sorry, sports has sold its soul to the gambling companies. They wear little logos right on their shirts. The fields are adorned, the boards on the hockey rinks are adorned with gambling websites. So you say, okay, these guys are helping to pay your salary, but don't go near them. Don't bet with them. Okay, I am finding that very hypocritical. I think Pete Rose should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. I even think that Mark McGuire and Barry Bond should be in the Hall of Fame because Major League Baseball was complicit with that. They said, we want home runs. Go ahead, use steroids, do whatever you want. It creates interest in baseball. So they did it and they made baseball interesting for a long time. That Home Run Chase was amazing, wasn't it? Sammy Sosa, we all remember that. So the leagues were complicit in that the leagues are complicit in this gambling. So they have encouraged all of Canada, north America, what 40 of the 50 states, I think allow gambling on sporting events. All of Canada now allows it. It's only like three years that they've allowed it. It's become everywhere. Every sporting event you watch, you're just inundated with these commercials over and over and over again. The odds change during the game. Here's your prop bet for this quarter of the football game. So the leagues are promoting these things. So Sean Lemon got caught, maybe got caught up in it. Maybe he never gambled before. I don't know. But he did get caught once. What he did was wrong, absolutely wrong. And it probably deserves a lifetime bat. You should never bet on your own team against or for, and that's the cardinal sin once again. But the leagues are once again complicit in all of this. What did they expect was going to happen? It's not just betters around the two countries losing their houses by gambling and running themselves into debt. Gambling is an addiction. The players are affected just the same as the rest of the population is. So I don't have, I'm, as I said, a lot more sympathetic towards somebody like Sean Lemon than I am towards Andrew Harris. And the debate about whether one or the other or both should be eligible for the Hall of Fame, it's going to be an interesting debate and I'm willing to listen to every side of the argument. Yeah, I remember, it's so funny that with just the baseball chase and all that, where I remember I was younger during all of that stuff and traveling through the airport and every single TV was on and every single, it just felt like everybody that you went across was invested in this home run chase, and it really did kind of take that over. Yeah, SNL did a skit, I guess it was earlier this season where it was like, now you can bet on your buddy losing their house. Hey, is your neighbor going to go all in? And all that stuff Saw, And we saw obviously with the Toronto Raptors player, right, getting the band and him playing Jona Porter. Yes. Jontae Porter. Yes. Yep. Did curtail off of this. I saw a lot of, and speaking of the Chad Kelly's and Naylor kind of talked about it last week as well, but well, hey, they were able to get this investigation done. What's going on with Chad Kelly? What do you think of the Chad situation, then how it relates to the CFL, I guess taking action against these various, and obviously different way different circumstances, but they're running these internal investigations. Yes, and you know what? The CFL is a very small operation as you've discovered through your years, right? It's not this big NFL conglomerate. They have limited resources and limited number of investigators. So we understand it's going to take a while. Of course it should. But Chad Kelly had troubles before. We were aware of that when he showed up in the CFL and you thought, okay, but those are the guys who say I'm always fine and hopefully most people deserve a second chance. Okay, Chad Kelly, go have your second chance. His second chance, I hate to say he's guilty already, but it looks pretty bad. And I think the CFL can, without saying that he's a guilty man of any crime, I can say that it looks like he's guilty of misbehaving within his franchise with people within his franchise. And I won't get in trouble for that because that's not a legal thing. He was doing improper things with people inside the Toronto Argonauts, so was their general manager, John Murphy, who according to all reports said, oh, you are wrong. Leave him alone. Don't stir this stuff up. He said to the female employee who Chad Kelly was supposedly allegedly harassing. Those are horrible incidents. All the CFL has talked about over the years is treat everybody with respect. It's a welcoming league. Okay, we're fair to everybody. These reports don't sound like that's what was going on in Argo land. I'm very concerned, and I was asked the other day, do you think Chad Kelly will be the Toronto Argonaut starting quarterback this year? I don't think so. I don't think they can allow him to be after what's been going on. And I asked pinball Clemens the president, the boss of the Toronto Argonauts the other day, is John Murphy still on your staff? Yes, he is. And then they didn't want to talk about it very much. And I see John Murphy tweeted the other day, he is getting ready for training camp if he behaved this way and allowed this to happen and protected his quarterback, there's no way after his second chance, because he got fired and suspended for an off field incident after a football game, he can't be in the league either. I'm not a canceled guy. You get a second chance all the time. I'm fine with that. But what they've been doing is wrong. This investigation better get going. And Randy Ambrose, sure he is, he's done something with Sean Lemon. He better do something with Chad Kelly because those stories are true, which they seem to be then they better get this going before training camp opens. Otherwise they've got a firestorm on their hands and they're being very hypocritical because they're not making the CFL offices a safe place to be. Would this be a different circumstance, and obviously Toronto is the biggest market and all these things, but we've talked before, the Argos get a little swallowed up with all the other activities going on there and visibility of it with MLSE and all of their properties. If he's the quarterback of the Saskatchewan Ruff Riders, is this a different situation? I mean, we had Cody Ferra, I wanted to show he is like, I couldn't even go to the grocery store without getting, and that was just football play, right? That wasn't like that was just, Hey, you're a terrible quarterback, Regina's like that. You've been here, Reid. You know what a small market it is. And when you were talking about all the guys who usually talking Farhan and they're all watching NFL playoffs. Yes, in Regina, we're watching NHL playoffs too, but we don't have a team involved and we don't have an NHL franchise here. So the rough riders are year round entertainment. Everything they do is constantly being scrutinized. I could write a rough writer column every week, every day I wanted in the leader post, and it would be read because people want to know what's going on with the rough riders. If this happened to one of the Saskatchewan rough riders, quarterbacks, it would be getting weekly attention or regular attention. You're right, the Toronto AAU slip under the radar quite a bit, especially now when the Maple Leaf are playing. Oh my goodness, there's nothing else going on in the entire world around Toronto. So Chad Kelly, it's good timing in that respect for the CFL, but they better be able to use that smokescreen a little bit to get to the bottom of what happened and make a ruling on it. Would it be bigger in Saskatchewan? Well, you'd be hearing a lot more about it than you are from Toronto Media because they're paying attention to other things. But because he's also the reigning champion, right? The reigning outstanding player. He won a gray cup two years ago, so he's massive name. He also has massive name recognition in the United States because of his college career. So it's going to get bigger coverage eventually. But you're right in Saskatchewan, if Chad Kelly was the Saskatchewan Rough Riders quarterback and was accused of the same thing, you wouldn't be seeing him in any grocery stores. It's just weird because coming off of the playoff game and I have the concussion and then we go into the off season, and then it just been swirling here where it wasn't really a clean exit into the off season for him and all this stuff. And I think Naylor had said last week, would you suspend him? Because it doesn't really matter right now because nothing's happening. But I mean, it's coming soon here. Like you said, rookie camps and everything. It just feels like, I don't know how you go into that season with the investigations so underway. Yes, they better get a resolution. That's a great point. They need a resolution before training camps open with their general manager and with their quarterback, because the way things have been described, there's no way that they should be involved with the Canadian Football League team right now. And if camps are about to open, they should be able to, even the Toronto organ out say at least deserve the courtesy of being told your guys won't be available. You better find replacements for them. And if they show up on May the fourth, and they're both allowed to be there, I would have a lot of, I wouldn't respect the CFL as much because it doesn't sound like nothing should be done to the people who put this assistant coach in that situation. In terms of the riders here, like you said with draft coming up, how are the riders looking going into the season? Obviously not a successful kind of last year with everything else. What are you kind of looking forward to for the team? Well, the draft coming up on Tuesday, the global draft I think is earlier on Monday or something, and you find a global player or two, and they got a pretty good punter last year. The rough riders did the global draft. So they do find some players on occasion, the riders pick third. Overall, I'm advocating for them to continue to pick Canadian receivers. If you've started a Canadian receiver, you have to have at least one or two backups. They have three pretty good receivers. When you think of Bray, millennias, Keon, Schafer Baker and Samuel Amli, those are three very solid receivers. They're Canadian receivers. And a few years ago, I think before the marque started showing up at the Canadian Football League, the rough riders had a, they called it the Canadian Air Force with Chris Gatz Laugh, Rob Bag, and Andy fan twos great, great football players, all Canadians, all receivers. And it was rare for teams to have that many Canadians. Usually you'll find one Canadian receiver, so to have three of them. And Western Dresser who's going to be in the Hall of fame was the American, and he was from North Dakota, so he was kind of an honorary Canadian anyway, so they called it the Canadian Air Force. And I think the rough riders have built themselves up enough that way to do it, to really rely on their Canadian receiving corps. And that allows them some freedom to add Americans in other places because they've really struggled along the offensive line. The fact that they got Peter Godber last year, senator from the BC Lions as a free agent, outstanding. Robert Blake's there. They've got three decent Canadian players, or Philip Blake, I said, Robert Blake, Philip Blake, and they got as a free agent for one tackle, they need another American tackle allowing them to find more Americans and maybe even playing one in the secondary, playing all American linebackers or something would really help them. And I think that they can do that. They can help their ratio. The teams, we've found over the years that the teams who have the best Canadians are usually the teams that win the Great Cups. So the rough riders have built, they've had trouble finding offensive linemen. They don't draft the offensive linemen. So why not find the players that are good at finding what seem to be receivers and then put the Americans in other places, find Canadians who can start. So that's what I see the rough riders doing, looking forward to it. When you ask how are they going to do this year, same as every CFL team, how's their quarterback? Trevor Harris, 38 years old when the season starts last year, tibial fracture five places. One of his legs was broken in right on the kneecap and didn't play. He missed the entire season. If he comes back, I think he stabilizes a team, but can he play? He's never been the most mobile quarterback, but can they protect him and can he stay healthy the entire year? They have a chance of being a respectable football team if he can play the entire season Pressure on coaching staff and everything else now coming in. Yeah, well, they're new, right? Craig Dickinson was here for how many years, four or five years, and did an okay job. But last year his strategies on field strategies were really bad. Every chance he took blew up in his face and he's gambling at the wrong time or he's kicking at the wrong time. And the players noticed that you could tell that they were losing faith in him, not that they disliked him as a man. Craig Dickinson's a wonderful guy as a coach. Well, he waffled a few things and really was bad and on field strategies. And then the players started thinking, oh, we don't have faith in him. And you could see it fritter away for the last two seasons, they ended their seasons with seven game losing streaks. So you could just see it was imploding before us as we watched. So they did have to change it. They changed. The coaching staff brought in Corey Mace, former defensive coordinator with the Toronto Argonauts, very popular throughout the league. Everybody seems to like him from our limited, well, not limited, he's been very accessible since he arrived in Regina and Saskatchewan. And you see him everywhere, and everybody seems to be buying in. When they get AJ Ette, they're running back a free agent from Toronto because he wants to play for Corey Mace. You start thinking, oh, okay, this guy has something special. And that's absolutely the truth. He has that charisma. He wants to be here in Saskatchewan. Is it the center of the CFL? No. But it might be the heart of the CFL and he understands that and he wants to be a part of it. So he's put together quite a coaching staff. A few guys who are familiar, he's brought along, guys he's worked with, including Mark Mueller, who's a former offensive coordinator, or not offensive coordinator, quarterback's coach, I guess with Calgary. He's the offensive coordinator. How will he do here? You have to remember that last year they took away his play calling duties in Calgary. So he's got to prove again that he's capable of running an offense here. And he'll be given a pretty good green light on those things because Corey Mac likes to have his coaches coach and Corey will be the front guy, I guess. But look it, I'm even calling him Corey, so I don't usually do that. I usually call them by their last names. That's the type of person he is that you just feel like you know him as soon as he shows up. And I think the people of Saskatchewan and the fans of the rough riders really look forward to his coaching style this year. Well, it should be exciting. Like I said, I think AJ going in there kind of rockstar, one of the big names of the CFR and now makes that feel sexy. And Corey Mason, all that other stuff, Darryl, I appreciate it. Like I said, getting back into the CFL coverage here, we'll have you back on. And then we will be figuring out if we can make any games, but then definitely Gray Cup in Vancouver and everything else should be fun. So I appreciate it. Anything else from you? That's it. Look, I can't wait for it too. We'll be watching the NHL playoffs, but training camp is special around here and with the new coach, there's a whole bunch of buzz around this province, even more so than usual Reed. So we're looking forward to it around here too. Yeah, I think it should be exciting. Yeah, a couple of years here and not so great. So yes, do for a bounce back. So Darryl Davis, I appreciate it. Good, good seeing you, Reed. See you soon. Huge special. Thanks again to you if you've made it this far through the episode. And then of course all of our guests today, Rick Cella taking time. I'm like, really? NFL draft week. He's like, I'm ready to come on, ready to talk. So appreciate Rick, appreciate Greg as always making time with his busy work schedule and life schedule and all that means a lot. And then Darryl Davis as well, coming out of retirement now, writing again and contributing, always enjoy getting his thoughts about the CFL and everything, rough riders and everything else. That'll do it for me today. Enjoy all the NFL draft coverage and everything else. It should be a good weekend of UFL gameplay coming up here. And then next week I think we will have Mike Mitchell on. I think we're shooting for kind of a welfare, how is the UFL, but kind of am mid-season welfare check on the UFL. And then I think Andy and I, our post game recap for UFL week five is going to be on Sunday. So I will post that on Twitter. But I think we've been doing the Monday, Tuesday, I got to work all next week, a Vegas conference down in Vegas. So I think we'll do that Sunday night once the games are done. So stay tuned. I'll posts all about that. But life subscribe, if you enjoy this, give a thumbs up, lots of work. We'll see you next time. Thanks.

UFL Week 4 Results, TV Ratings + Attendance! Winner and Losers From UFL Week 4!!

Well, happy Tuesday everybody. Excuse me. Back here again. UFL. Week four recap today analysis. We'll be talking TV, ratings, attendance, everything else. I sent Andrew Murray the link rather late here so he's logging on. That's my bad. Getting some edits done here and coming on today. This should be exciting. If you like the work that we are doing, make sure I can subscribe. Big show coming up on Friday this week. NFL Draft week, big week. I'm a Washington Commander fan here. Very exciting times but we will be having a big show on Friday. Rick Cella coming back on. I couldn't believe this week with the draft and everything else, but Rick said he is done all his visits. Everything else he said he's chomping at the bit. He has a lot of things to talk about UFL wise. We're also going to talk to Greg Parks as well with the UFL board. We want to talk through some more attendance stuff. We'll obviously cover all of that stuff today as well. Get Greg's thoughts on the season. I know he was rather disappointed with the Arlington Renegades performance here over the weekend and then Daryl Davis talking CFL emailing the UFL teams, trying to get some of that stuff going but we will at least have those three interviews if not trying to get a couple players every week is the busiest week so we do our best. I try to do all that stuff but like and subscribe if you enjoy any of that stuff. Throw me some comments here. We can chat through Andrew's logging on. I can see we are back here in the outdoor studio. We are getting ready. This is summer season here. It might be a little early. We'll see how long the weather holds, but at least for right now, weather Studio out here for the remainder of the Mark Cast season. Yes, Abdul, as long as it's not JJ McCarthy. I've been seeing a lot of rumors here lately about the JJ McCarthy and as he broke at my wife's heart for the national championship game against Michael Pennix, she would not be happy so it really wouldn't be a good household. Andy, give me a thumbs up. You're ready to rock. We have Angie Murray here at the professor standing by now Andy last week. I think I had on my LA extreme jersey this week. I have my he hate me jersey on because Andy, they hate us. They do don't they? We're going to talk about that a lot this week but man, there's been a lot going on in this realm that I have to discuss and especially with people in commentary that I've been getting this last week, but we'll focus more so on the football itself, but how are you doing Reed? We're good. Yeah, summer studio back here again. I've got my heat hit me on, I'm editing the video for a slow feeder for dogs and pets. I was like, oh shoot, I got to get on the thing. Weird weekend here. We had the three, the four games, the three time slots actually found a use. I have my Vision Pro, I actually have it here. I was editing it but I have my Vision Pro and everybody makes fun. They go, what would you ever use a vision pro for? I actually watched both UFL games Saturday. I had the Fox sports app on and then I had FUBU on and I was able to watch both games simultaneously. So stick it in your crowd there, Tim Cooks. There's the future for you, right? What was the experience like watching it on the Vision Pro? What was different about it? Well, you can have both on at the same time and you can have it on basically the size of your wall. So it's pretty cool. So I sit downstairs on the couch and I can have, we don't have, you would think for a wedding videographer professionally I would have a big huge tv. I don't, it's like a seven 20 p whatever, but I can have all that on. So watch both the games, watch all the Battle Hawks won, caught up on the Sunday game, all of that stuff. Let's get into, I guess just first of all we'll do ratings, all that stuff breaking news, but just general thoughts. How are you feeling now? We're approaching the midway point here, week five coming up this weekend. I mean in general I think the quality of football has been sufficed for most people. I think it's good. I would say from my standards it's been good. I would say that the audience reaction has been interesting, especially for the lack thereof being an audience in some of these games and cases. But I mean for me, everything's kind of really starting to flatline and we're starting to figure out who's who and what's, what teams are religion, which ones are not. I can clearly see who's probably going to be at least fighting for it at the end of the season and other ones who I think are going to have to be packing up their bags early. But there's a lot of things that are going on here and I am really curious to see what's going to happen with some of these offenses as they still continue to work out the kinks. And some of these injuries too, I mean we're starting to pile up quarterback injuries too, which that starts to speak to the depth of your roster that starts to speak to what kind of coaching do you have. I mean last year we obviously know the most famous case in the XFL with Luis Perez getting hurt and him coming on and sorry, him being traded, not getting hurt, him being traded obviously to the L Engine Renegade, which completely changing their season, but even then their offense didn't really figure it out until the playoffs. So what's going to happen with some of these teams? Do we start seeing trades? Do we start seeing maneuvering? I mean we've been seeing some interesting cuts. Obviously Taylor Sino being cut by the Arlington Renegades was certainly a shocker, at least I know he hadn't had a great season, but there's maybe there's a certain methodology to some of these teams where're saying, Hey, we're going to start cutting these players and we're just going to start moving on because it's not working for us and we're going to find somebody else. Yeah, I think, and we've talked about this before, that the not wanting to lose a lot of these coaches, I think even though it's the 10 week spring league and all that, I think they take a lot of pride in that. We've seen now, and I'm excited to talk with Greg this week, him tweeting out basically impossibly bad with renegades and just showing up and be able to carry that over year over year and I know that it's not apples to apples and teams changed and all of that, but yeah, some of these teams getting new identities. I know you tweeted out, you thought the battle hawks here now the most exciting team you've seen play since it's rough next 2020. There was a lot of stuff with that so it was good. But yeah, generally, and I'm excited to hear what Rick has to say this week as well. Obviously Rick, big NFL Scout and a huge time of year for him and just remember with the NFL draft and it's the biggest thing in the world and then a lot of these players that don't get drafted, they're going to end up in these leagues and the weirdness of we care about them for three or four years and then we don't care about them the next week if they're not drafted by your favorite team is a little odd. Let's get into, let's do a TV viewership here. I want to talk through because there's a little bit of a disparity online with what's going on. Is this the one? There we go. Okay, and I have too many tabs open. So Mike Mitchell posting the TV ratings this week breaking, coming out today, the Saturday game, St. Louis Memphis on a BC 954,000. I thought I feel like tremendously well FS one a little interesting here with the 2 43 as to be expected. FS one we've learned whether it's FX or Peacock or any of these people are not seeking out for that, but this dual cast and the weirdness of that, there was the rain delay in Birmingham, we'll get into the attendance and kind of all that stuff, but average viewership of 951,000. So you saw a lot of chatter online of like, oh well that means each game, and I've even had to have Mike clarify this in the chat. Okay, so it's for one did 401 did 500 and it is like, no, it's averaging. So that was roughly a million for the one 900,000 for the other. Averaging the 950,000 is so to me is a tremendous viewership as well. You saw a lot of comments like wow, well two of the games didn't even get No, we are, that is the average of both of those viewerships depending on where you were in the area watching that. Does that make sense? Does that sound good? I think 9 51 Saturday night for both those games averaging, especially with everything going on with the weather delay is good. Yeah, I mean that's combined viewership of 1.9 million essentially, if I'm understanding that correctly. Which yeah, that's tremendous. I guess it means that you could have had that many people perhaps watching one game, but again, you had regional discrepancies there, so you had people who were obviously tuning in for one team and not the other. I was viewing the Michigan Panthers and the San Antonio bras game, although I kind of got around it and found other ways to watch the other game. But here's the thing, what also added to this element too was that the fact that the Birmingham game got kicked to FS one, right? So that was another part of the element where originally I noticed on the schedule and the TV schedule, FS one was going to re-air that Birmingham game at 10:00 PM Eastern time and instead they ended up airing the San Antonio game because the Birmingham game actually got played on FS one and after the rain delay or the lightning delay. And so I'm not sure if that really affects the viewership either because you're talking about an average of viewership watching that game and then kicking it off to a different channel as well. So that's kind of complicates matters a little bit as well. At least for me. I mean that's what ended up happening. I'm not sure if that happened in the Birmingham region, but that happened for my region where it got kicked to FS one. But numbers wise, I'm not surprised by these. We all know that FS one when it's just FS one, like it was with Arlington Houston, nevermind the fact that neither of the teams had won a game. The FS one experiment has gone through, we've already seen it. It's not going to work as far as having significant viewership like you were telling us about the Ben Fisher article or the Ben Fisher's point about how much impact you need to have from an audience and how much viewership you need to have, and that's kind of below that threshold of how many people are really, really impacted by that. FS one has shown to be not significant at all in that regard and really thankfully this is the only game that's going to be on FS one And I know that we kind of live and die with this and obviously makes for great father for the podcasting and live streams and stuff, but there's just a base number of people that have these channels on that equate in the way that Nielsen works. And I remember back when I worked in Bakersfield and they still do and a lot of it's electronic now, but certain markets, they still send out the journals and the diaries and you fill it out and you're the Nielsen household and if you put the U watch, the UFL, that counts for X number of blocks in your region. So they've done it this way forever because it's very easy for advertisers then for TV stations to charge more for their advertising if people really knew the thing. With YouTube you can see exactly how many people watch and I think Segue and the Pat McAfee of it all into ESPN was tremendously beneficial. PAC sit there saying, I got 60,000 people at any given time watching and we get this many millions of views for all this stuff where TV's always been kind of this nebulous thing, but the point being said, these games being on these major channels is going to prop 'em up across the board just because of, like I said, the nature of X number of stations and people have tuned into these, but you're certainly not seeing a drop off, which is good to me. You factor in an unaccountable X number here to all of these and then we're kind of maintaining that across the board. So I think that that's good. Well, again, you're not splitting viewership. I mean that's the thing with last year about you're splitting viewership in the US FL and XFL, and there are people who, obviously there's people who can't tell the difference, but there's also who have more familiarity with one over the other and maybe just thought, well, okay, there's only one spring football league playing. Oh wait, there's two of them. And that didn't really help in terms of actually throwing it all together, whereas now it's just eight teams. You have all four games to really worry about week in and week out and in some cases now only three because of the regional broadcast. So it's really not that hard to keep up with and it's not something that you have to sort of extrapolate yourself over a long period of time. You don't have to go from February to July 4th weekend to have to watch all these games. So I think that's smaller sample size as well. You don't have to do as much, but I am curious to see what happens as we start to get closer to the summer. Do people start to drop off in terms of summer viewership? Do people start to travel? People start going on their own way and doing other things? I mean that's really always the biggest question that we always face every year is how deep into the summer or close to the summer do you want to get with your spring football schedule? Spring football, I mean it is actually spring football this year all the way around because it's not technically going to hit the first day of summer, but the weekend of the A FL championship game, I mean you're talking about a lot of public schools getting out a lot of kids, a lot of teachers obviously getting out of public school, so you're not going to have that. There's going to be impact there. So I'm curious as when do we start to see that impact? Yeah, a couple points. I totally agree with you and I am someone that has a very active life and likes to go out and do things, and I'll tell you that even with the NFL season, November, December, February, it's very easy. Like, Hey, weather's crappy, we're staying here, or let's go grab brunch, let's go watch the game, do all that stuff. Yeah, it's nice up. You want to go to the park, you want to go out of town for the weekend, you got kids playing sports, we got to go. There's just so much more and we've obviously the things have been shared on Twitter. I can't remember the show it was they were like, this is going to fail because it's not starting February. I think they're going to look at that next year just because obviously getting players into camps, we've talked about that. We've had the agents to talk to on the show, they prefer the timeline that way. But also what's exciting to me about this is the week four, this is generally when you start to see it kind of tail off these seasons. You kind of start and then it goes down and then it peaks week nine 10 going into the playoffs. So this feels good to me that we're week four and we're still at these numbers. Mike has his article over on, excuse me, on Sports Illustrated here. I think Mike's going to come on next week for kind of a, I think we were talking about that, a welfare check, but last year, week four, and this was not a great slate of networks that was on average 500,000 viewers on four Telecast FX and ESPN two the weekend, and it was obviously earlier because of the schedule, the USFL, that was when they had their big Kentucky Derby weekend where they popped the 2.06 million viewers, but that equated to an average of 989,000 and then this year obviously with the averaging basically over a million if you get rid of the FS one. So it just improves in obviously a year and we're not competing against each other and then we're not cannibalizing that, we're maintaining it. So if I was one of the people involved in this league right now, I would have to feel pretty stoked about everything. The one time slot that seems interesting to me is the Saturday morning one. I think that seems to be contentious for some people as far as actually a attending the game in person and B watching it on tv. That seems to have been a bit of a problem spot. It was in Memphis, even in St. Louis this past weekend, you saw an attendance go down because the Cardinals were playing a day game that Saturday morning seems to be a bit tough for people. Maybe just rolling out of bed after a long Friday night maybe tough for some people. I'd rather that be a Saturday night. Obviously Sunday, I think Sunday morning is fine because people don't want to go out Sunday night, but Sunday morning I think you can execute that a little better and Sunday midday as well. So maybe getting around on that Saturday time because Saturday to me, Saturday morning at least for me is always a chores time. I sit down and watch the UFL games, I actively do that and then do my chores afterwards during the season. But personally I would have more. That's more when I actively would try to go and do my chores. And during college football season, I mean the less significant games and the morning, they're basically in the morning time slot on Saturdays. And I think I kind of think the same way where I'm like, oh, I have time to go do other things. I'll worry about the prime time games later. I think there's the same mentality with that. I think people are just geared that way with football and that's the thing is football watchers, what are you most used to? You're used to Thursday night, you're used to your important games being later on Saturday and then Sunday you're talking about NFL all day. So that's kind of how people are wired. You have to consider that. But again, these leagues don't have that luxury of dealing with that. This weekend, the NFL draft's going to be in Michigan. That's probably why they had to put three games in the front end of the schedule. This was an absolute week. Week five was an absolute no-go because the draft's going to be there all weekend. So that's crossed off the list and when you have to start crossing names off the list or saying, well, we can't do it this weekend because of this event, or we can't do it because of that, then you start to lose options. You start to lose time slots. So I think that's still a complicating factor of the league has until they can start to kind of leverage themselves into maybe having better time slots. But again, that's all about stadium and venue availability And that's what kills me. But you talk about here at the Saturday, and we'll get into attendance here, but I mean the Saturday game did really well here on the A, B, C, we can talk attendance and that's another thing people don't understand. Just the UFL has literally zero leverage when it comes to any scheduling at all. Like you said with the draft. I remember talking when the season was announced like, man, wouldn't it be cool if they could do something at Ford Field and you got the draft they're probably using, they're doing other stuff, other things are going on. Even the CFL, they have to kneel at the whim of the other stadiums and they've been around for 111 years. If the CFL doesn't have the leverage that they need to do this, the UFL, there's all this, the brahmas, and it was Easter and then it was a fiesta this weekend. Okay, this is a disaster. They don't have any options. They got to run when things are, the dome was locked up. It was locked up last year at the beginning of the season. It had to start late, but I think they're doing the best they can, but none of that is done intentionally to kind of screw everybody up. And I remember, I think it was Sam had posted in the group chat this weekend where it's the Birmingham's playing Houston and that was the last scene they lost you two years ago. Like Sam, I promise you that they're just scheduling stuff when they camp. It's like Andy and I doing this today for this is the time that works for Andy. There's no rhyme or reason any, I guarantee you they're just trying to get through stuff right now. But all in all, I think attendance is another story. We'll flip the page here to that, but I think TV viewership is very, well, Kwan has a question. They did the regional, they did the lookin where they briefly showed both games as I feel a good distraction. I mean they do that with the NFL. Hey, let's go to Chris and Thompson with the game break. I mean, did you bother that? I don't think so because you already have to be multitasking as a viewer in this league anyways. You're having to listen to, you're watching the field play, you're watching the field, but you're hearing the audio of the coaches talking, the players talking, the officials. The officials, the Army command center dean in the command Center. Yes, you're command center, you're listening to Mike Prairie, you're listening to Dean Blandino. You're listening to a lot of voices. So I would say no because you're already multitasking as it is. So I think dual watching games, people watch four games at the same time. I mean, YouTube TV has a separate channel when there's games for a certain league that will show four games at the same time, we as viewers have just become able to digest multiple things at the same time. So no, I don't think that's a distraction at all. Maybe a few people, maybe for a generation that doesn't really isn't used to that. But for someone my age demographic, I'm used to it, it's not a problem for me. So no, I don't think it's a huge distraction personally. That's like I shared my screen recording and it was like I got in my vision pro, I got the two EFL games on, they got Twitter open, they got my message of Anthony is like, that seems like a nightmare, Hans here. Is there a sports overload going on right now? Too many options for any new league to succeed. I mean certainly in terms of too spring leagues coexisting simultaneously that we saw last year. There's a lot of programming of any kind that people are. You look at the TV and my mom is watching a new series every week. Oh, do you see this on Hulu? Do you see this on Netflix? Do you see this on Max? And you see this. All I know is there's more people watching sports right now than ever before. I think that boats, well, the NFL hotter than it's ever been ever in the history of the world. What do you think about this? I think it just comes down to can you make your product a priority? And again, I'm going to use that as an example, and people don't like this because it's a separate sport, but look at women's basketball. Nobody, most people, I'm just going to say most people on a regular did not care about the WNBA. Okay? The one person I knew in my life maybe 10 years ago was one of my former trainers who basically bet on games and he was like, Hey, the WNBA is really great to bet on because everything's super easy to bet on who's good and who isn't. But now with someone like Caitlyn Clark, I mean, look at the viewership that exploded with her, the notoriety that came around of it. And now because she's in the league and people know things like, oh, this is what her salary is. Well, that's too low if she'd be paying more. No one genuinely, most people didn't. That was not a discussion topic on sports shows even just five years ago. Now you have this as part of the zeitgeist because you've managed to find something to market to people for football, I know everybody, the consensus, it seemed like at one point that people came up with the spring leagues was, well, if we could just get a portion of the viewership from the NFL, it's like the NFL is a different product. I know it's football, but people treat it as a different product for what your product is. You have to find a way to sell yourself, yourself to other people. It's not about, oh, well it's the same sport, there's the same periphery. People will come in and watch it. No, you have to sell the concept to people. I was not a spring football viewer regularly until 2019 and I'd been watching football most of my life. And so for most people to understand is if you really want to get people involved with this, if you really want to have people, if your sport to appeal to somebody, you have to make it unique. You have to make the product unique. You have to make it worth it for them to watch. Yeah, there's a billion options. There's a billion options everywhere. I could go outside, I could go do something else, I could run chores, I could watch a game. I could do whatever. Make yourself unique. That's what I would say to that. I was trying to find the bookmark here of what some of the attendance that we get to. I was just trying to scan through that. Yeah, because the here all around hustle since it depends on sports you like along. I loved NBA before Caitlyn Clark hands here, and all I know is I miss XFL 2020 UFL seems like NFL light sometimes. I agree with that. I agree that it's adopted a little bit more of the Fox USFL presentation, which I don't like. I also don't like the ESPN commentators talking about the over or under embedding the entire time. So I think both have to be, but it certainly has that NFL light feeling in terms of the broadcast, which I don't like. I would rather you try something than me not like it, than have it be I've watched this 17 weeks, now I'm watching it again into the spring. Yeah, leisure report doesn't show scores. Why? I know some of the apps, at least they have the UFL stuff now. I know last year I was using SOFA score and they wouldn't have the USFL games or they would only have certain, so it's just hard to get all that populated in there. I mean, I'm just happy I can get all the games added to my phone calendar, but it's hard. It's hard to get in and build in. Even on the espn.com. You think they would have those listed sometimes and they don't. Any thoughts on any of that stuff, Andy? Yeah, I mean that's the thing. They have a separate tab for the UFL and instead of that being regular in terms of the scores, they don't really have that box score on top of, not the ticker, but the headline basically about the headline. And they don't really have that available for you to just click on and be able to go into. So I think that's just part of being a newer league and you're trying to get yourself integrated with other people's viewing habits. But again, I don't know if people are going to necessarily want something like this unless it's going to be unique and it's going to have its own identity, which again, the XFL kickoff was in a unique aspect to the last league and that's something that I wish they kept, but that's a discussion for another day. But that's something that I think separated it in terms of it being unique. I mean, I guess that's why people watch. I mean, again, something like the CFL Canadian football is very different. It's different in its own way, and I think it appeals in its own way and that's great. I think you have to make yourself unique. As I said, being NFL light is not really the answer in terms of the talent quality. But I think being able to appeal to certain aspects, certain different things, being able to have people gravitate towards certain people's stories or different athletes or different coaches or whatever, anything that you can do to create a narrative storyline, I think that's the most important thing. I do like the FOX broadcast. I think they're very professional. I think league like this needs to be professional, it needs to take itself seriously, but if you can have fun too, I think that's important. Maybe ESPN has a little too much fun, or at least they do things that are maybe more experimental, I will say, as far as their broadcast go and not all that works. So there needs to be some kind of leeway of consensus where you can have experimentation, but you can also take yourself seriously. And there needs to be, I want to see more consistency between FOX and ESPN. I know they're different networks, so they have different mandates, but I would like to see a little bit more flow of consistency for both of them in terms of coming together and having the same message. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it too much this whole ESPA because I think this came up. I mean it's been going on, but I think we talked about this last week and I really paid attention to that in the Battle Hawks game especially. I'm normally on my phone or whatever if I'm running and watching the game, right? I'm really just listening to everything and halftime. I'm not taking commercial breaks and going to get popcorn or whatever. And yeah, that broadcast sports betting, we talked about that on the thing. Them talking, oh, we got, they got to go for two here so they can hit the over. I'm like, no, they need to go for two so that they can try to win this game. I thought that that broadcast, I loved Tom Ville and I thought he was fine. I thought the other three people involved in that broadcast were horrendous. I thought the sideline people, both the women and man were bad. You just got an interception. How did you do that? I thought that Lee, whatever guy that was talking about the over under that was give me Joel Kla any day. Give me Kurt Brock. I think everyone now is trying to do this Brock Heward imitation, and we've talked about this. I think Brock's coming on the show, I think he said in two weeks. So I know that he's got radar on to come back on. I know his schedule is busy, but yeah, I agree and I get where people are coming from now, even if it is NFL Light, I can handle that versus this mishmash or whatever we have on ESPN pretending to try to talk about sports betting. Yeah, no, I think it's a bit distracting to be honest. And look, you can talk about betting, but you need to mention it in spurts and you also need to talk about it when it's relevant. But in terms of actually winning the game, it's not relevant. They don't care about the betting spread and you as a viewer, you can start mentioning it in certain respects. I still like the tongue in cheek mentioning of it. Back in the day when people couldn't really talk about the spread, it was always funny because when something happened or maybe catastrophically change the over under or the spread and some broadcaster, maybe Al Michaels or Brent Musburger would sort of mention something lightly of the effect of like, well, this matters to some kind of an underhanded play, which was always tongue in cheek. Now you can obviously be a little bit more open, but you don't need to put it out there for everybody because not everybody's betting on the game. Some people are just watching it just to have fun. But I think just hammering the idea of, we have to get to the over, you mentioned when the over hits, but you don't have to talk about it as the only talking ball you need to talk about. Like you said, how does the team win the game? How does it make sense in terms of them strategizing, what points they go for in terms of do they think the other team can convert? Do they think the other team can catch up to them or are they trying to catch up themselves or do they have the right plays? There's more analysis there instead of just over under, because that doesn't matter to the players, just doesn't, Can you hear the ice cream truck going around my neighborhood right now? I cannot actually. They may be concealing it really well. Did you press the mute button? No. You can tell that summer season here at the mark has, I do live in the neighborhood where we have an ice cream truck go by in the evening. So just to put that out, we have a good neighborhood. I like where I live. Okay, let's talk here real quick. I want to get to, we want to talk football here and everything else, but attendance this week. Boy, so St. Louis down, obviously over the first game that they had early game, the Cardinals were playing, it's nice outside. Mariah Carey was on TikTok. I dunno, everything in the world, there's always some reason about that. Then we had the Birmingham way down. I think they were 12,000 the week before. We had a lot of tweets. It was an impending way. There was weather, weather warnings all day and kind of all that stuff. But San Antonio, they're getting there. I think it'd be better without the Almo Dome 11, 12,000 in There isn't anything to sneeze out. That was the Highmark for Birmingham last week, if you remember. And then Houston here, a really kind of a disaster with the 7,100. No other games, anything going. I didn't have any big tweets about, okay, anything. There's a Oilers reunion party going on down the street or anything else. Andy, what do you make of this? Because we had the show last week where we had Paul Rean and talking is USFL carrying its weight, San Antonio here, or excuse me, Birmingham really kind of getting shown up here. And the US FLI was looking for, Abdul had a tweet out and Abdul if you could post it in, if you're still listening to this, the breakdown of since there's been eight home games in each conference and just XFL out drying, even if you take St. Louis out of it, head and shoulders above the US FL ones, Reed, let's be real, there's only two teams that are pulling their weight in terms of the attendance. It's the DC Defenders and it's the St. Louis BA Hawks and everybody else has work to do. And I don't care for people who want to take issue with me throwing their team under the bus for not getting enough fans in there. I don't care. I really don't. And you know what? You want to take issue with me with it? I don't care. Fine, go for it. If the entire city of Birmingham wants to come after me, they can. I don't care. You know why? Because this doesn't fit the narrative and the narrative that a lot of people try to create about why their teams don't sell out, why their teams don't have attendance. You are the Birmingham stallions. You need to be doing better. And if you don't do better, you're in trouble. This is a league-wide issue. This is a health issue. This is an issue where there needs to be more representation from all of these teams. Houston, I understand they're playing in a stadium that's being renovated right now. Playing Rice Stadium is not enviable. I get it. I also don't think the team's doing itself any favors by being possibly the worst team in the entire league. And yes, I still believe that even with Arlington being owned four, I still don't like Houston very much, but I don't get this vitriol that people have. It's like they get so defensive about their teams not having people in there and then I point it out and they suddenly get take up in arms with it at issues. It's bad for me to notice facts. And you know what that's on you and you don't want it to fit with your narrative. That's fine. Again, but I genuinely find this all concerning San Antonio. I know it's long past the days when the San Antonio commanders could get 30,000 people into their stadium, but there's got to be a way to try and reinvigorate that market. There has to be a way to do this. And I just think the league has to do more. They have to do more. They have to get better marketing, they have to do better in terms of getting localization, getting people into the markets, not just training in Arlington and transferring everybody. I know it's a cost cutting measure. Maybe they have a longer term play, but they got to start putting more work into this. They have to because there's two markets that are absolutely running circles around everybody else. And while it's great that St. Louis is doing fantastic, and while it's great that DC is doing fantastic, there has to be more attention to detail here and there has to be more done on these local markets. And I don't want any of these cities to lose any of their teams. I don't wish that upon anybody because I know what that feels like. I don't want that and I don't want teams to be lost because they don't get the attendance numbers. But there has to be more forethought into how these markets are going to be marketed to and how they're going to get more people into these games. And I know there's always a litany of excuses going on of why they can't come for one reason or another. Like I said, you make yourselves a priority if you don't, people aren't just going to magically show off. Yeah, I thought, like I said, we're bringing on Greg Parks this week. I want to get his opinion. Obviously Greg also does wrestling stuff. I want to get, because I was talking with Kraken and my Seed Dragons ticket holder, Michael friend, because we were talking about this because Paul Reeds made a really good point. You had devalued the product in these markets for the USFL markets. We were trying to get viewership, right, and we're giving away tickets in Memphis and we're giving away tickets in Michigan. We're giving away tickets in Birmingham. Now we're on, it's a little less, but we're still on this kind of XFL pricing model now and that you're asking people that got in, basically you were paying them to come in, Hey, we're giving you a beach towel, we've got big coming in with WWE E, we're doing the concert, we're doing all this other stuff. And now you're wanting them to pay money for it, and I think that's why Birmingham has faltered, right? I think you're asking, but I want to get Greg's opinion because it's very much like wrestling promotions back in the day. We're going to paper a market, we're going to give away a lot of tickets so it looks full, same idea, and how long does that damage last? What do you have to do to kind of rebuild that? I want to get Greg's thoughts on the football aspect and then obviously that as well, kind of from the business side. Abdul sent over this tweet, I appreciate it had a bookmark. And so the league attendance is actually, so overall league attendance average is 13,401. It is a miscalculation here, but the XFL average over eight games, 18,237 USFL average over eight games, 8,605. And again, you take St. Louis out of it, it's still outperforms. Again, people are allergic to fax read and I get people don't like to see those little numbers and they don't like to see their averages, but you know what? That's the reality and you got to deal with it. And this hub concept I don't think worked out as well as Fox thought it was going to work out and some team owner is not going to come swooping in and saving this franchise and suddenly getting ready to magically show up to these games. There needs to be more work done here as far as these markets, as you said, trying to just give away tickets originally and now they're trying to do the same pricing model. People are going to be miff at that. They're going, well, what really changed here? What so drastically changed that I have to start paying more money? Am I getting more deals? Am I getting more VIP packages? Where's my cut of this? And so yeah, people are going to be not as receptive to getting those tickets and it wasn't doing that much work in the first place. Quite honestly, there weren't that many people in the first place with those free giveaways or those cheap tickets. Anyways, so the hub model I think was a proof of concept that didn't really, really pan out the way that Fox wanted it to. And it shows Birmingham. I wrote an article two years ago when we went to Birmingham that I got absolutely flanked for because I said that there was no really, the infrastructure, the weather and a bunch of other elements were basically complicating the fact that they were going to have this hub and how well was it going to really work and who was it going to really attract and it didn't really attract anybody. Well, now there's only one market and it's not attracting that much more significantly. Number of people, the most people that we saw, Reed was the game we went to the opening game. That's by far the most people that have been in that stadium and it has not improved sets. It's gotten worse. And now they don't even have tarps out on the bleachers. And I'm looking at empty seats again. I feel like I'm watching USFL 2020 or 2022 and I'm watching a gamblers and a Panthers game in 2022. There's no one there. This has to be done better and there has to be more work done. And you know what? People want to plug their ears and not listen to that. Fine, but you don't do something soon. You're not going to have a league to be upset about it anymore or have me to be upset about anymore. I muted there. Sorry, I was Muted. I was hacking. I said a couple comments here and then we'll get talking to the games. I want to make sure that we talk a little football here on this. I just ran about all that stuff. There's a women's league and they pay two of their players extra 40,000 to live in the city. They play should they do that? They a couple players to market. Yeah, it's always the money. Do we have the money to do that? We don't want to make people seem, we're giving preferential treatment, right? We're already not paying the quarterbacks in these leagues like we did in the XFL. So I think that that might be part of the it get all of that stock speed tech here. What was the strategy? Get so many people to show up for the Battle Hawk game instead of the answer. Let's duplicate that. Well, the problem is this goes back to 2018 and building of the league, and it was the work put in. We've lost that obviously in Seattle. We've lost that in New York. We've lost that in la. We've lost that in Tampa. And then I'm trying to do the math. The markets, the ones that have stuck around that are the best right now are the ones that have existed since 2018 because they've had the work put into 'em. They had all lot going in. They were pounding the streets as you want to call it. I mean, I've told stories on here. I was at just a vendor expo. I was working like a corporate events expo. They had a tent there where they were given Seattle C Dragons here, here's the floor plant buy tickets come, we'll give you tour do it is having people in there and just running the ads out and trying to fit in that we're going to have two players on the steps of Congress before we go into the game here in the afternoon. It's just not enough. But it's no surprise that the markets that had the work put in back in 2018 have basically just kind of retained that, right? DC hasn't been as hot this year as it was last year. Thus far the team hasn't been as good, but we will see with St. Louis, I think you're starting to see a little bit of diminishing returns with that. Where they came out, shot out the cannon, what was that the first week there? Week two. And now we've seen that they didn't have the upper fill the deck and they didn't have all that stuff going on. So you're seeing that, but that is why the only markets that are the ones that are being more successful than the others are the ones that have had the time put in that long. Andy, anything. I think it's just the messaging, like you said, the messaging behind those new teams. It was new and exciting and they were able to get those teams right out of the gate because it was a new idea. And now there's two different ideas here too. I mean, again, St. Louis is coming from a market where they lost their team and they wanted to prove it that they could support them. Again, DC as I mentioned previously, at that time, tan Snyder was there and he is no longer there anymore. Obviously they have new ownership, so people might be going back to commander's games, but you had maybe a little bit of disillusion movement with football in the DC area, but also I think Audi Field has a great location and I think you were able to appeal to a great hater base to a great fan base. Excuse me, that it's a hot Jersey. Sorry, that's Not You really love that Jersey. You were just flexing. Well, someone I put it up, but hey, I interviewed Paul McCallum of the Las Vegas salad with the jersey on, so that was cool. Yeah, that's great. No, another feather in your cap, but I just, again, I think some of the marketing strategies as far as where they decided to put these markets, I mean these USS FL markets, again, I mean putting somebody just an NFL city I think has not proved for either league for XFL and USS FL. I don't think just putting a team in an NFL city has really beared out the way that they wanted to. I think that's part of it. And then secondly, I think there's a difference between having brand identity and brand reliance. And I think what's happened with us develop is they're just relying on the brands that were there before. But again, you have generational gaps of people who are actually familiar with those brands. And so that's why with Birmingham though, it's just kind of disappointing because you would think with the success and obviously the fact that it's not in an NFL territory, there's no NFL team in Alabama. You would be able to work with that and that's just not been the case. So there's obviously a disconnect between how they're marketing or how they're proposing the team to the city itself or to the people in the surrounding area. So I think, like you said, a lot of, I mean, it cannot be understated how much work Vince McMahon and Oliver Luck and all of them did with XFL 2020 because they really wanted to make it happen. They really did. They really wanted it to be a real league, and it was a real league for five games for five weeks and then it was gone, but they really put in a significant amount of work. But there were struggling markets there too. I mean, LA wasn't getting a lot of people. New York wasn't getting a ton of people. I know the energy was great. I know Mike Mitchell loves the energy that was at those games, but they were getting a ton of people. Tampa wasn't getting a lot of people. I mean, there were markets that weren't really pulling their weight. It was St. Louis, it was Seattle and it was dc. Those were the markets that were really pulling their weight, but there were other markets that were still struggling. So this has been a thing. It's just a matter of how do you get out in front of it and you're able to kind of pitch these different ones and it doesn't seem to be a make all solution where again, like I said, San Antonio a f was great, but now San Antonio with the bras has not been as proficient and maybe because were burned, they were burned by the fact that they lost their team already in the same space. I mean, it's different now that they lost a team before in the same space as opposed to losing an NFL team and they're trying to prove something. So I mean, there's so many different factors. A couple things here. I'm going to do a triple barrage here. This could get a little ranty here for just a second and then we'll talk all this other stuff. Leon here, this podcast is best. I've tried to listening to the UFL podcast several times, DOL show going, I, let me just say this. I have a much respect for Zach and Stefan. I saw them at the kickoff game. At least neither of us have resorted to posting a full games to our YouTube channels as a way to get views. So I appreciate any content creator going out of their way traveling to Arlington and then kind of doing that work. But yeah, wild times right now, Andy, maybe we don't even need to do this. We can just go, I'm just going to go clip the game and post it, and then that's my contribution. I don't understand that. Now I'm going to get a little argumentative here for just a second, and then Leon or Abdul has a question for you. Mike says, Andy, the league is doing really well with ratings. We need to brewery this attendance issue because it's really not an issue. Ratings are everything. Mike, this is because I respect you because Mike comments a lot. Mike's a big time, big supporter, A lot of comments, Mike. The reason why we continue to bring this up is a, even if you don't care that the stands aren't full for tv, which you always get that, right, who cares? And even at Emory Hunt on like, why are you watching The Sands? Even if you don't care, even if you're happy with all that, the long-term goal of these leagues is to sell these teams to investors. And nobody is going to invest in the 7,000 drawing Houston Roughnecks or whatever it was, the 7,600 drawing Birmingham Saudis this week. That is why we bring it up and because that to me also speaks to interest in the market itself, right? Yes, we want the TV viewership and that's great, but ideally, we were trying to grow these brands, seeing shrinking numbers every week in attendance and certain markets not carrying their weight that's going to do that. And then the last thing here, run it back. Nobody's plugging their ears. We've just seen you guys get more and more vain on Twitter, even though they're finally getting traction. You guys are the face of the league, and this negativity is pushing people away. I had that. There was a big, and if you guys aren't in the tech sphere space, which is totally fine, there was a big product that came out last week and it was this pin and you talk to it and it had a holographic screen and you could do all this kind of stuff. And this Marquez, M-K-B-H-D did this big review about it, and it was the worst product he's ever reviewed, and they totally tanked the company. And people are like, oh, Marquez, why are you so negative on this? Why do you hate? Are you trying to this? It's like, no, his job is, he's a product reviewer and his job is to keep his audience informed of all that. Andy and I do not work for the league. Andy and I enjoy watching the product, and we want to be able to watch the product as long as we can, and we want everybody else to be able to watch the product as long as we can. And so when we see things like this, so they're going wrong, that are easy fixes, some more difficult fixes, but a lot of unforced errors that we've seen a lot going into this. That's my job for the 10 people, whatever that are watching this money Marquez's audience is about a billion times bigger. But that's what we are. We're a sports business commentating football analyst show. That's what we do. So Andy, any and all of that, there was a lot going on there. Well, first of all, thank you for calling me a face of the league. That's high honor. I appreciate the promotion. I didn't get that email, so I appreciate being told right then and now. Look, my job is to be objective and I'm going to be objectively honest about what I see. And if I don't see things that I like, I'm going to call it out. And you want to portray it as negativity, fine. You know what? Yeah, maybe I do skew a little bit negative on some things, but you know what the reason is Because I want things to get better and I want things to be done better. And I want things to be done in the rights of, I want things to be healthier in the sleek, and I want the players to get better treatment. I want them to get paid more. I want the coaches to get notoriety, and I want them to be treated well. I want fans to be able to come out and to be able to join this product. There's a lot of things I want to happen, but they're not happening. And there's a reason why, and I want to point that out. I don't want people to just construe negativity away from the fact that I'm trying to create objectivity in my observations. I am not just inherently some negative person that hates everything. I think if anything, it's people that are hating on me. Because I see it as it is and I say something and they don't like it. That's just my opinion. And you know what? You disagree my opinion. That's fine. You think everything's sunshines and rainbows and everything's great, that's awesome. I don't think so because things can be better and I've seen things be better, so I'm not going to say that things are all great and gravy right now because they're not okay. So I don't agree with people who just say that because of this of my opinions that they're just going to be outwardly negative and they're completely ripping away the fabric of the seams of the spring football leagues. I don't even think people in the league really care about what I have to say. And you know what? That's fine. That's on them. I don't care if they care about what I say, but I'm going to keep saying what I want and I'm going to keep putting it out there because I want to see things get better when they do get to get better. I will appreciate it and I'll compliment it and I will make a note of it when it happens. Yeah, I mean this is what this podcast says. It makes me so happy when I see comments and then I'm laughing at it. I get to comment here for Andy. Oh wait, no, I don't want Scott right now. I want says does have to go by face of the UFL now instead of the professor For the record, That is what we are going to do. We got Andy, the face of the UFL at least today on here. We're going to have his lower third on all that stuff. Lemme see here. I had a couple other questions and then we'll get, I want to talk Renegade's fall off here before we get off the thing. Gregory, this is a little like humble. It's a little like sour grapes. Hats off to St. Louis. It's nice to have a dome stadium. Football in the south in the springtime is problematic also. Hats off to the 7,000 people to brave. Yeah, the Birmingham war of the April, 2024 when we had to fight all that stuff. And then where was the other thing? Oh Andy, you were the a f person. Did they do, what was the local marketing like for the a f? What was that? We had a good question for Abdul. There was a little bit of it. I mean it did seem to be a little bit hasty because I don't think there was as much forethought because remember the a f was trying to push out their games quicker to get ahead of the XFL. So I think the timeline was much shorter. Obviously the announcement was the year before in April and they had to really start pushing things a little quicker. I do remember, I mean I applied for a job in a F actually I applied as a communications assistant. I ended up getting it and I had a bit of correspondence with somebody who was emailing back and forth in the league and they said something to the effect of like, yeah, we're just trying to get everything together right now. And it was pretty close to the season starting, so I didn't know if they really had all their ducks in a row to be honest. And obviously they didn't in the end of it. But I do remember some players, as I mentioned last week, that they were doing some promotions, some local promotions with some of the athletic fitness clubs that we had around here. There were promotions for tickets to go to the games. So there was a little bit of it, but it wasn't clearly, there was not merely as much forethought. And that's the thing with the USFL and the XFL now where at least there's a foundation that's already in place for the most part with the teams that we have and the markets that have already been played in. But there was still a hesitancy as far as how to them and there was more, I know obviously the merger was a big part of it, but there's just still this kind of slower approach to it as opposed to the af, which had no time, really had no time. They had a self-imposed deadline and the XFL, which gave themselves that runway and did a lot with it. So I think that's why it's maybe for me a little bit frustrating because there was that time and I feel like it may not have been capitalized on as well as it should have. That's just my opinion. A couple of rapid fire here. We'll give, man, we got a lot of comments here. This is good. Oh, prolific one. So why is the highlight show on ESPN? Because they don't have the bandwidth on the main station to put that on there. They have some of the podcast outside on a beautiful day. I am blessed. I have a nice little backyard here. We have a deck that cost of fortune was rotting when we bought the house. Had to rebuild the whole thing. So the only benefit I get of is I get to do that. David here says the show is highlight highlights of my week of the Andy Re dream chain. Wait, what does that say about me? And he says, we criticize because we like football. Excuse me, spring football is the king of self-inflicted wounds. And then Gregory here wants to know where did Gregory Greg's comment go? He wants to have a positive. Yeah, do us all a favor. Give us some of the fixes. Give us something constructive. Find two people in every home market. Pay them $20 an hour and go outside of every major sporting event with a big ass sign and hand out flyers and say there's a Texas Rangers game. There's a series of them tonight across the street from where the renegades play. I would have a big table, I would have a big sign, I would have people giving out tickets, I would have people signing people up. You need to have people in the markets besides just the game day. Seattle here. Not that we have a market anymore or here, but I would've been outside the Sounders games all this week last week, next week. Hey, did you know the Sea Dragons play here? Did you know they're also here? Did you know? You know, I would go to go walkthrough pipeline market and you need to have people in the market because the problem is, and it was interesting because Russ brand and when I interviewed him back when they announced the Arlington hub, he said, because I said, how are you differentiating flying into the markets from what the USFL is doing? How can you more benefit from that? And Russ Brandon said, because we are going to be the first people into these markets and we're going to the last people out that's direct quote. You go look back at the channel where we interviewed. I got to interview Danny and Dwayne and then Russ. It was very excited and they haven't been come in to our, and I understand that and I understand travel logistics, but until they get, besides the fact of having dedicated people in these markets, selling tickets and really just pounding the ham, pounding the streets, knocking on doors, shaking babies, not shaking babies, shaking hands, kissing babies that, but you need to have it. I would be outside of Texas Ranger Stadium 24 7 telling everybody in the world that came there, Hey, did you know that there's spring football playing across the street here? Visibility is everything. I want to echo, sorry, echo something that Paul Reese said last week on your show, which was why not have more exclusive perks for the season ticket holders? Why not have more events Being able to do wine and dine events or maybe promotions for other sports or maybe local sports and saying, well, we'll be part of this and that's something that I think would be really good for the season. Ticket holders sweeten the pot a little bit for them. I think that's would be, that would be really good for them. I think that would be a good start for everything else. I mean tabling, as you mentioned, putting a table out and being able to advertise your product is another thing. Billboards, I mean if you can't afford, if you're willing to put in the money for that, a billboard I think is at least something. It may not be everything, but it's something. I see billboards for our rugby team here that plays the San Diego Legion and I think that's part of it. Anything to just be a presence, be out there, be in the community, do something. If there's an event where maybe there's a networking event, if there's a sports network working event for people who want to work in the sports industry, find that go table there. Go find people that want to work for you and spread the word that way, at least be in the same realm of interest. That's another one. There's a lot of ways you could go about it and I think it's just a matter of just being able to put people physically in there that I think really helps a lot. I do a lot of tabling events for a friend of mine who's an artist, but we travel around and we do a lot of things in the state of California and people are starting to get to know him and know what his brand identity is and his artwork and what he does and people who recognize him the next time he comes around. Maybe fellow artists or people who come back and buy the same thing from him because it's like, Hey, this guy's always around. I think availability is the best ability and I also think visibility also goes an extremely long way in trying to do this. But again, the league, I know the league is kind of keeping their wallets tight and they're just not willing to invest in that and I think that is affecting these numbers and it's affecting people's genuine interest in these teams. Yeah. Alex here says Carlos had a battle Hawks Day. A agent mc threw the first pitch together. Free ball hawks. Yeah, I mean I remember that XFL because I remember I was a fan back in 2018 and 2020. I listened to Mark Perry and Alan and was Alan and Brian. I mean I listened to Chalk talk. I mean I was just listening to all this stuff. I remember writing mark reviews on the Apple podcast. I hate the defenders go sea Dragons or there was the dragons at the point, but the dragons having all the presidents I thought was, you don't need to have a president. But having, and I know we kind of get that now with Corey and Brett and we have some of the ticket people that are on. Leah does it a little bit for the battle hawks, right? I do. She does the social, but I do like, Hey, we're here at the game. I'm here and here's the arch and we're here at the game. I thought Ryan Gus, it was like every Monday we'd come on and he would do a Twitter live for 20 minutes. We would answer questions and this is what we're doing and we're really excited for this and we're going to be at this bar going out this week. If you want to come get a flyer, we're going to do that. And he would do it every week and just feeling like you had people in these communities that were like, Hey, he's going to get off here and he's going and shaking hands and trying to get sponsorship deals or doing all this stuff. I just think having that consistently across the board as opposed to why doesn't Jay do that for the bras stuff? And I don't think that's a Jay decision, but why is Leah the only one that gets to do that for the battle hawks? Is it because Leah is a good looking woman? I don't know. Jay could go do it. You could have whoever does the social ham never did that for the Sea Dragons. I don't understand why there's, excuse me, there's just not consistency across the board. Even if you don't want to pay the president, have all the social people come on and do that, then they can put on makeup and do all that stuff. I mean, Ryan wasn't the most whatever in the world, but I don't get that. I don't know if I've ever brought that up. Why is Leah the only one that gets to do that when there's eight teams and there's eight social media people I think because a market that works and they realize that there's impact, but again, the market's not just going to magically show up and it's going to be there in the first place. You have to be able to build up to it. So yeah, you're going to have to do things like that. You really are, and you're going to have to get attention one way or another from people who just aren't in the know. And that's fine because there aren't people that are necessarily actively looking for those kinds of things. You have to really put yourself out there and you have to be able to make that visible to other people. I agree with you. Maybe social media people would be a way of putting that out there if they're not going to have a team president or somebody who's actively trying to do the promotion themselves. I think that there's a benefit to that and Corey does a tremendous job of, and he's posting Brad, but when you're posting from the league accounts and doing that, I said they should all do that. Then every week. I think the battle hawks do an awesome job of that. Be Leah's in San Antonio or Leah's back in St. Louis like, Hey, this is what's going on. And you feel like, oh, you don't know that. It's Leah the media person. Oh hey, they got a reporter out here coming up. It's such an easy thing to do. You're already paying the eight people for these things. I don't understand that. Like I said, we're do a quick preview of each game next week or this weekend and then we can talk through because I got a big series against the Rangers here starting in a few minutes. Andy, like and subscribe. Just remember we're giving away tickets to the championship game. We're like 50 away and I think we poo-pooed some people last week when the episodes, we lost a couple, but we're like 50 away and subscribe. Get us a three or 500 subscribers. Get to sit with Murray at the championship game. We'll get it. My street will get three tickets of talking about this giveaway. So it would be my honor to be able to get this going. Here we go. So this coming weekend here Saturday, we have the Brahmas going up against the Renegades bras, no beating, really taking care of Michigan there in that regard. Arlington's still winless here. What do you make of this? Because Arlington is almost out of everything now. I mean the one you really have circled here is the battle hawks at the defenders. Well go game by, but going game by game, if we're really going by game, by game, I look, I know it seems presumptive, but I just don't see the renegades really coming back from this and I don't know if it's an issue of player allotment in terms of what everyone needs to do, but this team seems lost. That was such a flat performance they had in Houston. I cannot believe they only put up nine points after their offense, had done a lot of work the last two weeks and really had played well enough for them to win in week two and week three. They just came out. So flat drops everywhere, inconsistencies with penalties. I mean they just so looked so lost and that really was the most shocking part of that entire performance going down 17 three. It seemed like they didn't even want to be there. The bras, it's really interesting. I think with Dormy being in the lineup now, they're pushing the ball down field more than they did with Garbers. They're really starting to get that aerial attack going. Downfield seeing if Dormy can do it week to week is always interesting. Last year he had a couple of exceptional games and a couple of other inconsistent performances. So is he able to consistently perform week to week? We'll have to see, but I mean I would think the problems would be favored, but I'm hearing things from Mike for example. He seems to perhaps it seems like Arlington or at least maybe that they come out and they are able to be more enraged and play with more passion and they play harder at home. But again, what's this attendance going to be like? I mean I know we keep Harvey on it, but how's it going to be with these people in this game? It was pretty down significantly last time. I don't know how disillusioned this market's going to be with this. So you won't really have much of a home field advantage in terms of the crowd noise. I have to pick the Brahmas just because I think they're the better team overall. I can't really take Arlington right now. If they finally play with more passion than they did last week, great. But I mean it's really dire straits for the XFL champions. I mean they're looking at their season going up in smokier really fast. I already think it has, but this would really just be the nail of the coffin. You can call it unfair kind of expectations, but I mean they did win the championship game, but if you watch, they've tried to bill stallion's championship run was very different than the Arlington Renegade Championship run. But I think the sentiment, at least with Anthony Miller in the chat is Bob Stoops and coaching and kind of issues there. I'll be curious what Greg thinks about it kind of this week and breaking everything else talking. Yeah, it certainly seems that you would want to come out and at least play for kind of pride at this point and certainly not doing that stallions here. Going into the roughnecks, I would take the best stallions by a million points. Am I wrong here? I mean I can't really fall to it against anyone's own. It would be absolutely flabbergasting if they lost in Houston. Really the biggest thing for them, the only thing that gets in their way is who starts at quarterback? Look, I'm sorry, but he is just too inconsistent in the red zone. I know the fumble, the handoff wasn't necessarily his fault last week, but this team just cannot seem to punch it in the red zone consistently. I got to think that Adrian Martinez is going to take over the reins here soon. I know they're that skip hold is trying to get taped for everybody, but they've got to start thinking more seriously about who should be under center that's going to actually lead them to a championship and they need to start installing their full-time starters soon. So that's the only composite for concern. But otherwise, yeah, I mean their talent so significantly outweighs the roughnecks and I just don't really think Houston has much of an arsenal to deal with here if they're going to really think they're going to put up a fight against the stallions. I mean it's more of the stallions are going to shoot themselves in the foot if there's really going to be a game of it, but the stallions team should absolutely run away with this game. Yeah. Philip here, that was so wrong. Philip's keeping up. Oh, that's fine. You keep it up there. I dunno. The stallions look really, really good at this point. I know they were close. Was it two weeks ago? Close to kind of losing that one. But here. St. Louis, you said Game of the week or St. Louis going into dc So this is part of, so I guess the top two games are the simulcast and then we have the two games on Sunday. So you'd be region locked here for the Brahmas, but I like that the one late game on Saturday, so we were talking about the beginning of the show, that feels better than me to get some stuff done and then we get the seven o'clock St. Louis here early game 9:00 AM Pacific on Sunday. No one thinks about that. No one thinks about the West coasters, but St. Louis going into dc What do you make? Is that Yeah, big game. Everything tells me that I should be picking the battle hawks because they have the offensive arsenal here. I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to pick DC because here's the thing, DC is undefeated at home. The battle hawks have never beat the DC Defenders. Oh and three all time. And this rivalry, I guess you could call it between these two franchises because of their fan bases and because of how successful they've both been in the XFLI am not really going to go against history here. I do believe that DC is going to find a way to win this game. Oddly enough, they were very close to beating Birmingham last week and I don't think their offense was all there. I just wish they could find a way to run the ball more consistently. But I just got the strange feeling that they're going to figure out again and they're going to get themselves back to being above 500. And St. Louis is going to be wondering why in the world they watch out to Audi Field with a loss again, because on paper I think they have everything they need, especially on offense. But there's just something about playing in that stadium that I think just is so offputting and I don't know if they're going to pull it out here. So I'm actually going to go with DC in this game. It's crazy. You think about this DC and defeated industry, right? That goes back to when they had Tyree Jackson who gets court back in there back in 2020. Ty Carne Jones. Yeah, Yeah. Running the ball against it. That was the roughnecks be ground and pound. I think it was DC versus I can't remember that, but the ground and pound game for all that stuff. Are you talking about when they ran Tyree Jackson out of the shotgun and just ran the ball the entire game? Yeah, no, that was against the Battle Hawks and that was Jordan Temu who was on the Battle Hawks at that time. And that was the last game that they both played before the league shut down. So no, that was such a tremendous game because DC had come off two road losses and it was looking like they were kind of lost offensively. And then they kind of had a bit of a shocking win over the St. Louis Battle hawks who were really hot at that time. And I kind of almost want to feel like history's going to repeat itself here. Last game here, the SFL classic. We got the Panthers going into Memphis. Excuse me, bras really took care of Michigan last week here. What do you make of this? Do they bounce back? I know we have QB injuries and everything else there with Michigan. Yeah, it doesn't look like EJ Perry's coming back anytime soon. I guess you're going to have Danny Etling starting who was okay. He got hurt a little bit too. I mean these Michigan Panthers quarterbacks are just getting beat up too for the Showboats. I mean, case Cook is can we get the guy an ambulance ride on call because he's just getting absolutely blasted every play he gets in there, I can't believe he can still get up after some of these hits. Again, Troy Williams is a suitable backup, but I don't think their offense is going to run as efficiently as it would with case. But again, this offensive line has some serious issues and this Panthers defensive front is going to just absolutely smack anybody who's behind the offensive line for Memphis. I kind of feel like the Panthers here on the road because they've got the defense that they need. They may not look pretty on offense. This is probably going to be a really ugly game. We're going to be honest with you from an offensive standpoint, but I just think that the Panthers defense is going to bounce back and find a way to get it done. I mean, they held their own against the promise. They had a bit of a rough start. They held 'em to only 19 points. Just their QB issues were a problem. But I think here their defense is really going to dominate it and give Memphis a lot of problems. And this Showboats team, again, a lot of talent, not a lot of going on for them as far as results on the field. And again, not a huge home crowd to really get behind either. So I don't really see it going well for them. Well, there you go. Getting done here. We're cutting to Texas Stadium. I saw a beautiful shot of the stadium outside. Didn't see Renegades, didn't see a renegades merch stand there giving away stuff. Yes. Just to round this aside, maybe next week you talk about some actual solutions trying to make, I mean we've done, we do that. Greg's coming on this week. I mean Paul brought up stuff last week. I mean it's not always a complaint fest. It certainly feels that way and I think the complaints are certainly louder than the other of it, but I think we do a fine job with that. I think we could do a better job with that. But again, I don't know. I mean my job is to make observations, but maybe we'll put on our thinking cap, Randy. Maybe we should get hired by the league. There was a point, was it last year when it was really, really, this spring is not slow. There was a point last year in my work when it was really, really slow just because it was post covid and everything. I thought, man, I really could just go live in Texas for three months right now and kind of do this, be able to kind of book weddings for the summer, do emails and all that kind of stuff. But go for it. Well, I was going to say, I'm on the record of saying this. If San Diego ever gets a team, I'm there first thing I'm covering it. I'm doing it as a media person. I have to be there. If they ever get a team, it's happening, but it's just harder for me because I don't live there. I don't live in that area. I don't live in Arlington, I don't live in the south. So I need team to really support. Well, there you go. I appreciate everyone. Like I said, like and subscribe. Got 200 and something people here watching right now between Twitter and YouTube, so I appreciate that. David's liking the thing like the Jersey like and subscribe. JP had the lead off double here, so hey, let's get No, Andy is the face of the UFL that is Andy is the face of the UFL. That didn't make me out. You have a better beard than I do, so I think you should go ahead and be the face instead. Yeah, I don't know if anyone wants to be the face of anything. Like I said, Greg Parks Rick Ella coming up this week. Darryl Davis talking CFL. Appreciate everyone, we'll see you next time.

UFL Merger: Is the USFL Carrying Its Weight?

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast Reid here. Surely this episode will ruffle no feathers today. UFL merger is the USFL carrying its weight. A good discussion today. Lots of fun things coming up on the podcast. I'll keep this intro short. Gets all the interviews here. Three great interviews today. Valid discussions here as we approach UFL week four. Some of the attendance did Fox, kind of sour the well and some of these markets giving away tickets here the last couple seasons. Now we're trying to get the Memphis attendance up, Michigan, all of that. I know Birmingham showed up last week, 12,000. I know they're competing against Alabama and all of that. We'll see what they do this weekend here. Coming up hosting again the DC defenders. That should be a good game, but lots of fun stuff. Today we have USFL historian Paul Reese joining from our Sports Central. Really appreciate that Paul has written books on USFL has been on through all of the different branding of the league and then the lawsuits and everything with the USFL and Fox back from old ownership there. So always appreciate getting Paul's thoughts on everything really wide ranging conversation with them, the TV broadcast, the attendance, we talk a little bit of football teams and stuff, storylines of the season so certainly I hope you guys enjoy that. Ts ns, Dave Naor coming on talking all things CFL, Chad Kelly's of it all. Edmonton Elks, lots of things I'm sure we'll get into with Dave. And then Matt McCrae of the DC Defenders game winning field goal kicker here last week. They're going into Birmingham. It should be a great game this weekend. So excited for that. If you like the work we are doing on here, 70 away like and subscribe, get us to 3,500 subscribers. We will be at the UFL championship game and if we get to 3,500 before that, we will be giving away two tickets to the championship game. I think you'll be able to sit with the professor. Andrew Murray I think is what we're going to do for that. I don't know he signed up for that but we'll get you going so well I can subscribe. Lots of work going in all the time on this getting interviews and stuff. Appreciate Dave Nailer taking time and DC Defenders getting that set up with the league so obviously with Paul getting his busy schedule coming on. So if you like the work that we do, all the friends that come on and subscribe, hope you guys enjoy the interviews. We'll see you at the end. Well we're back here. We have Paul Reese, USFL historian with our Sports Central. I literally, we were done with the UFL kickoff and I'm sitting there talking with Dorothy. I go, I'm such a dummy. I didn't have Paul on to do the pre-show kickoff stream, but we can remedy that today. Get a longer discussion with Paul Reese. Paul, first off, how are you and why don't you just, we have a lot of new subscribers so maybe just a quick elevator pitch of who you are. Great, thanks for having me on. Things are going well here. So I'm an old guy so I followed the original USFL very closely as a young man, never quite got it out of my blood and wrote a book on the league, did a lot of research and interviews just with various people involved and that kind of led to my interest in secondary alternative leagues and with that interest I started our sports central.com about 25 years ago and have followed that up since with stats crew.com. Our Sports central covers news from around alternative and minor leagues and stats crew covers all the statistics including the historical statistics for a lot of minor and alternative leagues as well as the majors. Perfect, and Paul is here today, so we're going to talk general thoughts, kind of football and then I wanted to get into kind of the thesis here this week of is the USFL carrying its weight here in the merger. First off, we're going into week four vibes. I get I'm watching that. That's good sports on YouTube as well. I got turned onto that. He does. Funny NFL recap seems that the quality of football, people are impressed, people are happy. How are you viewing the season thus far? Now that we have the eight teams? I think it's a little bit of a mixed bag but more on the good side than the bad side. I think you touched on probably my biggest takeaway so far is that the quality of football seems to be improved over both leagues. Last year we've seen tremendous kicking, for instance, our author Fran Berg just did an article that detailed how improved the kicking has been to me when I watched that St. Louis Arlington game a couple of weeks ago. You can put that up against any football game from the last year, N-F-L-C-F-L, whatever. That was a great football game, a tremendous atmosphere and came down to the wire. It was just very well played and I think you really do see a lot of that throughout the league. So that's been positive. Attendance of course has been a bit of a mixed bag, but I do think that the television presentation has remained very solid. I like the energy and that the ESPN and a BC folks bring to the mix, but I also think Fox is up there game this year. It's funny to me. Yeah, it really does depend on who you ask. Some people are very anti the ESPN broadcast. I'm pretty kind of neutral to all of it. I mean there's certain guys like the Steve Levy's of it all on ESPN get on my nerve screaming. I mean he's not part of it, but certain announcers might bother me but I'm generally not. But yeah, it seems like you're either Team Fox or team ESPN. It's kind of weird how there's a divide there. Always got to have these divides here with the spring football. Right. Well and I mean a lot of it is that we're less than a year away from watching both of them and they were different presentations and I think what we're seeing now is a little bit of a blend, but I really do like the energy and I've enjoyed the broadcast by and large. Do you like the branding now that this is the premier spring football league, we've come together. I know we've talked to you and through all this kind of merger stuff, but now that we've seen it kind of in action and what they want this to look and feel like, are you liking the branding around it? To me, we still don't really have an identity. Maybe we'll get that next year And a little bit. It is so dizzying. We saw the relaunch of the XFL, which looked different than the previous versions of the XFL. We saw another relaunch of the XFL, which looked different than the prior two versions. Then we saw the launch of the USFL, which looked a little bit different than the original USFL. And so now we're seeing yet this a new entity and there's blendings of the old and the new branding and I think we're still so new to it that it's really hard to get a feel for how it's different than maybe some of the predecessors and how it's going to end up standing out. We say the same thing every time, hopefully by year five or by year three, let's cross our fingers. Let's hope that we get that far and really do feel like we have a discernible identity And this came up on our live stream on Monday. We were recapping or I guess we did it Tuesday, we were recapping the weekend and talking attendance and we'll get into all that here, but I said if you're a casual person, this league doesn't make sense at all how it is right now. It makes sense. We know how we got to it where we had 18, you would never pick three Texas teams, Memphis, Michigan, St. Louis, that would never be, but it's like, well because they started in Birmingham and then we did this and we did that. Is it striking you? I mean TV audience has been consistent, right? They went up against the masters this week and Fox and a BC are certainly showing their power for that, but I don't know. It is hard for me when they're showing maps of the US and two thirds of it aren't represented in kind of where the teams are trying to get that national appeal. But maybe people don't care. Maybe it's just football on TV and that's what people are liking And I do think that it does make a difference. We don't have anything out west at all. In addition, the Northeast is really represented solely by Washington dc, a New Yorker, a Bostonian, how much do they care about that? Just having eight markets and three of them in Texas I don't think is helping the TV ratings. I do believe that the networks that are involved are fully aware of that, that they just don't have a real broad base. What they're really scraping here is that core group that's going to watch professional football no matter what. And even there was the, not leak but kind of the thing a couple of weeks ago, like new trademarks that it was Canton and Nashville. I'm like that doesn't help with your national appeal for the life of me. I can't figure out why we can't get anything going in San Diego except maybe that stadium is just too busy Now they have built, I just can't wrap my mind. You can't just get a flight from Dallas to San Diego and get this going. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean your operations aren't going to be based in the state anyway as long as you have the Arlington hub. So you would think that it would be wide open. I know that the people who were in Canton who went to the games last year really missed them. There just weren't that many of them. Can't, would be a horrible mistake. It would not help at all with the TV ratings. It just didn't make any sense from that standpoint. It's just really when the USFL did that, they took on all the costs of another hub and absolutely zero benefit besides a kind of decent stadium. Are you surprised now that we're gotten this far that we're doing the XFL business model with? We basically just adopted some of these USFL teams. I mean we knew kind of the Arlington of it all, but I guess that bearish fruit to kind of the way the XFL had been doing it from the beginning, even if it was costing more to do this flying in and out because certainly I think if the USFL had its way or saw success on that side, we would've just done two or three hubs and not been flying out to all of these cities. I think that's certainly right. It does show that the USFL business model that they sat down in the room and compared numbers and they didn't go with the more expensive proposition there. They didn't go with the one that made less sense. So the Arlington hub made a lot of sense and just flying out to the individual markets. I think that it was a realization on Fox's side that yes, we're a TV network. Yes, the ratings are going to be the big driver here, but attendance is also important. It's more than just having props. It's more than just having the people as a backdrop that there's a piece of the revenue equation eventually that's going to have to be carried by attendance. And whether that's 20% or 40% or 50%, whatever, we can't just write it off with $10 tickets or I think I ran the numbers last year in Memphis, if you went to both Houston and Memphis games, you could sit in the end zone for three bucks a game, which is ridiculous. And what I think there's been a realization that we can't do that long-term hurting us. We need to turn the ship around. And so I think you're seeing by and large more normalized ticket prices than a lot of these markets. And we talk and even the Monday, the attendance and Birmingham showed up and I have the numbers here I'll pull up. But you get all this like, well it doesn't matter, right? It's tv. It's all tv, it's all TV A and we've talked about this and we've learned people don't like watching football with nobody in the stands, right? It's really hard. We've learned this with the US about it's such a what's going on here? Any casual fan that's tuning in, it's like why is there no one here? So there's that the energy level of it, but then also if you're trying to get people to eventually buy these franchises, which we've been told is the plan, and I think that keeps getting kicked down the road now as we maybe the SFL had that year five to seven, well maybe that's another five to seven years from now, but I'm looking here. Memphis is averaging 8,700 people a game. What am I buying there if I'm buying a Memphis franchise? It's a great question. I think right now what you'd be buying is the concept. I don't know that necessarily anybody except the guy who owns FedEx would be looking at that Memphis franchise. It certainly has been a really slow start there and there's a lot of different reasons for that. But what you'd be buying is a concept you'd be buying, Hey, I want the San Diego market, I want Seattle, I want Denver. Those probably would make more sense to a buyer right now than some of the markets where we're seeing really minimal attendance unless things suddenly turn around in those markets. I equated it to, it's kind of like how some of these private ownerships with the CFL teams where it's like they would be like, I don't want to buy a yacht. I want to go buy a CFL team and then we have a doman in BC and putting tremendous, that's something he just really believes in and wants to rebuild that and work with the amateur football. But that is a huge, he is dumping the money and one republic comes up and ll cool J comes, we're having all these bands, that's him dumping money. And yeah, I think that that's what you're looking for here with the UFL. It's not going to be here, buy this in turnkey. You're going to make money, you're going to need to put in your own time. Do you see it similarly? Yeah. And the advantage of the CFL is decades of history so that these guys can look back and say, I remember watching them on TV or I was in the stadium when this happened, or this was a part of me growing up or at some point in my life I really connected with this. So they have more of those people who will come in and say, you know what? I can stand to lose a little bit of money or maybe I'll really over the long term kind of draw even on this. That's fine with me. Whereas the UFL, we don't have that yet and it would take a long time to build. So they've got to be looking at some extra intangibles that they're going to build into a UFL franchise in order to sell them. And I do think that it's a few years down the line. Well, and even with the CFL, there's the promise of like, hey, maybe every four or five years you might get a gray cup and then you really get some money coming back into the city. I mean I can't remember. I think when they were talking about one of the sales that came out and it was like that was part of the guarantee was like, Hey, we're going to get you a gray cup here just to make sure you don't have a multimillion dollar event coming in every year here with the UFL that's going to generate that. We could be looking at a similar situation in a few weeks here. St. Louis puts a really nice crowd into the dome for the championship game no matter who's in it. That could be a nice revenue generator and if you can promise that every eight or 10 years or more, that might be something that helps sway somebody. I don't think that we'd be looking at that in the next couple of years, but maybe down the line. So I have a tweet here, and this is from K day on Twitter. This is running down the average attendance. This is just a good way to kind of visualize it. I had Max run these numbers as well because I hate seeing this and okay, this is whatever, but what to me, and I hate being the whatever, but it's exposing these USFL markets that came in Memphis now that we're not giving away tickets, $3 tickets, even Houston on here doing the whole switch and bait with that. I think we're seeing a disparity here. Now, Birmingham showed up 12,000 there game one. You would like to see that for a team that's been in the city three years. I know they have the Alabama game going on looking at this general thoughts and then we can dive in more. And looking at Houston, I think that the stadium switch has really affected them this year as well. I don't think that we're far enough into the season to really see that the roster switch has hurt, but not having Wade Phillips there probably hurts a little bit. And with the rest of it, Birmingham, we've got the one game which was easily the best of the USFL draws so far. One of the things that we're looking at is that I believe they increased ticket prices in all those markets and so it's no longer that $10 seat. So not only are people looking at an increase in the ticket prices, but when they set those values over the last year or two, people are used to those $10 tickets. That's what their football team is worth to them now. And so I think this was probably the biggest mistake that Fox made was they devalued their product to the local populace rather than selling at a normal rate for any other team. They were so interested in getting people in as backdrop so that it looked like there were people in the stadium on TV that they forgot about the long term and I don't think they really helped themselves that much in the short term. I think it was a tremendous mistake the way they priced their tickets. And that's really reflected in three different places on this attendance chart. In terms of, and this is again my thesis this week is the USFL carrying its way, I don't know, and I always struggle even with the roughneck brand, whatever, but I don't know what cachet like a Michigan Panthers, a Memphis SHOWBOATS has here in 2024, outside of my age or your age higher. You get that, but I just don't know where, I don't know the DC defenders and I know where are they at right now? 15,000 average. I think they had two home games, right? At least it's a sexy new brand, right? The battle and then they're kind of standard of that. But I dunno if we're getting exposed that way. Also, the cachet of some of these quantity or entities not having in 2024. I mean I don't think that there's really any debating it. I think you're absolutely right that obviously the attendance would, I mean for outdoor football to have attendance under 8,000, I'm not that far away from Green Bay and they can draw that for an indoor football game is amazing to me and they're doing that at full ticket prices. It really is amazing to me how much these markets have struggled. And there are some reasons Memphis for instance, has had a team in every single league that there's been Birmingham too. And you see before this with the collapse of the alliance that couldn't have helped the local markets at all. But I think your point is right about the USFL branding, which I love. There's nobody who loves the original USFL branding more than I do, but I think they found that it was of limited benefit here in the 2020s As someone that obviously has built a large business stemmed from all this. Is that disheartening? I mean because I think people come on like, oh, Paul's going to rag on whatever Reed's going to rag on. This is something that's been a large portion of your life in a lot of people's lives to see it get to this point. It doesn't. I look at the original USFL as something that had a beginning, it had a middle and it had an end and they really have had by and large so little to do with the current happenings with the new league that took on that old name that it's a new entity. And so that's the way that I looked at the SFL last year. And so you can't compare attendance in the 2022 and 2023 USFL to the 1980s USFL. It would've been tremendously unfair to the new one. You can't compare quality of play where the original USFL was competing for the best players. That's what made them a major league and the new USFL is it was really a developmental league and really everything since the original USFL has been a developmental league and that's fine. I do enjoy it. I enjoyed NFL Europe and I enjoyed the World League and I've enjoyed everything that's come since. There's no insult at all from my perspective there. It just really is what it is. In order to be a major league, you have to compete for the best players and clearly none of these leagues are in a position to do that. The XFL wasn't the USFL. There's no shame in that. The NFL is a multi-billion dollar juggernaut. You're not going to compete with that right now and you're certainly not going to do with that in the spring. So I enjoy these leagues for what they are. So I agree with you, but we had Darryl Johnson on before the season and he talks about they don't want to be a developmental league. What do you say to that? Just as a side note here before we keep going because like you said, you're a decade away from even being to the point where, I'm just curious your thoughts on that, where he says they want to move away from that. Oh, I mean there's perception versus reality. So I can understand that he doesn't want to be perceived in that way. The reality is unless you're taking people off NFL rosters or taking collegiates that the NFL wants, you're a developmental slash minor league. That's all there is to it. So what do we do here? Because like you said, I do think going back, if we could reverse course and go back a couple years here in the price appropriately, what do we do at this point here with the USFL markets, right? I guess how do you rebuild that? And I know if we all knew how to do that, it would be done. But thoughts about that? I do think, like you said, irreparable damage in some of these markets, I mean it's going to be super hard to turn the ship around, I think where you've already devalued your product. I mean, how do you take that away? I'm thinking of John Spolstra. He was former NBA exec who wrote about how to sell the last seat in the house, and I think that was kind of the ticket seller's bible. And one of the ways that you do that is by increasing the value of your ticket, more freebies maybe, or player visits or exclusive ticket holder events. There are some of those things that maybe can be done. I don't know how much that bumps the needle in these markets to be honest. You may be looking at choosing the markets where you think you can build and then reassigning teams to other markets where you can't. That's my fear. I mean I agree with that, but my fear is if you do that, then you are, how locked in are you to any of these markets, right? I mean, I think you got to go, do you pull out of Michigan at the end of this year? I don't know. Then what does that say to the next? I always equate when the new ownership took over the Washington commanders and everyone said, well, they're going to fire Ron Rivera. And they said, no, we're going to give him a season. We want the next head coach coming in to know that we'll also give them the full kind of benefit of that. So I don't know what you do if you pull the plug in any move and then to San Diego. Well God, if we don't get enough people here, they're going to pull it in a year. And you mentioned Michigan, at least you have market size with Detroit, whereas in a place like Memphis, if you're struggling with attendance and your market size is not doing much to help the TV rating, then that's when you really have to take a good hard look at how can we turn this ship around? Can we turn this ship around and then do we move? So a couple different things that you think about is do you move a team or do you expand first and then contract? So that, I don't know what the right answer is there. The other thing that I think about is the original American Football League. If you look at how that league started, and of course everyone knows that the original American Football League ended up merging 10 teams in the NFL and as part of the NFL multi-billion dollar juggernaut now, but originally they were drawing 3000 to 7,000 in Oakland. They had to move out of Los Angeles, they had to move out of Dallas. So there were a lot of things that happened there. But part of it was in places like Oakland and New York, they were able to build from those meager beginnings partially because the league built around them and you entered a new stadium situation in New York, but they were able to continue to build in Oakland, for instance. So you have to, okay, what can we develop a five-year plan on which markets do we think that we can actually improve? And which markets are we actually just wasting our time and we'd be better served getting out of right now, I am always the Mr Pessimist on here and I believe in this space and wanted to succeed. I just don't know what the long-term play is here. Where we saw Redbird after one season of loss, like, okay, we need to downsize, we need to do this fox the same way. Maybe we're seven years away from getting ownership, ratings are good. We're averaging 800 to a million viewers. Is that enough? Are we happy enough with that for the next four or five years? I would love to be a fly on the wall and kind of know what are the metrics here we're trying to hit? Because both of these ownership groups now coming together seem very gun shy about losing any money at some point. And we talked on the Monday show when I quit my day job to freelance, at some point you got to pull the plug, take a hit and then build up the other way. But you can't just kind of meander along at this pace, Right? And I think Fox has to be encouraged by ratings because of what they saw last year. They had to wonder, are we on a downward slide where this thing is is just not working? And to see a rebound I think for them has to be helpful. If anything, I would say that I maybe underestimated Redbird capital a little bit and just how much capital Redbird has. This is a group that has been in talks to by CVS. So these people have a lot of resources now if they have the patience and the plan to continue with this, we'll see. But I'm encouraged by the level of operations that we've seen throughout the league, even just from a media relations standpoint. I think these teams have taken a step up, particularly the former USFL teams. They actually have people issuing press releases and game notes and all the things that you'd normally expect. And that was probably part of the hole that was dug last year and even the year before where people are like, these people don't even really treat this like a real league from a media standpoint. It was certainly obvious. And I would imagine that that translated in how the media talks to fans if they talk to them at all about your product and in fan perception as well after that. Respectfully. Yes, and I do enjoy having the USFL teams, having people respond. I like the media portal. Not all reps are created equal, right? I mean, you get a little bit about that, but even in terms of that, I get the press release every week like, Hey Arlington, they're doing a practice. If you want to come at nine, film the first 30 minutes and then Bob Stoops is going to be around at 1220 and then Luis Perez, whatever at 1230, I would love to meet a single media rep that's going to go to an Arlington Renegades game or a practice on a Wednesday at nine. I used to do that for the Seahawks and we'd go film and you'd go do the first 10 minutes and then yeah, you'd sit around because you're waiting to talk to Russell Wilson or whatever. I don't know if we're at that point yet. So yes, I appreciate the access in that way. I would be curious the number of people that are taking advantage of that. And it's hard with the hub, that is one of the difficulties that the hub introduces as much as it certainly saves them on the cost side, that exposure in the local markets is part of the price that they pay for that. And that's of the areas I think that they really need to continue to do some thinking about how you get exposure in the local market. Does that mean you fly a select group of players in a day early to the local market just to meet, greet, do all those things that you would do if you were locally based, your cheer team, are they always around and available treated well so that they're more than willing to go to parades and different other things just to keep your name and your brand out there? It is one of those things that the league has to overcome. And setting up video meetings is certainly helpful. It does allow local media to interact. So there are some options, but they are going to have to get creative not only in how you really help the press connect with the team members, but in how you maintain a local presence in the market when you're really only there a day or two, five times a year. I think that's really hard. And I think that's what I've learned this season with having all the reps and everything. And we'll start winding this conversation down here soon. I appreciate your time. It is that I don't have time A to do all, Hey, it's Wednesday at whatever on the Zoom. I try my best and I'll look at the recordings afterward. You might have three people on there. You might have two people on there talking to whoever. I don't not being in the markets besides the fan stuff. And they do a good job, I think like, hey, we're doing a thing, a meet and greet right before they're trying to do some things that way. Little town halls and stuff. But yeah, getting the media, I know Anthony was at the Renegades game, I think it was last week, I think he said there were seven people in the press box, which is not a burden. And that's the hub that you're in, let alone what does Michigan look like? I haven't had a chance to go. I was at the kickoff game obviously, but I imagine St. Louis is packed. I imagine DC is packed. I don't know what the Memphis Showboats press box looks like on game day. And that's tough. It's tough. You're going to have a little bit limited media buy-in because of that. So one of the things that I am encouraged with is that, and in particularly contrasting last year's USFL teams with this year's UFL teams is that you can get transaction notices, you can get game notes, you can get game recaps. These were all things that were missing out of the USFL puzzle last year and last year they had taken a step up from the prior year where it was basically, if we can't release it on Colin Coward, we're just not going to bother to release it. So they've continued to kind of up those operations. So when I say that I'm encouraged by the media relations, there's still a lot of improvements that could be made, but they have taken some steps. Oh yeah. Night and day compared to, especially with the US development that was getting, because last year had the hubs, had media people, and yes, having people dedicated the media portal is great. All that stuff. Last note from me, we were talking TV ratings and all of that, and I know that Mike Movahill ville, I can never say his last name with the Fox sports guy, tweeting out 47% increase whatever because they're consolidating all these TV time slots. We're giving Fox at noon, whatever. What struck me in, curious your thoughts, I think we're learning, it doesn't matter if it's the USFL, the X-F-L-U-F-L, if it's on a good time slot, people are going to watch, I don't know how many now I know we've talked this whole interview about USFL hurting their local markets in that way, and I do standby that, but I think a general TV audiences, they don't know if it's the stars or the rough. Okay, which one is this league? Especially when the leagues were competing last year during the same time. And one of the big helps in TV ratings so far is removal of games from USA and FS one. Now I think there's an FS one game this week. Yeah, This one's going to be rough this weekend. Yeah, That'll be the roughest rating. But those ratings were, they dragged down the whole average last year and the year before. So it has been very helpful when you're on ESPN, when you're on a B, C, when you're on fox, it does help. It is a tremendous boost. Well, and even I think just in terms of we go to a lot of sports bars, even flying back from the kickoff sitting down at the airport, the TV's already on ESPN or whatever. You're not sitting there. Oh, excuse me, okay, okay. We don't have ES ESPN two or we don't have whatever it, being on places where people are just going to find it naturally I think is such a boon. And just having it be, there's always going to be a TV on Fox or a BC or ES, ESPN of any bar you're going to walk into. And I think that helps. Oh wow. What's going on? That's awesome. That's right. Yep. That helps a lot. And I think that we have this weird kind of the season when it started too. It's earlier than the SEF L started last year, but later than the XFL started last year. But I still think they're missing their window. I was glad to see that they did take on the NCAA tournament and actually the women's championship proved to be a bigger hurdle than even the final four games. So I mean, the thing that you're going to have to embrace this competition, you're, you're going to have competition on TV no matter when. So when is the best time to hit this right after the Super Bowl tax day, which is what it was last year for the USFL or somewhere in between. I continue to personally believe that it's right after the Super Bowl, you ride that wave of football and try to hang onto as much of it as you can. Yeah. And I think take on the habits that people have already built, right? Sunday morning I'm sitting around watching football. I'm not, weather's terrible. I'm not doing anything. Baseball's not on Paul, anything else from you? I don't want to take you too much of your time. I appreciate it today. Anything else you want to plug or get off your chest here? No. No. As far as getting off the chest, probably I was watching, I've watched most of the games so far and this league had five fantastic finishes in a row, literally coming down to the final seconds. A couple of games this last week were blowouts, but just tremendous finishes and it's been super fun to watch so far. And I think this story, it's been a good storyline of the season. A couple different, okay, Birmingham coming back, whatever in DC doesn't look like the same team they were last year and now we have the San Antonio, the Garber's injury. Okay, now we got another sign in. What does that look like? A week ago it looked like San Antonio was going to be on top of, that's our team here at the mark that I chose. So there's enough little things like that going on. It seemed like especially the overlap last year where I got 16 teams I'm trying to keep track of. I'm like, I can't process all of these storylines. The aid at least right now feels good in that way. And that was really tough. And when you looked at the disadvantage that I think that served up to the USFL because you had the XFL entering its playoffs stretch. And so if I have limited time, how much am I going to pay attention in the league in its first week or two of the regular season versus how much am I going to pay attention when it's coming down to the line for the playoffs? And the XFLI thought did a fantastic job last year with the presentation and bringing that whole season to a conclusion where the USFL, maybe they were trying to do the same thing as they had last year only in four different places and it just didn't necessarily translate all that well. So it has been nice to be able to concentrate attention, but I'm kind of running into the, now it's starting to get nice outside and now it's starting to get really busy. And so not through any conscious effort to avoid games. I'm going to start missing some of them. It was spring break and people are gone. I'm trying to keep up traveling so I can talk about the games when we get back. No, I totally agree with that. Last point for me, I think going into next season, I don't know if we need this, but I think adding a team or two, I hate talking the expansion, but I think having it feel like this speaks to the success of the league. Like we're moving on and this is conversation down the line, but I think they got to have some sort of hook where the USFL going from one hub to three and a half or whatever with the canned thing, it didn't feel like that was enough of a hook going into the next season. And I think that that might be the greatest cause the greatest reason maybe keep teams around for next year is so that you do see actual expansion and not relocation. It kind of answers some of those doubts of, oh, if we struggle right out of the gate here, are we going to get our team yanked? It gives a year under the belt at least before maybe you'd move somebody or whatever, just to make the new markets feel better about themselves and about the patients that's going to be displayed. But I think if you would expand at all, part of that is you've already answered some of those questions. You've already have some good corporate support with sponsorships. You already have an interested fan base. So choosing those expansion markets would be making good choices there would be very important. Well Paul, I appreciate it. Our Sport Central stats screw.com. Appreciate it. We'll get you back on again, but always it means all you taking the time. Alright, thank you so much for having me on, Reed. Great to talk with you. Well it's been a long time since we've had this gentleman on. It was you and Farhan wandering through the BC Lions dead here at Gray Cup. Internet issues aside, we have Dave Naer here, TSN Insider, CFL, everything else. Dave, how are you? Very well other than the internet issues I was just having there, but I think we got 'em sorted out. There you go. That's good. I got Matt MCC crane logging on. I got to do, I'm sitting in my other chat right here when he hops on. I'm going to tell him we're running a few minutes late, so I appreciate it Here. Appreciate that man. So we're getting ready. CFL, everything else going on, we were talking a little bit of the NFL kickoff and all of that. Where do you want to start? What's on your mind right now? Well, let's start with the kickoff. I think I was in the CFL combine where they were talking about that. And it was funny because I don't think people really knew how close the NFL was to moving its kickoff five days later I made it was sort of references to the NFL is going to talk about this maybe as early as next week. And then they pulled the trigger a week later. So I'm kind of interested in how that may have influenced the CFL's decision one way or another. And I think it's always been a different discussion because kickoffs and just the return game in general is so much a bigger part of Canadian football and it's more celebrated and returners are more stars, some of the greatest stars in the league and the NFL because they kind of face it out slowly over time. And because those players in the history of the game have not been as prominent relative to the other players in the league as they are in the CFL. So there's a lot of sensitivity about this. And the curious thing to me is you see fans on Twitter and things like this, they seem to think the league has some agenda to get rid of an exciting play that has nothing to do with injuries. I dunno what that agenda would be. I don't know why the commissioner and the different people in the rules committee and competition committees would say, yeah, let's get kickoff returns out of the game. It doesn't make any sense to me, but I do think there is a greater sensitivity to the fact, the idea of removing them. Now you're still going to get a lot more punting in the CFL than you do in the NFL and you have no fair catch. So it's not like the return game is going to disappear. But I mean there's two proposals I think they're looking at. One is that you would give teams the option to scrimmage on the 40 yard line as opposed to accepting a kickoff, which they already have for field goals. And 96% of the time last year teams took the ball in the 40 as opposed to a return. So you're going to basically wipe out returns after touchdowns. I think we can say pretty safely. And then again, the only time you don't give that choice is the final three minutes of a game that protects the onsite kick. But the other possibility is looking at a version of what the NFL just did, the XFL model. I think that one is on the table as well and whether they would make some tweaks do it or come up with their own. The buzz I'm hearing Reed is, and I think this is smart, that the league is probably going to strike a committee and study this for a year, which would allow them to see what happens in the NFL. It allow them to look at their own data a little closer. And I think it's such a fundamental thing. CFL has been around Canadian football in one form around another, it's been around for over a hundred years. So there's not this, we got to get this done before kickoff 2024. I mean the game has survived for a long time, but I do believe that this is being driven by the same thing that is driven by in the NFL. The rate of injuries on these plays is substantially higher. That costs roster churn, that's bad for players, that's bad for owners who have to replace injured players. It's just one of those things that I think it was kind of naive to think that the NFL was going to go here, college football was going to go here, but in the CFL we're fine. I said to somebody, it's like saying that if you smoke a cigarette in Buffalo, it's bad for you, but you can do it in Toronto. It just doesn't make sense. The physics are a little different in the two games, but not that dramatically different. So I'm not surprised the CFL is dealing with this issue. Well, it's the same irony where the UFL now is using the, and even more elongated NFL kickoff. It's bizarre, right, that the alternative spring league football, if we can call it that, is the inspiration for the most substantial change we've seen to the NFL game in, I don't know in my lifetime, just in terms of how often you're going to see it. And the league that developed it isn't using it. What it reminds me is like you're going to put a piece of furniture onto your curb and somebody comes over five minutes later and takes it away. I feel like the UFL or the XFL put its kickoff out to the curb and the NFL came along in a pickup truck and said, I'll take that. It is funny, and I know you're busy, man, but we had Darryl Johnston on the week before the week of the kickoff and it was very interesting hearing his thoughts on all of that. So it's a little bit of egg in the face on that, but certainly they're doing the best they can. Absolutely. Hey look, I think if everybody recognizes that one of the real opportunities that spring football brings about is to experiment with stuff and people forget, and correct me if I'm wrong in this, you're the exit L expert, but I mean that camera shot above the huddle. Yeah, we use that all the time. And the NFL uses it ubiquitously and that was an XFL invention. So I do think it's great to have leagues that can try stuff that maybe established leagues are a little afraid to try. And by the way, on the XFL kickoff, I loved it the first time I saw it. I was always surprised, especially with the grumbling in the NFL that didn't get more attention. Obviously it was getting a lot more attention behind the scenes than anybody knew. They didn't go from zero to a hundred on this in a month. They've obviously been looking at this for a long time. And major rule changes often take a tipping point. And I think for the NFL, it was 11 kickoffs in the Super Bowl that all sailed through the end zone. I mean, what are we doing In terms of moving on to some other CFL stuff in terms of the Chad Kelly's of it all? Has anyone thought of just deleting Twitter, maybe pulling back his phone? This is all I've seen the last couple of weeks. What's going on with this? Yeah, I have reason to believe that Chad Kelly has probably been advised to use discretion on social media, but he's obviously not doing so to the degree that people would want him to. I think this is a real tough story for a few reasons, including the presumption of innocence, which we have to maintain. And I know that a lot of people are looking at Chad's history of questionable decision making and saying, well, this lines up with who he was before he came to Canada. And again, I think we got to try to be fair and objective and allow him the presumption of innocence as we discuss this. But it's strange because Chad Kelly was a guy who, he came here, I think people were kind of, I don't want to say holding their breath, but keeping their fingers crossed. And it's not so much about him. I would just say the history of players who've been out of the NFL largely for behavioral reasons or character questions and come to Canada, usually those kinds of things follow them here. It tends not to get left at the border. And Chad Kelly for two full seasons, I mean what was the most controversial thing he did? He went on radio last winter and said he loved to play for the Saskatchewan Ruff riders while he was still under contract to the Toronto Argonauts. That would probably be the most controversial thing he did. And then there's the bad performance in the eastern final and bad is a mild world mean I I've never seen a player's playoff performance that was so unrecognizable from what he'd done consistently in the regular season on any team at any level in my life. You put that game up against everything else Chad Kelly did. It's unrecognizable. I think he just threw another interception right now. It was unreal. And not just the numbers of interceptions, but if you actually watch the plays, they are textbook awful, right? And I'm not a break it down kind of guy, but even I can see that when you're looking one way of the field and you pivot and throw off your back foot on to the other side of the field off balance, you're probably going to get picked anyway. Then you have before he was named the league's MOP, he has the concussion story that he was concussed and that's why he left the field afterwards without shaking hands. Well, I can tell you, given the sensitivity of that issue, the league went through the tape play by play, play by play to try to find any play where Chad Kelly might have been concussed. They did not find one. And I think if you look at his whereabouts in the days that fall, that game, he wasn't necessarily, those weren't the actions of somebody who was dealing with a serious head injury is what I would saying. So I'd just say the league, and I believe he signed his, at the end of the season when you have to sign your exit that you're healthy, he signed that. So that was, a lot of people on the league looked at that and went, wow, what's going on there? And now you have the civil suit, which again, we can't really comment on, but we can comment on his social media presence and the video he made during the CFL combine where he went on and dropped a bunch of F bombs. And I would say objectively I would describe him as showing a complete lack of self-awareness. I'm comfortable with that description of what he looked like on that video. I mean, that's the face of your franchise, that's the MOP of your league. That is behavior and conduct that is so out of touch with your role. And again, I think it just kind of raised questions about where his head is at that he would think that that was appropriate or acceptable. And then since then you've had cryptic tweets that can be read a whole bunch of different ways. But again, for somebody who's facing potentially a legal situation or is facing a legal situation and is also facing the court of public opinion, which in this case is a big one for him, because again, a lot of people are judging him and saying, this is the guy we heard about before he came to the CFL, now we're seeing it. And every time he puts out one of those tweets, it kind of moves people more in that direction. So I think I asked the CFL players association about it when I was at the combine. They said, look, we don't proactively reach out and tell players what to do or not do. We're here to accept their requests for help or guidance or counseling or whatever they need. We're here for them, but we don't identify guys and go out for them and say, Hey, what are you doing? That would be more the role of his employer or the league. And I don't know that that's happened, but I would be surprised if there haven't been efforts to try to get him off social media. And I also wouldn't be surprised if he's ignored them. And the last thing was obviously the Caitlyn Clark and her getting the contract coming out and him saying like, oh, that's CFL money. I saw Nathan Rourke tweet out the league taking too long. Is this just time? And Yeah, I don't quite get that and I'm not be, I think the league's messaging on this one hasn't been great. It took what several days until the suit was filed, until they had a statement, Chad tweeted out a denial and then it got deleted. The Argos haven't really said much, and I don't know what they can say, but it feels like there should be a little more clarity about what's going on right now. And I don't know if you can put him on an administrative off season, so I don't know what putting him on a leave does. But even symbolically that might show that you're a little more proactive that hey, until we can clear this matter up, we put Chad Kelly on a whatever suspended list, whatever it may be. It doesn't really affect anything. There's no off season for the CFL anyway. But it would at least sort of clarify maybe a little bit where they stand. But beyond that, I don't have a ton of criticism for the league, and particularly on the, it's taking too long part here. The league has hired an independent investigation to be done on this, which I think people would say is probably the right course. And look, I don't know if Chad Kelly's going to get favorable judgment because he's the starting quarterback and the highest paid player in the league in the MOP. I would hope not. But I can tell you he's getting a different process because we have seen other players who've been involved in situations and the league by and large has acted very quickly without very long process, which is their right to do, I guess, unless to the point that they could be sued by somebody if that person thought they were acting inappropriately. But we can clearly say that Chad Kelly is getting a different process. He is getting a much more thorough process. And I don't have a problem with the league saying, Hey, this is a guy who has tremendous importance to our franchise in our biggest city where we've been trying to gain traction. This is a guy who has tremendous importance to our league. He's our reigning MOP. We are going to take our time and step back and let somebody else deliver us a report on this again. I mean, do we want the league to rush this? I don't necessarily feel that way. So that's what they're doing. I asked Randy and Broy the commissioner about this at the combine and he said, we're not going to act or comment until we get that report. And that seems like a legitimate position to me. I guess the question is when's that report coming now? Because we're a month away from training camp less than a month away from the opening of training camp. And you think that a decision has got to come down before or that report and the league's decision based on that report has to come down before the start of training camp. So we're all kind of waiting to see where this is going to go. And I would expect that this may be framed from the league's perspective as kind of an HR issue. I mean, there's not a criminal accusation here, right? There's a civil suit and the descriptions that are in that suit, we sort of line up with inappropriate behavior in the workplace. So is that the framework that the leagues or the Argos are going to use to deal with this? I don't know, but I think it's an issue that's been hanging over the whole off season and it feels like Chad Kelly's been hanging over the whole off season when you go back to the concussion stuff and just on a personal level, I'm kind of sad just to see when we did a feature on Chad Kelly a year ago and we were at Jim Kelly's house and Jim Kelly said, I would not be doing this if you'd called me two years ago because I didn't really believe Chad had matured and seen the light. And it was my producer, Matt Dunn, who wrote the line in the feature. He said in Toronto, there is no past only a future. That was the line that I thought was kind of the line of the piece that Chad Kelly's able to come across the border and people aren't familiar with all the things about him from the past, they don't care. You've got a fresh slate, man, run with it. And for most of two years he did that. And so just on a personal level for him, I'm sorry that his behavior has become a little worrisome, particularly when you see that video. I mean that video is just, you cannot do that as a starting quarterback in the Canadian Football League. That cannot be your representation. And again, I don't know what the Argos of the league are going to do about it, but it's not certainly anything that would be considered acceptable. Rapid fire. Last one here, I got to hop over Elk sale everything. What's going on with that? I know we're trying to privatize and rapid, I think we're about a week away maybe or within the next week from the sale of the Elks being slimed down to a shortlist and it may be a long shortlist. I mean one of the things I think you always got to remember in these situations is you and I can put our hand up form a partnership and sign a non-disclosure agreement and get all the financials of the Elks and say we want to buy them. I mean basically if you knock at their door and look presentable, you're going to be given an opportunity to look at it. So I reported the number was more than a dozen individuals or groups had looked forward. And I think part of my role in reporting that I think from the Elks perspective is they kind of wanted everybody in Canada to know about this, right? They understand that TSN is a platform that's widely read, particularly for CFL, and I think they weren't unhappy to have me reporting on that because they knew that anybody wasn't aware that the Elks were for sale Now might be. It's a real fascinating sale and I'll tell you first of all, and again somebody else told me who I trust that the number was got up to 19, I don't know what it is now and I don't know what the shortlist will be, but for a league that's been used to having fire sales or distress sales or hoping somebody comes to the rescue, this is not that. But here's the interesting thing people ask, well, what's the franchise going to sell for? Well, it's owned by a nonprofit. It's not even clear where the money would go if somebody paid $10 million, $20 million, $30 million for the Edmonton else. Paying it to the nonprofit makes no sense because there's nowhere for it to go. It doesn't get divided among the board. So I think where the negotiation's going to come in here is how much are you willing to invest in the team in a new stadium, in the facilities, in the infrastructure, in raising the team's profile and driving the season ticket base. That's going to be the negotiating point I think. So you can see a situation where the franchise fee is a dollar, whatever, it just disappears into the ether, but the money number that's going to matter is if somebody's willing to pay $30 million for the Edmonton Elks, 25 million for the Edmonton Elks, 99% of that is going to go to investing on the team, not into the pocket of the current owners because the current owners really don't have private pockets. So I think it's a good opportunity for them to sort of set this right. And I asked the question of somebody, is there any chance that this doesn't happen? This stays as a community owned team like it has been for 75 years and I was told that the only scenario would be somebody who has a ton of money and really, really wants to see the Edmonton Elk State community owned and would donate that money to the board and say, here you go. Keep running the team. Here's my 30 million on. I don't think that's going to happen. No, I think we're going to see a private sale. Well, there you go Dave. Let's get you on again here when we got more stable internet, but it held up today. We got the data. Everything else, I appreciate it. Yeah, sorry for the delay off the top, but as you know, always enjoyed joining re thanks so much. Awesome, thanks. And yes, see a fellow, it's almost June. It is not far away. Well, this is kind of the man of the hour here for the DC Defenders. A great season thus far and then certainly a killer game here over the weekend. How are you doing, sir? I'm good man. I appreciate you having me on. It's good. I know trying to get these remote stuff and with the training camp and hubs and everything, I appreciate it. You're back here again, obviously with the Guardians back in 2020. What's it feel like being around here right now? It's exciting. I think I talked about it a little bit in the post-game interview with Jordan is the merger of the two leagues and to kind of, I guess skip on a forward a little bit, but the merger of the two leagues has been really exciting, really cool. We've been able to put a good product on the field that I think people are starting to enjoy, so that's been good, man. It's been really well ran and has been really exciting. So I've got nothing bad to say so far. What's cool too is you never really know going into these leagues, right, who's going to get spotlighted, right? We had CTE turban, excuse me, turban back with the US FL and all that special teams, especially kickers right now, insane between you and Jake Bates and everybody else. What is that? Is it just getting the opportunity, one of the major storylines of the season? Yeah, I think mean not just me and Jake, I mean everybody in the league. I think I saw the stat what were like 92% or something across the league so far through three weeks. And so I think for a lot of people is it's that it's just limited opportunity. In the National Football League, there's only one active roster kicker out of the 32 team. So you're on each team, so you're talking 32 kickers in the world and it's hard to get an opportunity. I've been in and out of the National Football League for five years off and on from practice squad to active to Covid year and filling in for injured guys. And so really I've only had one genuine opportunity to say, okay, I think this is my job. And that was when I was with Oakland. Daniel Carlson got cut by Minnesota and then they moved on from me and Daniel's been with them ever since. And so I think it's just proving that there's a lot of really kickers out there on the market. And I say a lot, I mean limited. There's only eight guys in this league, so not very many. I mean I'd say maybe 15, 20 guys that deserve a shot to play in the National Football League that just whether it's through injury or guys are performing well in the NFL and so it's limited opportunity to get in. And so I think you're just seeing that right now as there's really good talent out there and kickers are proving that week in and week out. You guys have to get jazzed up for each other. I mean especially coming off of your game and Jake and everything else, what is that like? And just see these record setting kicks and you had super 50 yard plus. This is nothing to kind of sneeze at. Yeah, I think it's always been that way for kickers. I don't think if there's a kicker out there that's wishing ill will on another kicker just to get an opportunity, that's a bad thing coming. That's some bad mojo. But Jake and I were kind of back and forth on social media. He commented on I think a post that I was in after the game-winning field goal and said Congrats or something. I was like, dude, how I commented back and said, how are you going to cover me up? How are you going to steal the spotlight with another 60 plus? And so we have good banter back and forth, but I stay in contact with a lot of these kickers. We all train together out. Some of us train out in California together with Nick Novak. We see each other at combines as honors combines. So it's a tight knit group and I think we're all cheering for each other, man. It's really good opportunity for us In terms of the game itself. This last one with the game winning, you quick really spotlights the UFL rules and we're able to do this big 11 point swing and all that. What is that just from, I don't know, a game strategy? Game planning and you, because it really is, you're really in all these games until the very end. Yeah, well it's funny, I learned my lesson just this week because we were down a touchdown and a normal circumstance I would say, okay, I'm telling my long snapper and holder we're dead is what we call it. Hey, are we dead? We're done for the game. If we score, we're going for two or in this league of course we're going to go for two or three. And so I went to Coach Barlow and I said, we're dead. I think there was two and a half minutes in the game and we were down by a touchdown and he said, yeah, you guys are dead. So I literally untied my shoes and I told Paxton and Trey, I'm like, Hey guys, we're dead when we score, we're going to go for it. Well, what happened was Arlington ended up getting the ball and they kicked a field goal and now I'm looking at it and I'm like, okay, with the new rule, the fourth and 12th we could be back up potentially. So I tied my shoes back on, I got us all stretched back out and ready to go and sure enough, we drive the whole field, we score a touchdown and we're back in the game and need a field goal. So I think it's an adjustment for a lot of us because the fourth and 12th it's more engaging for the fans, it's fun and exciting and it gives the team an opportunity to score points quickly. And we've seen that the last two weeks in a row. In terms of the DC locker room, the vibe, what is everything like there and Coach Barlow? I mean I feel like even last year runs a heavy, a tight shift or what is that? What's it like being in the locker room there? Barlow's definitely a player's coach. I've had a few of those in the past that can really relate to the players. He's very open to different ideas and strategies and things that we go with. He's got an open door policy, so that's really cool to see from him is that he was a player once he gets it. But we're going on our second year of having a really good squad. Last year we had a great team. Obviously we lost the championship game, but we're starting to build that culture and it's really cool to see us excel now. We've had really close games and I think we can play a lot better and our offense and defense have talked about that, Hey, we need to put a better product on the field because we've proven to do that last year. And so yeah, we're building that culture. We got a lot of the same guys back, we got some new faces, but it's really cool to see that now in year two of the same team just starting to build some chemistry. Yeah, it is a lot of carryover. But then between injuries or players getting other opportunities, things, I mean it is Jordan's there obviously kind of at the helm, but it's a different chemistry this year. Is that, do you feel like you guys are getting into this now as we get into week four so hard with that limited training camp and we're trying to come in, you think you're finally hitting it because even last year some of these teams, it's taking you to week seven, eight to really get things going? Well, I mean that's exactly what happened with us last year. It took some time, especially defensively to really start locking it down and Greg's been on 'em. Coach Williams has been on 'em like, Hey, listen, we've got to kind of finally wake up and say, listen, we are a solid defensive unit because Greg's a phenomenal defensive coach. He is on those guys week in and week out. Well, yay. Honestly, I'm witnessing it on the sideline watching it. And so he's very tough. But I think that's where, again, it takes time. We don't had four weeks of training camp, but we don't have an off season to develop. We didn't have the luxury of what some of these NFL guys have. Heck we didn't even know if we were going to have a league. And so when it came out that we had a league, we had a little group chat of all of us and staying in contact with each other. But yeah, I think it's going to take time. We through week three, but still to be able to pull off a win, and I said this the other day in an interview is that no matter in what sport you're in professionally, and I say that because this league is professional ball because there's guys that are 2, 3, 4, 5 year NFL vets and even a one year out there is really good talent on these teams and I think that's what we need to get a point across to fans and people looking to watch this league is like, listen, we're not guys that don't deserve opportunities or we're not good enough to play in the National Football League. That's not the case at all. It's just limited opportunity. So we're able to put up a good product, it's just going to take time. It just takes a couple of weeks to get our momentum and figure out what we do and who we are. The episode that this is all going to be a part of, we're talking kind of XFL and USFL and markets and people, what teams have fans showing up and obviously DC and St. Louis are really obviously the 10 poles for in terms of fans coming up, what's it like playing there? What's it like knowing, I know you were in Arlington last week, but what's it like playing there and just knowing that that team really is full support of you guys? Yeah, I like the soccer stadium. I like the capacity of that. It's really a cool environment because especially towards the end of last season, we packed that thing 12, 15,000 people. And so I really liked that aspect of it. When I was playing with New York, we played at MetLife and so we played at a massive stadium and we still had a really good crowd in New York before covid hit. And I remember when we played at DC like okay, this is a somewhat intimidating atmosphere. I've played in big time college football games in NFL with a hundred thousand plus. And I said, in order to get that professional feel, you need that fan attendance I think. And last year when we played in St Louis, they're packing that dome full and opening up new sections each week. So the fan support is crucial into the success of this league and I think that's the point that we have to get across. Just like I said in your previous question was that the product is there and the talent is there. It's guys that should be playing on Sunday and that have played on Sunday, but it's spring football. I mean, what else are we going to watch on TV as fans right? It, it's a great product and a great atmosphere and again, I couldn't be any more excited with it. I think it's been good so far. Yeah, we were at Audi Field for the kickoff back in 2020 and then I went last year. I'm Seattle and so I went when you guys took care of the Sea Dragons there to go on, I was removed from my own safety from the beer snake section because I had all my, and they said the security and they said, we got to relocate you. I said, I'm just because it's like a hardcore fan, but it's all these spring football. I'm like, this isn't like you're going to, no one's attacking me here at the XFL game. But it's certainly a passionate fan base there, so it's exciting to see. Yeah, for sure. I mean the beer steak section, I think they opened up another section for our home game against the Battle Hawks in a couple of weeks. They're doing a promo I saw, which is kind of cool. They're doing $16 tickets or something in the hundred sections, so they're utilizing my number to sell some tickets, which is cool and try to make it affordable. Bring the families out, bring the kids out on Saturday and Sundays and get to watch NFL caliber talent. What's any better than that? It's really cool. Last question here, just speaking of fan support, you guys are going into Birmingham this weekend going to be a big one. They're one of tremendous teams and obviously everyone's supporting that. Thoughts going into the weekend and what are you looking forward to? Yeah, so it's going to be a huge game. I was going to have a watch party at my restaurant back in Texas, but there's another kickoff same time and it's a regional game so we won't be able to have a watch party in Brownwood, Texas with it. But I'm excited for the opportunity because we believe that we should have won that championship game and so we see this as the XFL versus the USFL championship game. And so that's been our mentality this week as a team is we've heard things about Birmingham and that they're really solid football club, but we're eager to take it on and come to their home field. So again, I'm excited for this league, I'm happy for the opportunity and grateful for the opportunity because it's a platform that not only me as a kicker, but other positions have that we need the game film in order if we want to go into the National Football League or continue playing in this league, whatever it is, we need the game tape. And so I'm thankful for those that made it happen in short term because merging a league like this from XFL to USFL, I don't know how they pulled it off, but I'm glad they did. Yeah, no, as I was at San Antonio, I also don't know, we also expected you guys to win the championship game, so that was as much of a flabbergast, but I mean give Alexander Flowers, you got a little revenge last week, so that was good. I mean I know it's not the same as getting the trophy, but This game will be fun, man. I mean, like I said, we've seen it as the XFL versus USFL championship. That's how we're kind of approaching it and take that mentality of how we've created the XFL in our hand against the USFL. It should be fun. It should be fun for fans to watch. So if that's in your area, man, the people that are listening to this, it'll be one to tune into. Well Matt, I appreciate it taking the time. Dave Naer was running long. I appreciate you waiting a few minutes a week. I'm trying to get all this going so super appreciate it. Good luck. Even though you took the Sea Dragons out of the playoffs last year, we'll be supporting. So good luck and have a great weekend. Yeah, appreciate your support ma'am. Big thanks to all of our guests today. Always appreciate getting to catch up with Paul Reese taking time from his work with the websites that he runs coming on talking about good wide ranging conversation. Don't want to be too negative Nancy, but it's an interesting discussion here. I think Fox maybe overestimated and we're giving away tickets and now we're trying to build this back up. I thought Paul probably vocalized it better succinctly than I ever could, but I thought that was a great discussion with Paul. I know Dave Naor, ISS a busy guy a week before the draft, so I appreciate him taking the time with everything. Always great getting Dave on. I think it is been since the Gray Cup, so it's been way too long since we've had Dave Naer on the podcast and then Matt McCrae coming on DC Defenders really appreciate that and him taking the time and them setting that up with the league should be a good show next week. I know we have the NFL draft, got a good guest coming on that is very NFL draft focused, but he is very anxious to talk about the UFL. So we will get him on working for a couple different interviews with the league and then we'll figure out some CFL stuff as well. So like I said, I can subscribe if you like all this stuff, get us a 3,500 subscribers and we'll see you guys next time. Hope you have a great weekend. Take care.

UFL Week 3 Results, TV Ratings + Attendance! Winner and Losers From UFL Week 3!!

Well here we are back again Tuesday this week recapping UFL week three here, a preview in UFL week four. Lots of stuff going on. Andy and I had batted around doing the show. Yeah, I thought I was going to have to work yesterday. No show last Friday was out of town. Big show coming up. I will preview that on Friday, but first let's get Andrew Murray in here. Andrew, how are you doing? Good man. You survived la We did. Made that all the way to Bakersfield, my old stomping grounds and back hung out with some of the friends there. Orlando and Adams on my old station. 14 years since I left Bakersfield. I hadn't really done that. Math made me feel very old. I mean I've been through Bakersfield before. It's a town. That's all I can say about it really. It's a town. It's a town. I appreciate. Yeah, we were going to go, I thought I was going to have to film late yesterday so we said okay, let's do it today and then I ended up, my gig was done at noon and then we were okay, we were going to do it and then we had all the Garbers news coming down so we'll be able to do that today. Basically We'll do TV ratings via Mike Mitchell. We'll do attendance thoughts on that. We'll do the chase stuff. We won't probably do game by game breakdowns of everything just because it's Suzy, but we'll talk through the weekend. We'll preview all that stuff last week. But coming up this Friday, USFL historian Paul Reese is going to be joining the show. We were going to do that last week, was hoping to get a little league support with some interviews. So we will see I got my hooks out for a good XFL guest as well. Someone from one of the teams. I think you would like Andy, but Paul Res confirmed. And then for all you CFL heads, Dave Nailer nails coming back on. So we're going to be talking to the Edmonton Elk Sale and the Chad Kelly's of it all and maybe get Dave's thoughts on what he thinks of it. What is a UFL? All of that stuff. Andy, does that sound exciting? Well I mean it's your bi biannual meeting with Dave. You got to have it right. You meet him at the Gray Cup and you got to have him on the podcast once in a while. I mean the C is so honestly I was thinking about the CFL this whole weekend. I know I think some of us joked in the chat about some of the C FFL previews because I mean it's not that far away. Training camps are going to happen before we know it and the draft will come through so I hate to already be onto the next league and thinking about CFL, but I really have to give it credit. I've gotten fully integrated with CFL fandom the last few years and I really wish it's going to be interesting having not having them at the same time as the USFL and now be able to cross over from UFL over to CFL in a smooth transition. So I mean I always love having your CFL fans. I know your CFL fans are clamoring for you to have your CFL guests on. Yeah, we'll get it. Yes. What I was going to say is I like not having to do whatever it was 32 weeks straight or whatever of post-game recaps and all of that on Monday. So that'd be good. We'll do the UFL here and then we'll do that getting here. Mike Mitchell loving. Yes, I brought out, I have so many good jerseys, but I get so perspirating during the podcast and so I try to layer, but I need to bring out more of this stuff. I have a whole, I had my John Cena one last week and then I have this, so we'll do all that. Yes, Philip doing that as well. First off, I guess just breaking news reactions. Do you want to talk Chase the Chase Garbers news or do we want to do TV ratings? Where do you want to go first? I think we got to talk about Chase first. Okay, so let's talk about Chase. I'll pull up the story here. Yeah, we were like literally we would've been just going live yesterday before all this comes out, but know Laughing Mather big deal, right? San Antonio, Bramos quarterback, chase Garbers bras lose the game, he gets injured, kind of all that stuff. What do you make of that? Let me pull up Mike's story here. It's a tremendous shame. Chase Garver was off to a scintillating start in that offense. He was accurate, he was poised. He already had an epic comeback under his belt with the game they had against Memphis. Apparently he got injured in the middle of this game and still managed to play through the injury. He actually was on a heater in the fourth quarter for San Antonio when they were trying to come back against the Battle Hawks and it's really just a detriment to the whole operation of San Antonio's offense. And the same thing happened last year when Brandon Silvers got hurt. This offense just never looked the same with AJ Smith and this entire staff when their head guy got hurt and here you have the same situation with Garbers almost around the exact same time that Silvers got hurt. So it's almost eerie in that way unfortunately. I don't know as far as their options go for people who were fans of Quentin Dormy, he might get his chance again, he might be blowing his horn and charging in, but there have been speculation about or what could be done, who they could pick up and what kind of players they could add in Chase's stead. But the fact of the matter remains right now. They've lost their number one starter and you were talking about a potential MVP candidate, so this is really just devastating for the Braas. Yeah, it's tough and it's one of those, like you said, it is so hard to build kind of the continuity. We're getting all these wraps, we're getting everything going to go down like this. Obviously losing the game anyway, going down to two on ones for that. I don't know. I mean we had batted around, we call PJ Walker, do we call Cole McDonald? Do we call any of these people? We kind of batted rather in our group chat. I don't know what the best option here is. And I think dorm, I think he was doing the media avail today. I was getting my teeth worked on, so I would've hopped on that to kind of see what he had going on. His is either today or tomorrow, I can't remember because AJ was working on that as well. AJ Smith. But yeah, presumably he goes this weekend. What do you think, does the offense look any remotely similar with Dormy there? I mean the question with Dormy is can he be as efficient as Garbers? I mean dorm's arm, I have a lot of faith in just based on some of the tape that he put on for the Guardians last year and he was pretty accurate down the field. Garber's obviously operates much more in the efficiency standpoint in terms of throwing a lot of screens, throwing a lot of seam routes, throwing a lot of these shorter routes and letting a lot of the players do yards after the catch. Like John, Trey Kirkland, Cody Latimer, Anthony McFarland, all these weapons that they have on the Brahma's offense and now you bring in a different kind of pastor with dormant. Can he do the same things? I think he can if he's able to be coached up, I believe in his ability. I just wonder as far as the overall efficiency, I mean one of the most impressive things about this team was they started off the game three for three on fourth down. So even when their backs up were against the wall, they still always had a great game plan down by down and they only failed on a fourth down at the very end of the game when they were trying to come back, whether they were down by seven. So I mean I'm not sure if the accuracies is going to be there. I do think maybe some of the downfield passing game might open up a little bit, but again, that's not always in the cards for AJ Smith's operations, so we'll see how he adjusts. It's interesting you bring up PJ Walker. He's currently an unrestricted free agent, but it's one of those things where we see this in some of these leagues where once you make enough of a name of yourself, you get your paycheck from the NFL and then you're kind of indoctrinated in their system and you just kind of cycle through the rest of paternity. I mean that's happened with a number of guys that managed to make it there. Some of them now, I mean there are a couple names like Chris Traveler, he's going back to the CFL, he was in the NFL for a few years. You've had Josh Johnson, I mean he was in the NFL, he went to the A f, now he's back in the NFL has been in the NFL. He's not really seemingly going to be joining into these spring leagues ever again. So it really depends on the personality of the player, what they're looking for, what kind of opportunities they have. Do they just want to play or they want to make a paycheck or try to work their way onto an NFL team. So I don't know if PJ Walker's really realistically a chance. I think it'd be shocking if he really actually came back. I mean it would be like if Nathan worked way back to the BC Lions, it really would be Well and the whole idea and we were talking that the PJ Walker maybe in another year that makes sense where he's still so fresh coming off of this, the practice squads and all that stuff where he's still hovering around and God knows what's going to happen with the draft next week and everything else going on that way. And so yeah, God forbid he comes in here and gets hurt or whatever and then isn't able to make it into camp. I think that that's kind of unrealistic. But that man, that would be at least, I don't know, do casuals get, I dunno if PJ Walker to the UFL is like a casual, oh we got to go. I mean I think the fans of the league would go crazy, but I don't know if that has the same kind of impact as even doing the Matt Corral kind of someone that was just there. Do you think that that pops like a casual fan rating? I don't think so, but certainly for people who followed the XFL, absolutely they would go bonkers and people obviously Texas residents would go bonkers because he played over in Houston. I mean PJ Walker was five and oh, he was on pace to throw 30 touchdowns in that XFL season, which is insane. I mean that is gargantuan numbers in a spring league, but I don't think he really moves the needle for the casual viewership as you said. But the thing that I really kind of took away from this, especially with these injuries happening, especially with we'll get to Case cus in sort of his plight right now, it's a risk for some of these quarterbacks to come back to these leagues because offensive line is everything and there's already talk at the NFL level about their not being enough offensive linemen and it's something that we talk about in spring leagues. I mean they're just not in that big of supply and also defensive linemen are getting more athletic and they're getting more dynamic as a quarterback. It's really a risk injury that is not worth the compensation that you get or maybe the notoriety that you could receive if you played well enough in the league. So for a lot of these free agents and maybe in talks with their actual agents at home, they may not find that it's overall long-term good play to be in these leagues in terms of just the injury risk. And I kind of can't fault them because we've seen it happen. I mean we see it at all levels of football, but especially when there's a chance that you could be signed by an NFL team, you don't really want to throw caution to the wind like that. If you really think it's possible you could get hurt. Well it's kind of like this is such, but that was why the Rock for years, they're like, Hey, we want the Rock to come back to WWE and the rock's. Like I have a $200 million movie I'm working on, I'm not going to go risk. And I mean the Rock made $9 million here coming back for WrestleMania, which is crazy. But yeah, I'm not going to go, we have bigger sites has head here than four weeks or whatever by the time he gets in. That was even the bents of it by the time we get in. Okay. Obviously whoever you bring in won't play this week. Okay, so now we're next week. Okay, now we're in the week five already. You just have to wonder, I don't doubt Wade and AJ's motivation some of the times, some of this USFL coaches, the Jeff Fishers of the world, like hey, we're fine. Are we really making a push here for the last four weeks? Do you sense that? Because I do think it's interesting how all these coaches would attack this situation. I mean you could make in-season trades maybe with other teams and maybe there's a quarterback that was on a roster last year, but again, it depends on what their priorities are and where they're going. And I always think about quarterbacks that got injured last year. I mean, I don't know, does Brandon Silvers, is he interested in doing that Again, what would happen if someone like Luis Perez got hurt? I'm not trying to wish that on anybody, but if he got hurt, would he even consider coming back or has he made enough of a name of himself that he would say maybe I'm good. I'm just speculating in that way. But I mean for these coaches you have to really think outside the box. You of course want to have backups. I mean there's some teams like Birmingham who they don't care. They'll just plug anybody in and they make it work, but we'll get onto them later. But for the reality of a lot of these teams, you have to have somebody in place that knows the system and is able to work within it. And it really depends on who they want. I mean the battle hawks really like somebody like Nano last year, does he work on a team like San Antonio? I'm not so sure you could throw a lot of names out there, but again, unless you know the system and you are confident in what they bring to the table and if they want to be part of it, it's really threading a needle and I'm not sure it's as simple as people make it seem to be in terms of just signing a name And like I said, not that, but just to kind of put it in. I know we live and die by all of this, right? Anti and all the merger. Do you punt on this season? I know even people with the league we're just trying to get through this year and to figure out what we want to do next year and how we want to brand, I don't know. I think that this isn't, we're making the chiefs are trying to get the triple threat and we got to go back again all the, it's the UFL at the end of the day. I mean I like, oh Chase, what if he gets, he could be non-injured, come back in time to play the rest of the year. It's like he's not coming back to play the last week of the season. If he's on borderline, I mean this isn't Lamar Jackson game time call here, we're trying to get to the playoffs. You just need to be kind of just realistic about where all this is in the world. I think in terms of people's health and last point it was like the A GM McCarran thing, he needs to come the guy's playing, it was like the McLeod, Bethel Thompson. Pat's always on this. These guys have lives, these have families, they have other things to do then go play four weeks in spring football or whatever for yeah, it's good money, but it is what it's, I give AJ McCarran all the credit in the world for coming back. That's a great name to bring up because he really had no reason to and he didn't have to. He's proven it. He proved it last year. He was spectacular and now he comes back to an even better arsenal. But there's no guarantees with that. Obviously you never know what's going to happen. You could get hurt like you said, and then he doesn't have a chance to go back with the Bengals and be a backup, but he decided he wanted to come back. So all the credit to him. But this is always an individual decision made by every player and you can't really assume just based on what you're projecting them to do in the league or what they could do in the league or what kind of clout they could get. Again, I think that's a little overvalued in my opinion. It's great. I am thankful for whoever comes in and decides to play. I'm thankful that we get continuity like Perez, like McCarran, some of the Birmingham players. It's great, but it's not guaranteed Getting a lot of calls here. Philip starting to hear the Charman Jones so out of football now didn't he go try out for a CFL team last year? Wasn't he on the training camp for the Elks or something? He Was, yes. Yes. Okay, good. But then again, the Elks have signed 827 quarterbacks since last off season. So they'll sign anybody. But I mean no Charmin's out or Cardell's out. Last we spoke of Cardell. He was doing cameos in about 15 minutes for the podcast because he had so little going on. I don't think that he's involved in that. Leon, the other question we got to get Ben Kurt's done. I mean he's like, I don't think he really liked his time with the XFL. I know he got hurt. I don't like how he handled any of that situation at all. I'm like, well, they said I'm signed to the league and I don't even, I'm like, okay, well then the league's tweeting it out. This isn't insiders. The league tweeted that you signed at at least it was far enough that mountain line. But I think Ben Kurt's out. I don't think that that's a possibility. I don't think so either. I mean, once you make it as a media personality, you're pretty set. You don't really have any reason to have to move beyond that. Pat McAfee probably could have played a little bit longer in the NFL, but he's got a media empire he wanted to start. You don't really have, don't have to do those kinds of things if you don't want to. And football is a tough sport. I think football is really just a way of getting your name out there. At the end of the day, it's not even just about making money. I mean if you're playing in the NFL and you're a top player, awesome, fantastic, but that's not the reality for a lot of guys. Some of it's, Hey, I got to get my pension, I want to make a name for myself once I know that I made it, I'm out. I'm good. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. This is one of the most brutal sports on the planet. I get it. And so for me, I'm not beholden to the idea of somebody coming back just because they played in the league previously. I mean sometimes like you said, they have a sour experience, they don't want to do it again. Yeah, and I agree with you there where you're talking about, I think it's understated sometimes just how brutal football is and it's like, yeah, let me just, what was it, Joe Flacco did it last year, right? And that was the greatest story in the world, how he came off the couch and he came and played. He went to the playoffs. Like that's nots not the normal thing that everybody does that they're going from the carpool line in and they're calling plays at the line of scrimmage. I just think that's understated sometimes. Like, oh yeah, you can just play another six weeks. It's like McLeod played an entire CFL season, got hurt, came back and then played an entire USFL season. That's really hard. I don't care who you are, I don't care how old you are. Anything else from the garbers of it all? Like I said, I mean it's just going to be really interesting to see if they trust someone like Dormy or if they try to swap for somebody else. But like you said, it doesn't matter how quickly they get them. They can't integrate 'em this week. They're going to have to wait. And that's the only downside. That's the one downside that I said and I've advocated for before in these spring leagues. I want to see a bi-week installed for these teams just to have a time to sort of recuperate and have a midseason break to be able to sort of reassess where they're at. I mean the team that could really use it right now for example is Arlington. They need a bi-week, like no one's business. Same with Memphis. There are teams that need that and also just for injury's sake as well, if they had a bi-week, then maybe I could say sure, maybe garbage does come back, but I don't think that's really reality. But that extra week I think could do wonders, especially for trade possibilities too. So hard to trade for somebody and then expect them to be integrated immediately. Had a question here, and I was very dismissive of this, maybe you won't be as dismissive. What a chances to see a player like Zach Wilson come down and get some reps. I say 0.0% at least for a couple of years. I don't see that happening at all. I mean these former draft picks, especially first round draft picks, don't grow on trees, especially aren't going to be growing on trees that come down here. They don't want to really stoop themselves to this level. Look, guys like Johnny Menzel are an anomaly because Johnny Manzel just decided to flame out of every league in existence. That's his own methodology of going through life. So that's different. But as far as the normal basic first round player, it's really hard to expect them because once you get that, you get a first round grade or you get drafted in the first round, you run around with that label for the rest of your life and every coach thereafter thinks even if your first team doesn't accentuate your talents, maybe they can rehab your career in some way, shape or form. And that's just reality. That's a whole nother thing as far as how NFL teams evaluate talent from year to year. But that is just a label that teams can run with when they are trying to look at players and say, well there used to be a first round pick. Maybe we can do something with them and they believe it too. Alright, let's transition. We we can do more roundup questions at the end here if we wanted to do anything else about Garbers. Let's talk TV ratings here. These came out today. I'm always like, oh yeah, because I always check everything and I go back to bed for a few minutes. I'm like, okay, yeah, these were this morning. Mike Mitchell here at the Saturday game, the ESPN DC Arlington, I'm just pulling up so I have the times on here. So that was the 1:00 PM Eastern DC Defenders, Arlington Renegades 534,000, the Memphis at Birmingham Stallions, that would've been the seven o'clock primetime game, 8 37 on Fox and then Sunday, A BC, Houston, Michigan, that was the early one. That was at noon. Noon eastern and then 3:00 PM the St. Louis Battle Hawks Brahm is there hitting the million for that. General thoughts on this? I have a couple thoughts, but general thoughts. It appears that the Saturday morning time slot is maybe the roughest of the entire slate because that also was the case with Memphis and San Antonio last week. It doesn't seem to be an enviable time slot for a lot of people to be watching football. I think a lot, I'm going to be honest, there's people like me who probably would rather be doing chores on Saturday morning and getting all that done as soon as the weekend starts. But I mean the fact of the reality is you're seeing a lot of these numbers come from the network televisions. I know ESPN obviously is this is cable as opposed to having a B, C and having Fox. So that does factor into it as well. But the time slot is also a big factor into it. And the night times it looks like as far as the Saturday night does pretty well. The midday game on Sunday does pretty well and even the Sunday morning game does pretty well. We had that Easter game with San Antonio that first weekend. They seemed to draw at least a decent audience television wise, even when there was really no reason to. So this tells me that it looks like the one problem slot could potentially be Saturday morning. I know that's unavoidable for certain circumstances and also as Mike was talking about, there was the Ohio State Spring football game on at the same time as the DC game, which may have affected viewership and that was over on Fox. So ironically enough, that same network may be drawing away from that audience, but people are going to want to watch those games, whereas with the Alabama game, the Alabama spring game you had after the Arlington game and before the Birmingham game. So you were able to sort of sandwich it in between those two and it didn't affect the viewership at the later game. Yeah, I see time for UFL. We'll talk to your question. We have the two games at the same time coming up next weekend. The issue too is it's also the ESPN, right? So it's early ESPN and the game last week, the early game on Saturday was early ESPN as well. So I had tweeted out and we have, I got here the bookmark from the Mike Ville or whatever with Fox. But to me it's really highlighting, and this is what they've said, this is their game plan. We are consolidating, we're giving the best time slots because, and I've had this conversation with Brett and some of the guys in the Facebook groups today and there's all this talk about, oh, okay, well next week that's the DC Defenders versus the stallions. And that's a really hot game. That's a big, I'm not saying it's a non-zero number, but to me what really dictates this, and we had this song with Ben Fisher last year from the Sports Business Journal. I'll reach out to him here probably like midway point once we have enough of a sample size to kind of talk through. But really at the end of the day, it is the network and then the time slot that it's on the matchups and like, okay, what are the standings? Okay, does this game map playoff implications? As much as we all like to salivate over that like, oh, I can't wait for the Brahmas revenge game against whoever. It doesn't really work that way. I mean Fox is clearly carrying the day here, really good rating for the a b night game, but also that's the A BC night game, right? Sunday night I think that you have, there's X number of TVs in America that are tuned to Fox X number that are turned to A B, C. That's why last year, the USFL in 2022 with the kickoff, let's do the simulcast on Fox and NBC because then we'll get the double ratings because there's roughly about a million people that are going to be watching you and roughly a million people they'll be doing that. I dunno, I think anything around the millions good. I think if you're significantly under that, I think it's losing relevance. I think Ben Fisher said have 500,000 and lower. You're probably not necessarily hitting that on OTA. I'm not talking the ESPN one. I'm talking like if you're on Fox A, B, C, but yeah, I mean it's good. It is certainly not falling off a cliff for any guard. Well, I mean those Fs, so one games which score a 200,000, which was just that wasn't going to get it done. These numbers on network television certainly are encouraging and it shows you that there is a floor involved here. Again, the floor is not as high as it was when it was XFL pre covid, but you still have a lot of numbers here to work with as far as the floor goes. And like you said, I agree, the matchup doesn't really matter to the casual audience. It's time slot, it's convenience. It's when people can be in front of their televisions to watch these games. And of course you want to showcase the best games with the best audiences as well. That Arlington ESPN game, which from an attended standpoint, it wasn't the greatest TV product, which we can get into later, but that first St. Louis home game was on a B, C at night on Saturday, like a 5:00 PM primetime matchup. That's great. That's exactly what you want. You want to put those kinds of games. I know they can't really do that in terms of being at the mercy of the venue availability and being able to have time slots that they want to work with, but you do what you can. I still think this is better than we've had in previous years. Obviously no competition head to head with both leagues existing and also the fact that you're not using channels like FX or FS one to sort of put your games on or Peacock, which was another one. So you're not cutting viewership that way either. Just to put it in context, I had a question here from Leon did the spring, I'm assuming you're talking about the Spring League, but this is a good comparison, is when did the spring games draw Radiance wise on Fox? If we look here and let me pull this up on XL new sub would a throwback, the Spring league, the Brian Woods cardboard box. I made a football league out of a cardboard box in my garage, 418,000 for their finale on Fox in the spring. And that was different times and covid and all that stuff. But just to put it in perspective, because when the USS L Season one, oh my God, we're doing, I'm like, okay, it's such a jump from what the Spring league was in terms of now we're paying the players, obviously we're paying the coaches and we're doing the hub and we're doing all this stuff and we have all these teams and we're not just playing basically scrimmages and all that stuff to get 200, 300 more thousand. It shows you kind of where that four is. And so what do you make of that here to get four 18 for the Mega bowl? I mean we're getting 800,000 for the UFL here, but it shows you, I mean there's even a four below this and it's really, that's always interesting to me. I mean the Spring League was not a leak. I mean the Spring League was a proof of concept that honestly I've grown to appreciate more as time has gone on because the fact that it was basically operating on the budget of a Diet Coke and to me that was a testament to how the players played and also the fact that you could just put football and TV in it work. Now, I do not believe in that concept for the UFL because there needs to be more effort put into presenting the product because it has be a TV product. Now, if you're going to say it's a TV product, then start pretending like it's a TV product. You can't just put it in front of people and have a venue full of 15 people on a drone and expect it to sell. That doesn't work. The Mega Bowl was the baseline. I thought that was basically an experiment and then it spilled over to the Birmingham hub and it was not an enviable TV product. So that is something that I think was lost in translation there, at least on Fox's end. But it does show you that there is a baseline interest in the sport, which is great, but you have to work on that and be able to build on that if you're going to present it to the public. Okay, so I guess the spring games were the Ohio State Spring football games that you're saying said well, so that's another good comparison as well. But I like talking about the spring league. Any chance I get, maybe I'll wear my Joer jersey next week. So mean, there's certainly a floor here for I think for football of any kind. I had tweeted out at the end of the day, the time slot is really all that matters. People don't care if it's X-F-L-U-S, F-L-U-F-L-Q-F-L, it's football on in the place where I can easily find it. That's good enough for me. Do you agree? Disagree. I mean for now that's just the reality and it's not really going to be about the matchups. Maybe some people will become familiar with a Battle Hawks brand or a stallion's brand or a defender's brand, but that takes time to build that relationship with people. And for now they're just another league, another football league with a bunch of random teams that most people dunno about. And that to me tells you or tells me that you have to have a good time slot to show these games. Yeah, I'll be curious to get Ben's slot. I have a feeling I know what he's going to say just because we always had 'em last year. Mike here has a question. Replace ESPN with NBC, that'd be a major coup. Yeah, if wishes and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas. I mean a certain point you're not like this was pulling teeth to get to this kind of merger here that we have going on. I mean generally speaking TV networks are like, Hey, hey buddy, do you want to work on this with me? I mean Fox wanted to get involved in this obviously bit off a little maybe more than they thought they could. Redbirds doing all this stuff. They weren't finding the return on investment they wanted. It was very fortuitous circumstances right now. But that's generally not how major TV networks work. No, it's not. And also keep in mind NBC was burned by the XFL in 2001, but I know its time has passed, so maybe tempers have cooled since then. As far as the relationship, obviously they took on some of the SFL games last year and the year before, so they were willing to share in that load a little bit. But look, SPN and A BC are invested in this product and I can't really fault them either way. It's not an idea of people aren't watching ESPN, I think it's just more how are they presenting the product because people clearly will watch SPN for other things like women's basketball and that's not a problem. So I think it's more of how it's being presented and that you can go into TV presentation and all that if you want to. But that to me is more of the story here as opposed to let's just throw it over another network and let them have the numbers. I don't think that's really sustainable. It's good to have that here. I think you need to work on building on the audiences on all fronts, A, B, C-E-S-P-N Fox. You need to be able to build into the audiences that you have right now because that's where your familiarity with that audience is. People aren't flocking the NBC to watch spring football. Yeah. Leon had a question here. How many USFL and XFL games topped a million last year? The USFL only had the two, and Mike's comment on here was the championship game and then the one where they had the whole Kentucky Derby and they popped that rating coming into all of that stuff. But XFL, I'm sure Max is on here and can do that stuff. If Max is still on the chat, I'm sure he can pump that out. Yeah, Mike had more than two last year. Let's see here, we have a $5 super chat. That's exciting. Andy, we're rolling in the money right now. Let me get this out from Coach Sip and jam juice out of a straw. I appreciate that. I know if I've seen you on here before, please like everyone like and subscribe. Like I said, big show coming up on Friday. Dave Naor, Paul Reese, US Val historian, do you think the league underestimates the value of A UFL films, innovative NFL film circuit, sixties, seventies in terms of marketing? I think we are trying to do the best we can right now. I think we did the player 54 thing and I don't necessarily think they saw the return investment on that. I know we did the United by Football thing. I'll tell you, I think it was week three, they hadn't uploaded the new episode yet. They had re-uploaded the weeks before and I did not hear one peep of anybody on it until I went on to try to watch it on demand. So I can tell you the viewership isn't necessarily outstanding there. Andy, any other thoughts on that? I think maybe in a couple of years down the road, I don't know if there's even the UFL today show. I know we champion like, okay, we're doing this and this is good, but I don't know how much appetite there is. I mean, I love to have a pregame show, but I don't know if that's there either. I don't know if the appetite is available for something like that and for UFL films, I mean it would be great to have that. It really would. I just don't know if they have the allocated resources. I mean they're already dealing with things like social media and community marketing and other things that I think that I'd rather them work on first before we really worry about things of that nature. But yeah, it would be a great way to promote your product and promote the league and promote your brand. I just dunno if that's really a priority right now, considering other things that I would rather they work on. But sure, that's something that I would like to see from the league eventually. Max. Yeah, six XFL games over the million. The other thing as well, comment, I guess we've never talked about this on the show talking about we never got to cover the destroying injury, which I shouldn't laugh at, but I guess that happened right as I was flying out. But another blow, I don't know if I can say exactly what I said in the group chat last night because Dorothy came home and I said, Hey man, the brass quarterback got injured. Chase Garbers. And she's like, oh. She's like, man, the bras are really having a lot of injuries. I'm like, what's his story about the bra? She goes, well, no, that annoying YouTuber that you, I'm like, oh God, we had been to LA and all that stuff. But yes, the Donald, Hey, any comments on the destroying injury? We never really got to that. Well, you certainly started a firestorm before that even happened because of the video of him doing the tackle. But look, I can get into that in a second, but I'll say this first, destroying, it's unfortunate I feel for him because it was a cool story. He obviously made a lot of notoriety, a lot of people who wouldn't have followed the league otherwise were following because of him. So he brought in an audience. Now from my standpoint, it's fascinating to see a player celebrated so much who had never even attempted a field goal in the league. I've never quite seen that. I can't just for my money and no offense, just not offense to him or anything, it's hard for me to characterize you as a star player when you literally don't record anything on the stat sheet as in your primary position. I mean obviously he'd done special teams things, he'd done kickoffs and he had tackles to his name, but he had never attempted a field goal and San Antonio didn't attempt a field goal until this past weekend when he was out. So for me, I mean it's a fascinating phenomenon that happened with him, but it just goes to show that you got to be ready for these games. And as far as filming and being part of something really special, that's cool. But at the end of the day, it's a brutal sport and it can chop your head off in a second. It can take you out immediately. It can all end in one fell swoop. We've seen that with other players. So I feel for destroying that aspect that it just ended so abruptly. But that's kind of the reality with the sport and we've seen that for many guys who don't get nearly as much notoriety. Yeah. Jared here has a good comment and this, this doesn't need to be a whole tangent on term right now, but I agree with the thought process, right? This is someone big we're going to bring them on to do. I have lived through my entire life and thankfully now WWE E is at a point under Triple H where they are confident in being a pro wrestling brand. I lived through 25 years, whatever I was watching, and Vince McMahon of we need to find other cooler people than we are. So they can come in and then they'll bring in their audience, we'll bring in David, our cat back in WCW. He will win the championship. We'll bring in, I remember Jeremy Vin came on like Entourage is hot, let's bring on Bob Barker. I mean, they did this whole thing and every week it was like we were giving away money at one point. And anybody that's cooler, just be confident in your brand. Just be confident in your brand. I think at the end of the day, yeah, I mean it doesn't hurt to have destroying a part of it. I just don't think we need to be falling over ourselves. This is so incredible. That's my 2 cents. Max was asking for this and I'm doing this under protest. I think this is rude, but when destroying posted his neck brace meme, and now keep in mind this is very serious injury. I'm glad he's safe and thankfully he's going to be fine. But I mean it really is a new meme, right Andy? I mean this really is right. Am I wrong? I don't know if he's selling it as a meme. I know you are. I wouldn't have gone that way, but for me, I don't know how much light he's really making of his injury here. Well, I know, but I mean it's a little bit, it's a thing. It's a thing. Sorry, I just had that Max was asking for it. That's the thing. It's a little bit of an envelope push. I'll just say that. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Okay. Let's talk about anything else on that. We'll talk attendance here. We got to talk some actual football, but I want to have it, we had a comment about the building local fan base is all that stuff. So you want to move to attendance Always. Okay, so we have this, and I'm going to have again, Paul Reeds on the show this week talking about some of the USFL markets. Birmingham showing up here with the 12,000 for their home opener, high weather mark of the weekend. That stadium, we have a whole breakdown of, I think Stefan and them made it, but Max checked the numbers. We'll do all that deep dive with Paul Reese about attendance and all that stuff on Friday, but 12,000 for Birmingham, Arlington, the new low for them at Michigan, continuing a three week decline at San Antonio. If that darn stadium wasn't so big, I think that would maybe feel a little bit better. What did you make of the attendance this weekend? Disappointing is the word I would use, but here's the reason why, and I want to go into a couple of things here. First of all, for Arlington, I mean it barely looked like anybody was in the stadium when they first started the game. And our colleague Anthony Miller had noted as such this was going to be a low attendance game. And he was right. I am not quite sure what happened here because they drew 14,000 their first game against Birmingham. Maybe the novelty of playing another XFL team wore off, but the people just did not show up. And it is the lowest attendance they've had ever. Any of the leagues that they played in the 2020 version, the 2023 version, and now this version, they've never had so many low attendance numbers. Now I know the team had started off oh and two, but they've gotten off the slow starts before and that didn't stop people from coming. So something was lost in translation here. Really disappointing on that end. Birmingham. Okay, look, I've had just about enough of all these stallion fans coming out every week and saying, look, you don't understand this league. These people really care about Birmingham. They care about stallions football back to back, whatever. There's all these people that really care about stallions football. I'm sure there are. They're not showing up at the stadium. Half the stadium is empty. You pack everybody on one side, it looks awkward. I don't know what it is. Either it's a Celine Dion concert or it's a gas station opening, or apparently it's the Alabama spring game. Now all of a sudden, that seems to be the other aspect of it. I don't know what excuses, I don't want any more excuses. You have a back-to-back champion. You have a consistent football team, you have notoriety, you have success, you have history, you have everything you need. Why aren't people showing up? I want to know. I got to know. And you know what? Maybe the answer isn't there in plain sight for a lot of people. Maybe it's, maybe it's Fox's undoing. Maybe it's the fact that there's things around Birmingham that are stopping people from wanting to go to the stadium. And I know I got heat for it for writing an article two years ago about how the infrastructure was less than desirable around it. And people took the issue with that. Well, you know what? They can keep taking issue with it. There's got to be something here that's stopping people from going to games. Because what's the excuse? This team is getting significantly out drawn by the Battle Hawk brethren who have just about more than three times as much as attendance as they do, they get out drawn by dc I mean, people were celebrating. I saw somebody celebrating this week where they were showing the attendance numbers and the percentage of the stadium that they're filling out. It's 26% of the stadium that it filled out. And someone's like, great, we're third place. That's not an accomplishment to sell. I'm sorry, it's not. It's really not. This Birmingham team has to draw better. I'm sorry, end of story. I don't want to hear any more excuses from the stallions fans, Nate here. How can there not be a smaller stadium that's usable? They're in a deal with protective, right? Wasn't that in the whole, I mean, I think now maybe this is year three and we can move on from that, but I agree with that. I don't know. I think the 2022, the 8,700 home games or whatever for all the teams, I think they really did just really hard there for irreversible damage for that Birmingham brand because yeah, last year these numbers are down compared to last year and even last year was down compared to the time before. So I don't know. I agree with you because talking and we had, excuse me, a comment from Jacob. The Houston game next week could be really rough because the rice stadium of it all, and Houston's not good. And I don't know. I agree. Attendance isn't the end of the world ride. And you always see that like, oh, it's the TV ratings. It has been wildly proven here now for two years that people do not like to watch football with empty stadiums. It makes you feel like you're back in Covid. It's really weird. It doesn't look right. Even I watched the Mariner game last night, Monday night baseball. It is a crowd. It's fine. And the mariners aren't onto the hottest star, but it's a griffey Bobblehead night. It was fine. You got to have some sort of energy in there. And when you have some of these, this Michigan with the 6,900 people in that Ford field, like it is rough. And then to me it compounds because then if the game's slow and then it kills the audience even, it's just a compounding effort at that point. Yeah, it kills the energy level. I mean, that's the attendance of high school football championships in the state of Michigan. That's the kind number we're looking at. And I'm sure state of Michigan football and high school is great, but for a pro league, that's not the number you need to be drawing. You got to pump that up. Now, three home games in a row doesn't help to start the season, so that does tax your audience a little bit as well. But I mean, the proof of concept of being in an NFL city hasn't really beared out for the USFL here or the UFL, I guess in this case for San Antonio too. I mean, I have to keep myself from framing it in this reference, but I can't help but keep looking back at those commander games and back in 2019. But the thing is, it's a different audience and it's a market that's been burned. It's been burned before, and I think they all remember that they have that skepticism for San Antonio. They've got to find a way to build that audience back because the Alamo Dome can be really cool when it's filled, but at the time being, it's still kind of cavernous with how many people really go to those games. So look, there's work to be done on all fronts. The only teams that are really doing their job are DC and St. Louis. They both have rabid fan bases who are crazy, who are enigmatic, who have personality, who have specific traits to them that you can point to immediately that continue to increase their attendance instead of decrease. They both have success. They both have identity as football teams. You can draw on that, and that's the crown jewel of your leagues. But that's two out of eight teams. It's got to be more than that. It's not going to be enough to be sustainable as far as a marketable entity. You can't just rely on those two teams. There has to be more and work done for these other squads. Well, a couple of things, and I have a little bit of a rant here. I mean, it's not lost on me that the two most successful of any of these brands or two XFL 2020 brands, battle Hawks and defenders I hate. And just as someone that's been, we've all been a part, I mean you've been a part of this as long as I have, but it is been a part of this now, just how we've gotten to this and these markets and everything is the most backwards way of building the football league ever, right? XFL 2020. Okay, we're setting that up, and that was its thing. And that died. USFL, Birmingham, Alabama was the only place that would pay, and they could come up with a deal to do that. Okay? So we're going to do a hub there because the taxes are right and they're giving us a benefit and we can use the stadium. There's all these different reasons why we're going to do that. Otherwise, you would never choose Birmingham, Alabama to be the home base of any football league ever, right? There's just too much competition with college. So then the other seven markets are, well, these were the trademarks that we could acquire from the eighties. There was no thought process of like, well, should we even go to Michigan or should we go to Tampa Bay or should we go And they had comment quotes about this, well, these were the trademarks that we acquired and this is what we're going to do. So then you have those eight teams now, and then when the XFL, a little bit of thought process, okay, we got to bring Seattle back, obviously, DC St. Louis, the Vegas thing we've talked about, and then we're doing all these Texas teams because we're doing the hubs. So again, you would never put three teams in Texas, but now we are. Well, now with this merger, it's like you're keeping the worst out of a lot of these except for the two, right? You would never choose Memphis, Michigan. These are not markets that you would choose to do this. You would choose Oakland, San Diego, St. Louis, you would choose these NFL markets that got left out. And I know there's all the other logistics, but just there's no rational reason why these are the eight teams right now, unless you've seen how all this has gone down. Nobody would pick these eight cities in any map of the world of how to have a football league. I mean, that's the thing that seems like not just a logistical decision, but there's also a little bit of a motion mix in there. The St. Louis fans want to prove to stand Croy, you left us on the side of the road and you were wrong. DC fans proving to Dan Snyder, Hey, we really don't care about your team right now of the way you've operated it. We're going to go over here instead. And they've managed to draw enough. We'll see what happens with the commanders going forward, and if Josh Harris is able to bring those people back, but they've managed to establish themselves in a market that needed them. So for these other markets, I mean, Birmingham sounded like a cool concept, but it just hasn't really borne out that way. And same thing with Memphis. People talked about how great, it seemed like having football in Memphis was, well, it hasn't really borne out that way. And same thing with Michigan, the fact that they're just kind of relying on these ips and these old markers of, well, this was really popular in the eighties, so why isn't it popular now? Because the market's changed, things have changed, the demographics have changed, the communities have changed. You have to do your research on those. And for me, again, I'll always advocate for a team to come into San Diego. I always will, because one, it's the same feeling. A lot of people are spurned by the fact that the charter's left, but also the city is building back its sports identity. They're adding teams now. They're starting to put teams back into the system and they're starting to give themselves their feet after being burned by so many different teams and markets for so long and bad ownership. That's the thing. You have to know what the people are looking for and maybe not every market has this, but maybe some markets just want to thumb their noses at owner that completely abandoned them and for other leagues and other cities, there might be different reasons, but I agree with you. It doesn't seem like there was always enough forethought on placing these markets in the first place And they always dangle that like, oh, well we chose, okay, Memphis might have an owner lined up, right? Mike has said Memphis and that's what they did, and it's the FedEx guy, whatever. You're not buying this franchise. It's averaging 7,000 fans. It's certainly not for anything that the FL, excuse me, that the UFL is going to part with. I mean that's like this idea of I'm going buy and then I'm going to spend my own money. I mean this is a CFL thing all over again. People own CFL teams because it's a cool thing to do. I can't own, obviously they're not going to buy an NFL team. I can own the Bob. I guess Bob Young is different. He really wanted to build it back up, but we own these teams to be cool and to be able to show off and we spend our money until we're done spending our money on it and then we pawn it off on somebody else. I had one thing here and then let's get to some football. We'll probably go a little bit over an hour, but we'll try to get out of here decently and I love that comments a lot. Could Michigan playing in the don't be beat issue? I live in Michigan. There's always an issue. There's always an issue. There's a carwash that's having a sale and there's a bookstore opening and they're like, there's always a reason and I am tired of that of everybody like, well actually seven counties over and they're having, I remember when the Savannah bananas, that's why Birmingham can't draw. It's the, there's always something and I mean I said the same thing with Seattle. It's cracking and that's why people don't want to go and especially when you're playing at exactly the same time three miles away, that is a little bit of a reason, but otherwise there's always going to be an issue And I think it's something that you've touched on before is just getting these guys into the community and being able to be part of the community instead of working out of a hub and then being transplanted into the community after the fact. I mean, you want to integrate these players and be able to get people on board with your product. I mean, one example I can think of in recent memory, which is just drawing bananas numbers all the time, is this team down here called the San Diego Wave. I mean before they even played a game, I was seeing stickers of theirs on people's cars and hoods all over the place and thinking, man, this is a women's soccer league team that is getting this much notoriety and they got some notable players like Alex Morgan and such to play for them, but the fact that they were able to just put themselves out there as an expansion franchise in this league and immediately just draw numbers. I mean they are selling out this 30,000, 35,000 seat stadium sometimes and it's nuts because it's a league that people in most cases would just say like what? NWSL. Okay, I don't know what that is. And they're doing gangbusters because of the way that they integrated themselves into the community and they do all these player signings and they go out and they encourage girls to play soccer in the area and there's some local people. I remember the San Diego fleet, not to get on too much of a tangent, but the San Diego fleet, they had some partnership with this fitness center down here called Orangetheory and there were guys who were getting sponsorships to go work out and be part of some different branches with that company around the area and get people be like, oh, you're a football player. Okay, so where do you play? Oh, okay, you play for this league and that's how it starts because again, your average Joe's not going to know this and that has not been done by this league. It's been more of the corporate mindset of let's just get our numbers audience wise. Whatever it is is what it is. We want the TV ratings, let's just get that interest instead and try to draw national interest. But you have to start from the grassroots first and we've seen that. A couple comments here and then we'll talk games. I had a comment from, and I agree with this and this is going to be more the discussion I wanted to get in with Paul Reese on the show Friday. US L'S ticket model really sandbagged them and you create an expectation that you don't have to pay for tickets. Fans won't show up when they do. I mean, I do think that this, Hey, come five bucks and get a beach towel and we'll do all WWE stars are going to be here, we're doing all this stuff and then now it's like, you want me to pay $70 for it? Whatever it is for the ticket, I don't want to do that. The other thing I love at this Jared buy UFL team when they're small, then sell data for massive profit. Yes, because Philip asked this, right? This is what they're like the model. We want to get the local owners and all this stuff. If I had any amount of money in the world to buy a team and put it in Seattle, I wouldn't do it right now. You're not buying. There's no product to buy, right? If you had done this and if two years ago the SFL had done things correctly and rolled out, maybe by year five you are enticing people to buy into this stuff, but otherwise, what am I buying? 6,000 people showing up? I mean, that's not a gate. That's not even enough to run some of these gates, the venues anyway, like Lumen Field to run that. You're bringing eight whatever. What was the external average in there last year? 10,000 at Lumen, 12,000. Like Lumen Field cost a ton of money to run. I know that because talked to Sam Schwartzstein about the numbers that were involved in that, how they didn't think they were even going to do it there. So this whole idea with that, I don't know. I'm enough of a rant on that. Anything else? And then let's do a little football before we get out of here. Well, just to touch quickly on the MLS thing, I think it's fascinating that in my time sort of talking about it, I mean this is a league that I quite frankly don't spend much time watching if we're just talking about a different sport, but the fact of the matter is what do they have? They have a TV deal with Apple. With Apple plus tv, they have slowly expanded franchises. The expansion fee for the San Diego team next year is upwards of 400 million. I mean for an expansion franchise in the MLS for a league that seemingly most average people don't care about. And obviously I get told by all these people that I teach in my regular job, all these European students and Brazilian students and all that, I'm like, oh, it's an significant league and no one wants to play their mess is obviously going to destroy everybody by playing in there. It's like, okay, but it makes money. It appears to make enough money that people care about it and invest in the product and it keeps expanding, but they don't focus on just television audience or the spectacle of it. Look, the giveaway thing. Why do you think I'm going to a Padres game for the giveaway? No, I love going to Padre games. They're fun and they're a part of the atmosphere. Do I want to be, but I do go to some, I'm going to bar giveaway. I like getting a knit beanie as much as anybody, but that's not why I am going to a game. I could buy that online. That's the thing and that's probably what people are thinking about the other stuff. They're like, whatever. I could buy a spatula and put my slap my own logo. Who cares? That's not the part of it, but maybe you're a giveaway person. I don't know. All right, let's get into some of this stuff here. Just big surprise, upsets for the weekend. We had the Ballad Hawks year over the Bras 31, the 24 Panthers, sherlocking, the roughnecks. I was traveling. I was doing my best to keep up on all this stuff. Birmingham obviously over the showboats as to be expected for their home opener and then DC eking out of the wind. Biggest takeaway from that and then let's start focusing on to next weekend, but just any major takeaways from week three. The renegades really just fell flat and be up 10 points with just a little over two minutes left, which they could have ran the clock down to this two minute warning. They mishandled that and could have ran the clock down on the field goal attempt. They make the field goal. Then you kick it to Chris Roland who has been pretty good the entire game. He's made some big plays. He runs it back past the 50 yard line DC scores quickly and is able to get a two point conversion and then they get that fourth and 12th onside play, which is starting to become pretty easy for teams at least as far as conversion percentage wise, it's definitely, it's a lot more possible than the onside kick and it's been converted two weeks in a row and like San Antonio gets Memphis last week, DC gets down the field this time. They just have to kick a field goal and they win and just an absolutely devastating loss for the Renegades who on offense, I can't fault them. I mean Luis Perez almost throws for 300 yards. Tyler Vaughn, I don't know what DC was doing. They just thought it was optional to cover him all day. They weren't doing it period. But DC's, defense man and their special teams have just let them down this season and it's not the same unit as last year and that's really crippling them because they finally figured out their offense. They have consistent offense, but it doesn't matter because the other two units have just fallen by the wayside. I have seen this a lot and I obviously don't think we'll do it this season because we're not fan control football changing rules in between games. But I think this conversion and it will probably be adjusted in the off season if it's too successful, but hey, maybe they want it. Maybe they want to. Yeah, it gives everybody a chance. It gives your team a chance Anyway so that with that and then so I mean Birmingham, right? I mean not too much of a surprise here, right? Pretty much took care of business. Anything stood out to you from Birmingham? I joked in the chat, I said, if Adrian Martinez can find a way to throw a pass, this team is going to be lethal. Well, guess what? He had himself an outing. This is frightening for the rest of the league. If Adrian Martinez plays like he did on Sunday and he had a fumble too, he had a fumble in the first quarter, but if he is able to become any semblance of a consistent passer and really is able to utilize the full skillset that's around him, forget it. This team might run the table. I mean this is really terrifying. They can run the ball, they can throw it now with Adrian Martinez whose legs are obviously a tremendous asset. This team, they treated Case cus like a pinata. They beat him senseless, they killed him. I mean they had three sacks in the first four plays. They just treated him like a ragdoll. Bless him. I can't believe he even kept getting the way. He just kept getting up but just kept getting beat up and beat up and Troy Williams eventually had to come in. Oh man, this Birmingham team just has all the pieces. They really do and they don't have to use someone like Jaymar Smith and we were wondering is Jaymar Smith going to come in? Well this is a resounding no, he is not coming in because if Adrian Martinez is the guy, this is it. And it also, on a sideline note, I mean this basically kind of ends the Matt Corral experiment at least for now. So for Skip Holts to just continue to get these guys, these quarterbacks to come into the system and play like this is just such a testament and I'm sorry, I really just don't think the rest of the USFL has a prayer. No, I agree with that. I mean if you had asked me preseason and especially going in and even the first week and them thoroughly taking care of business against Arlington kind in the second half of that game, Panthers here, I mean are we good? I mean we beat the roughneck so it's not a tall task, but I mean is Michigan give you anything to be inspired about? Their defense is what's going to carry them offensively. I mean I think this is more of a byproduct to the fact that the roughnecks are just lack of a better term, rough to watch. They just don't have much going for them on offense. Reid Sin Net tried his best, but there's just only so much he could do that interception wasn't even his fault. It bounced off one of the players' hands and ricocheted into Panther's hands. Look, EJ Perry still a passer that I don't really envy. Now 16 for 19 is fantastic, but it's his legs. I mean he's just a runner. He always breaks out of contain and he is able to do these QB draws and he makes a lot happen with his legs offensively. They'll do enough. Matt Colburn. I mean that's awesome. Great one two punch. Matt Colburn or West Hills and if you could EJ Perry, they should be a running attack. They should focus on that, but their defense really what their calling card is and of course you have Mr. Myers back there just bombing it away. I mean the Panthers are probably your second best demon. Probably remain that way for the rest of the season. I just don't really give them much of a shot against Birmingham, but as far as getting back into the playoffs, yeah, absolutely, and that's a testament to the rest of the roster at least being cohesively built and Mike Nolan knowing what he wants to do with it. Yeah, I saw RJ I think put RJ Young put the Panthers I think in number two and I was like, man, is he smoking? Like, hey, okay, you agree with that? We saw a bunch of comments like, Hey, maybe Birmingham will trade Matt Corral now. I don't know. I don't see them doing that just for competitive advantage to the bras just because of all that. Speaking of that here, St. Louis came in, took care of business against the bras St. Louis. Are they picking up steam here at this point? I know it's been kind of slow going the first couple weeks. Oh absolutely. I mean you have such a bevy of running options now and not only that, they're supposed to get Jako Pearson back very soon. He's apparently cleared the practice. So I mean you just continue to add this arsenal for this team, give it up for this team figuring out on offense with Adrian McCarran just being the smooth operator, I mean he's in full command of this entire operation. I like St. Louis a lot defensively. I'm still a little bit concerned about them, but from an offensive standpoint, I mean they can score with anybody. They can get into shootouts and they always have a chance. You got to think that as of right now, they're probably the favorites now, especially with the Chase Garber's injury, but I mean it's really a matter of them not getting in their own way. I think it's going to be really interesting to see them face off against dc. I mean that's still to me, one of the best rivalries in this league and DC has completely owned it, but DC and St. Louis is still the thing that you have to really look at most and who gets the most out of those victories is going to determine who wins this entire conference. But yeah, I love the Battle Hawks offense. They're so tenacious and Beck's really just, again, I like the way he coaches this team. I feel good about them going forward as far as San Antonio goes, I hope they can find a signal call. I really do because it's really a shame considering what they accomplished the first two weeks. Yeah, I texted John Lewis because he had had Brams as a one team, a one win team, and I said, you're crazy. And then Chase Garbers came out and lit the world up fire. I said, don't you feel foolish now? Well, hey, maybe John Lewis is a sightsee here and can see a Sosay. Yeah, Maybe he and Mike. Yeah, he can see in the future here. Then let's do here. We'll quick we'll get out of here. We did have a question. What is Mark as Cohos name? That's the professor Andrew Murray, so you can follow him on Twitter. Paul Murray. There you go. Coming up here this weekend. This is going to get controversial. We have the big triple header, but it's not really because two of the games are at the same time. Memphis going into St. Louis. Oh, I was going to say St. Louis against Birmingham in St. Louis for the championship is probably the best case scenario right now. I think that they quickly, do you agree or disagree? Not a hundred percent. I mean from an audience standpoint, that's going to draw your biggest number from an intrigue standpoint. I think those two fan bases going against each other would be fantastic. I believe that's what the league, like I said, the league would never say it, but I'm sure they would love nothing more than that matchup to happen on paper because that just is a guaranteed draw for everybody. It gives us a lot of energy to look forward to as far as going there in person, but I mean if DC recovers or one of the other team recovers, that'd be great. I do think what I'm curious about, because we saw this with the XFL championship game, there were fans from other teams that showed up that weren't in the championship game and I gave them a lot of credit. It felt it gave off a semi gray cup vibe where you saw representatives of other teams show up even though their team wasn't in the big game. I wonder if that's going to be the same case here or is it just going to be all St. Louis fans and then maybe a smattering of stallions fans in there, or you're going to see representatives from other parts of the league. I think that's the sign of a really good healthy league is when you have people who care from other fan bases that still want to make it to the championship game even though their team's not in it. Well, I think if you look at St. Louis, I don't think they need any other team support to fill that dome. I mean think the fix is in, they want dirty saw the turf truck. The fix is in want. We're fixing this getting St. Louis here, but no, I mean I think they could fill that stadium just with the Battle Hawk stands. I mean that place is going to be rocking. Alright. I will say viewership this weekend could be rough here. So we have Memphis going into St. Louis, that's on A, B, C. That'll be good. Then we have this double header at the same time, DC going into Birmingham. That should be an exciting matchup. We'll see how Birmingham does Michigan at San Antonio. Both those are on Fox. I think it'll be locked of how wherever you live. I don't know. I don't know if I get to watch either game. I live in Seattle, I live on the west coast, but maybe they'll let me watch one of those and then we got the Renegades at Houston on Sunday standalone on FS one. I mean, woo. That could be a rough game. What are you looking forward to this weekend? Well, the shame of it all is the two games that I really look forward to the most are playing at the same time. So whoops on the league's part there DC I was not incredibly impressed with in their win over Arlington. I give Jordan Tommo all the credit for sticking in there. He made some tremendous throws on Saturday, but I don't know if this team really has it, especially defensively against the stallions. They're in for maybe a rough matchup there, but at least I like the intrigue of DC traveling to A-U-S-F-L team. I think that's the coolest aspect of this matchup. The Panthers of the Brahmas. I mean it really depends what the Brahma situation is. A quarterback. I mean, it could be a good game. It could be a rough game. I mean rough from the standpoint there may not be very many points. Is it very important for both? Absolutely, as far as the seating goes, but I just don't know as far as a product goes, so I guess DC at stallions would be the most intriguing of them all. I agree with that. I do think DC is going to go in there and be like, you call this a home field advantage. I think shots fired on that. No, that's probably good. I don't know. This is rough. This doubled up. I will because people, they say, how are we going to watch these? I don't know. Like I said, I think it's going to be region locked. I could humble break. I'm going to get my Apple Vision Pro and I'll VPN and I'll just have both games, simulcast, simulcast, one to each eyeball. That'll be how I do this. But yeah, this could be tough. This is when you get, plus we're getting into the midseason. The novelty is worn off. This could be when you get the Mike Pereira or Mike Florio. I always do that. The Mike Florio like is the UFL doomed radiance? I do think this weekend is going to be pretty bad. Well, as far as their competition goes, I mean again, they're competing against themselves in this case and I still just don't really understand that model at all, but we'll see how that experiment works. I'm very curious to see what that means in terms of the head to head, literally head to head matchup that they have. This is my conspiracy theory, and I said this when they announced it because with them, because I think it's two, I know it's at least two if not three weekends, but it's at least two weekends where they have the double simulcast on the fox that allows them to say, we have four Fox games on that. Because if otherwise they're putting that game on FS one or whatever, then it's like, so it bumps those numbers of, Hey look, see we're getting, we're really pushing all this out. We have a team whatever on A, B, C, and then we got 37, whatever the numbers were. I think that that's part of it. It could be an experiment too, right? Kind of like, Hey, see how this works and whatever. But yeah, I don't see how this works. How did anything Well, I think it just gives them more numbers on OTA cables that they can talk about. I mean, again, I just don't want to be barred as a viewer from watching one game because of a region log, which again, we're on the West coast, so does it really matter who doesn't Care about us? Well, we'll find, we'll report back to see which ones they actually give us if they give us any. Yeah, Abdul says I'll probably get, Ooh, I'll probably get it. The Panthers Braus games because yeah, I couldn't even fathom a guess of which of those. All right, let's start getting out of here. Andy, any final thoughts if anyone has any final comments of there are. I'll put this one to bed please. Like I said, like and subscribe. I think we added a couple during the stream. USFL historian Paul Reese is the USFL carrying its wade in the merger. Spoiler alert for the theme this week. I'm sure that will go over swimmingly well. And then we have Dave Naer coming on CFL Insider and I'll get Dave, he, I'm sure he'll be like, I'm not watching, but we'll ask him about the UFL as well. It continues to really be fascinating to me to see how these ratings and these attendance numbers develop because again, this is new data. I feel like we're collecting and sort of harvesting over, but at the end of the day, I just want things to work out for everybody involved. Me, Reed, and I know we have our complaints and we've put in a lot of work, but we care and we both care about what goes on here. I just hope that there's more consideration for what some of these trends are showing. But I am really curious to see what happens this weekend as far as the ratings go. At some point, and we talked about this with the USFL as well, and this is similar in that at some point you go from breaking even or losing a little bit of money and then you need to pull the trigger at some point. I do not think that these leagues are going to find ownership that they're going to carry them over that finish line at that point, right? I worked in news when I was starting my videography business and I spent a year and okay, let me build up my clients. I'm going to do all that. And then eventually got to the point of I can't accept any more gigs because I don't have any more sick time left. At some point then you got to quit and then you, okay, now maybe I'm going to take a hit for six months, but then I'm going to be these leagues. You're never going to be able just to be Sal on this at this point. I just don't think they're ever going to get to that point with the local fan bases engaged enough by still being in the submodel. No, I think breaking even is not the strategy you're going to have if you're going to get individual ownership. You must find a way to show some sort of level of growth that encourages them. And TV audience is good. I think attendance is even better and profitability is obviously the ultimate goal, but they need to show that first. Excuse me, sorry, I sneeze here. Max was talking about, I don't know if this is new. We have replica jerseys now as well. They don't know if they have the actual jerseys, but I don't know if anyone else has tracked that because I think it was Gavin with the newsroom posted it yesterday and I was busy yelling at people for that credit, Mike Mitchell. So I don't dunno if that's new. I dunno if all the teams have it, but that's how I'm posting them with that. So hey, at least we have jerseys at this point. I mean probably we'll shit by the end of the season, but we're doing there. So Evan, thanks for checking in here and yeah, we'll get out of here. Andy, anything else? Good work as always, Reed really appreciate it and always being flexible. Oh no, Andy is the flexible one. I appreciate us being able to do this. I mean that check back in Friday, like and subscribe, Paul Re, Dave Naor and hopefully a big name DC Defender. Well say hopefully a big name UFL man, they'll be get back to me and then we'll see you guys and then next week we'll figure out what time we're doing all this stuff. So thanks everybody. We'll see you next time.

UFL Week 2 Results + Reactions! Winner and Losers From UFL Week 2!!

Well here we are back here again. Week two UFL Recap show here. Got Andrew Murray standing by later in the day today. I think this is good slotting in between the men's finals tonight and people are complaining that's too late. So I think this is a good time here, people getting home from work and all of that. Some announcements to get out of the way, but first let's bring in Andrew Murray. Andrew, how are you doing sir? Always good, Reed. How are you doing? We're good, we're good. I have on my fashionable John Cena jersey today in big, big Night last night John came out, helped Cody finish the story. Exciting WrestleMania I had all weekend. I had WrestleMania on one tv. I set up a whole nother tv. I have a cavalcade of them to do wedding shows and trade shows and stuff, so I brought out another TV so I could do that. A couple of big announcements here. We are less than a hundred subscribers away from giving away two tickets to the UFL championship game. I think we're like 24 13. So if you like and subscribe, even if you don't want to go to the championship game, let us be like Cody Rhodes. Let us finish our story here and then we can start talking about something else but like and subscribe, give a thumbs up because speaking of the St. Louis championship game, Andrew Murray and I officially booked ready to go. We will be there partying in St. Louis. Flights are booked, hotels, everything. Pat Rafino will be there. I'm sure we'll do a live show. Pat's got connections or we'll figure all that out. But we are official. Andrew, how do you feel? We will be at the championship game. I'm ecstatic. We did it last year on we discovered a beautiful city in San Antonio. I discovered it. I know you'd been there before, but I loved it and St. Louis has always been a city that I've been curious about. I'm glad that I finally have a chance or an excuse to go there and I'm really excited to see Pat too. I've never seen Pat in person. I've known him through online interactions, but I mean this is one of the coolest things for me is meeting all of you guys in person and I've already gotten a little bit of feedback from people that we'd met last year in the championship game in San Antonio and being able to meet them again. So it's really exciting. I love it and I'm happy to be part of it and happy to be with you again doing it. Yeah, I'm excited. So I always go back and forth with this stuff as with you, I enjoy the connections we make, getting to see the fans there, people that watch the league and know who we are and we know them from being online and you and everything else. We have the most view that UFL pregame show here for kickoff, so it only makes sense we roll that back. So that'll be exciting. So like I said, like and subscribe, get on the train and then we give that and Andrew will probably be in the crowd as well for that. I'm going to try to get credentialed, so maybe we'll just you sit with Andrew Murray, that could be part the prize here, so lots of members checking in as well. You can become a member 99 cents a month. Flights to St. Louis aren't cheap, although I did get a screaming deal and then Andrew and I got a hotel nearby. So overall we are lots of things to talk about today. We'll do kind of general thoughts, attendance, kind of all that stuff and then we'll do game by game breakdowns. I probably saw the most of the UFL that I possibly could this weekend just being at home with WrestleMania and everything else where last weekend traveling back. So I feel like I have a good handle on a lot of this and I also feel like these teams are kind of coming into a little bit more fruition what they are. What do you overall thoughts on the weekend, Andrew? Why I pull up Mike Mitchell's tweet about rating or attendance. Yeah, I mean it was a lot of navigation around other events, right? Men's Final Four, women's Final Four, the WrestleMania whole bit of it. Obviously you still have baseball, you have a lot of other sports going on, but for the UFL standpoint, I mean the biggest thing that we noticed from a disparity standpoint, and I can get into this now is the attendance numbers. I mean we have seen and had enough data at least for the first two weeks to see almost every home market and so far it has been arousing success for the XFL markets for the most part. I'd say DC showed up, they did fantastic with 15,000 in their home opener and then St. Louis obviously breaking a modern record. I don't know what modern day record really is for a lot People, but for basically the US FL back in the day, right? I would say, I'm going to just say 21st century, which is a sizeable number of years now, 40,000 is insane for a spring football game that's absolutely bonkers, but that crowd in that area has been just all in on Battle Hawks football. But to pan it over to some of the USFL teams, look all of the SFL teams so far at home have drawn less than 10,000 and I know a lot of it has to do with their model that they had the last couple of years playing in hubs, playing in markets that they were more interested in just being in as opposed to actually marketing too. And I think what you're seeing is the results of not really putting a lot of backing into drawing people in those areas or really in those markets because it was just the idea of here's football, come see the football and that only works with so many degrees and also you have to consider which cities they're in as well. I'm talking about obviously some of these factions are in NFL cities, not all of them of course, but some of them were. And I think this is a problem as far as optically what you're seeing on TV and then what you actually have in terms of the actual attendance. I mean, and I know XFL didn't have flowing markets either all across the board last year either, but at least you were able to get a sense of what they were trying to do in some of them, and I know the Vegas one was just kind of a disaster in a lot of ways, but this is something they have to work on. I mean Michigan, their attendance went down from week one against a good team. Birmingham was a good team to watch in your home stadium and your attendance goes down Memphis, that's your home opener and you draw less than 10,000. I thought, I know Mike Mitchell was on here last week saying how apparently there's people willing to be invested in buying the team and actually being an individual owner of Memphis. Well, that's not the number I want to be seeing as an owner. I need to be seeing more. St. Louis is much more interesting to me. If you're talking about individual ownership if's like a cash cow right there. So this is something that, look, I know there was a lot of fudging of the numbers last year and there wasn't really, I know Mike couldn't really discuss some of them or really disclose some of those official numbers, but the fact of the matter is the XFL, whether you want to talk about is the remnants of the numbers that they had from 2020 or the carryover or whatever. I know DC this is their third season existence. St. Louis is their third season in existence. I mean the numbers prove out and they bear out to show you that the XL markets are clearly, in some ways, at least from an attendance standpoint, are a little healthier than the USL markets and in some cases much healthier. Yeah, I had over, because we have the Battle Hawks game on opposite WrestleMania and my buddy Michael came over and it was 72,000 at Lincoln Field for the WrestleMania and he's like, God, what's going on with this UFL? Because he was with the C Dragons and all that. I said, well, they're going to break a record tonight. They're probably going to have 40,000. He's like, there's no way. He's like, there's absolutely no way. Absolutely no way. I said, no, they're already tweeting out that they're approaching. He's like, that's insane and proves that because the big thing you had with the Michigan attendance, I saw a lot of people tweeting like, well, the Tigers are playing across the street and this is going on. That's going on. St. Louis had that as well with the Cardinals playing and with the soccer team playing. So there's always going to be a gas station opening or what was it, Celine Dion concert or whatever. There's always going to be something. I knew I had one other announcement. So we're going to LA this week, I'm going to see Paul and we're going to see a lot of Dorothy's friends and stuff. It's like 50 50 right now. If we do an episode this Friday, I have Paul Reese on USFL historian kind of wanting to go live. I was trying to get a couple pre-taped interviews because I thought then Paul and I could do a half hour and then we could still have, he doesn't have to be on there the whole time. Of course, not hearing back from people today trying to schedule that, but I wanted to talk about this is the USFL carrying its weight in terms of this merger, which got me thinking about this again. So let me know if you're interested in hearing that in the comments, but kind of 50 50 otherwise, I'm sure Paul can do the next week, but I thought it would be nice, do a little half hour live show and then play a couple interviews, kind of smorgasbord all that together. Because even taking out the Battle Hawks game, the XFL is out drawn all of the USFL and even I saw numbers all put together. Even the Panthers have two games and it's still whatever. So I don't know. I think like you said with Mike and all this Memphis stuff, I don't know what I'm buying there at this point except for DC or St. Louis. Very much. Let's hope San Antonio, we have JP checking in. You're like, hopefully San Antonio kind of builds up now with their team. But yeah, I don't know what you're buying with a lot of these markets, which long-term wise I think is kind of an issue. I mean Memphis, they've been trying to make it happen for a while. The Memphis maniacs back in the day with the original XFL, obviously the Memphis Express with a F and now this market, I'm not sure what's going to happen with them and I'm not sure if this is really the long-term solution. I know also on your show last week Mike was talking about the idea of a Nashville team. Do you really want to have two teams in Tennessee at that point or are you just going to, I mean that's the thing. If you can't hold one team in the state, are you going to be able to hold two? So that's another thing that I think is worth discussing as far as what other potential investors want to see if this league moves forward and if they want to put their capital into it. So look, again, I know not every market is thriving. I still think it's interesting that San Antonio, their first week they had 13,000. Now they had Easter Sunday morning to deal with in Texas and they still drew plus 10,000. So I don't know, I know maybe Memphis goers are obviously maybe doing their Saturday shopping instead of going to the game. And that's the thing, you have to make your game the priority. You have to make it seem like, no, this is the thing I want to do with my time on Saturday and Sunday. That's hard for all the teams. It can't just be, well, there's football in town, let's go watch football game. I know in some markets that may work in terms of maybe people's familiarity or the nostalgia for some of these things. I can't imagine that it's really USFL branding because look, a lot of these teams have not been around for 30 plus years, 40 years, and you can't just expect these generational gaps in your existence as a team to suddenly just come flowing back. Yes, I know them at show about successed at one point. Not a lot of people who are alive now remember them. They're existing. So that's something that you have to keep in mind when you're building these new brands. DC is a new brand, it's a new hot thing. They're 10 and oh at home. They have an incredible record at home. They like St. Louis can talk about home field advantage. DC has a significant home and field advantage in terms of their success. They can pitch that to people and they can also pitch the fact that Dan Snyder was running the Washington Commanders for however long and that was really what disillusioned people from going to those games. There's other aspects here that you can look at for why these teams are outdrawing others, but for the USFL, I just don't think they can just rest on their laurels of here's the football, come watch football. Also, this is a brand that your dad or your grandpa might remember. Again, I don't think that's really going to work because there's just too much of a gap in the time that the last time that they were around versus now. Yeah, I don't know. I think the USFL, at least the rebirth of it back in 2022 fit that niche of it had been just long enough from the XFL 2020 people were really starred for that. We're coming out of Covid, we're ready to do that. God knows if they had started with this model, the pseudo model back then and flying people in, I know people still complaining, you need to have practices in town. You have this and that. I don't know if that's a make or break for any of that kind of stuff, but to me it is just hard and you're just asking. I've seen people online posting, well, you just need to go out to the games. And I've told the group chat this morning, it is so much easier to say than to do and a lot of these are big commitments to go, okay, got to For me, I live 15 minutes from Leman Field. We can pop down there. I can Uber down there, pop street, some of these places I'm driving to Birmingham. I know Brett's, the big Birmingham guy runs the Facebook group. He's got to drive two and a half hours in and do all this stuff. It's way easier. You need to go to these games. Well, we're getting in the spring and people got birthday parties and got to go shopping and God forbid do anything else in the world. We have the Kraken to compete with. There's always something. And so this whole like, well, you just need to go to the games. It's hard. It is a much bigger ask than I think we will get to. If anyone has comments on that, we can chat through any more of that stuff. I don't want to hammer attendance too much. I like this and I saved this. I tweeted that last night. Want to see they update this. Of course I'm totally anti this and then now the XMLs tied it back up, but what do you make of this two V two here with the conference, the conference, whatever records after our two weeks? I mean, I know I joked about it last night too about the update not being there initially, but of course they put it out there last Monday. So I gave 'em the benefit of the doubt if they'll probably put it up on Monday this time as well. I'm still weary of the idea of creating tribalism or at least stoking the fires, but if this is really what they're going to go for and this is what they want to drive out of this conversation and discussion, so be it. If they want to just keep hammering at home, then that's their choice. But I mean it would've been really funny if they just decided, you know what? We're just going to tweet when one conference is ahead of the other. That would've been, I think they would've shown their hand a little too much there. So for them it's important to keep that head-to-head and keep those tallies going along. Look, people can come out and be like, well, Memphis shouldn't have lost. Yeah, should have would've, could have. Sorry, they that's just the end. Or IT team's like, well, Houston should have been in dc sure, should have would've coulda, guess what? Every team's going to say that every single week where they're like, well, this team should have won. They didn't. People would've said that about St. Louis last week and then Jake Bates ruled the world. So it's going to be a continued part of discussion. I think it's just a different kind of discussion. This is an A-F-L-N-F-L stuff where the NFL had a superiority complex that they've been around longer and said, well, the A ffl can't keep up with us. And then the Super Bowl happens. Super Bowl III happens and then all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. It's not the same thing, but there's going to be that rivalry baked in. Again, I just worry about it that separating people and creating a little bit too much of vitriol in the discourse, but if that's what they're had their head on, then so be it. I did laugh with Mike Mitchell and if you guys haven't, haven't listened to Mike Mike and I's chat last week, a little more timeless of a chat and it's hard and I kind of go back and forth with do we do the week preview and then it's kind of dated once Saturday goes around. I struggle with that a lot with the CFL, with kind of the Friday posting of our episodes, but a good timeless talk with Mike. But I thought it was funny that Mike's said, well, once we get through this, we're you going to get rid of the rivalries? We're just going to be excited for players getting to the FL. I said, yeah, until we're ranking like, okay, how many USFL conference players got in versus XFL conference players? That's going to happen. So I kind of go back and forth with this. It's fine. It's something they hang their hat on, but I do think we need to eventually move past this. You were talking about the bras and all of that should coulda, woulda, let's talk through that. First and foremost, that was the game I personally was most looking forward to. Just obviously with the bras of it all and my connections with AJ Smith and Wade Phillips and all that stuff, I don't really know how San Antonio won this game, Andy, I was Saturday, I'm getting ready and I'm watching the game and I'm running and then I cut my hair and everything and I'm like, there's a minute left. I go, well, I got to get in the shower. Let me just, I'm like, no, let me keep you. I'll keep my phone on. I'll listen to this. And so somehow San Antonio won this game. I don't really understand. So why don't you walk me through this Reed? I have a hard time telling you from watching the entire game myself, San Antonio had absolutely no business winning this game whatsoever. But I'll tell you what, one of the mitigating factors is a couple here. First of all, Memphis, horribly inefficient in the red zone. I mean you kick three field goals from under 25 yards, 22, 22 and 23, that's not going to do it. I mean your red zone in efficiency is a part of it. Second, your terrible clock management at the end, I tracked it, San Antonio Chase Garbers on fourth down throws an interception with 4 25 left on the clock and they're down 20 to eight. I mean the proof is in the pudding at that point. That's it. You're done. I remember you saying on the group chat, this is over and I agree with you, this should be over four and a half left down 12. But to Memphis' undoing, they just couldn't control the clock. They didn't run any time out. Their offensive line play is really suspect. I don't think they can run the ball. I'm really worried about Chase Cookes. He is just, he's going to die. He keeps running around with reckless abandon for the love of God. I want him to slide baseball slides so badly and he just won't. I know some people like that about him and his bravado. It makes me nervous. It really does. So there clock management's one of it, John DeFillipo, I know it's really fun getting all those sound bites, but he needs to do a little less yelling and a little bit more game managing because the last two weeks Memphis has gotten, well, the first week they got away with it against Houston. The second week they did not. Their second halfs have been really suspect offenses just dried up. They can't run the ball effectively and really close out. A team like San Antonio, San Antonio's offense was so listless for three quarters, completely listless, couldn't get anything done, couldn't run the ball, couldn't throw the ball, nothing. And then suddenly this fourth quarter they just explode. Really, it just goes to show what they had in some of their weapons. I mean Marco Stevenson, I give credit to that guy. He was incredible the entire game. He was awesome. They just kept catching these passes from Gar Garber. I'll give credit, just never gave up. But yeah, Memphis just really let this slip away. It was crazy. Yes, John DeFillipo is probably my favorite character kind of in this season so far. We had a little bit of the, was it Barlow last season? They had to be drug off the field during the DC game when he was upset about one of the Dean Blandino calls. But yeah, we're kicking the ball and he can't change his mind and he's screaming, I thought it was great and you would never get that in the NFL broadcast just in terms of that sort of access. I love that. Just back and forth with all of this and they going into the half and we're going to take the penalty and I was trying to figure out, okay, how the heck did this work? And okay, we're going to take the penalty but then we're going to, or we're not going to accept it on this, but we're going to accept it on the extra point. Is this, I don't know because obviously San Antonio two one oh and they're at the top of all the power rankings and stuff. Now are we bullish on San Antonio moving forward here? Is this a repeatable kind of situation here? I am glad that there are top of the standings, but that's not really consistent play through. I mean their offense, obviously, they put up points. I mean they put up 47 points in the first two weeks, but it's inconsistency. And again, I voiced this last week, could they run the ball? Well, they didn't this week. They really could not run the ball this week. And I am concerned about that out of AJ Smith's offense the last couple of years, they really need to find a way to establish a run game. You can't just put it all on the quarterback. So I mean good for them. They came back, they got those slate touchdowns, Garber stayed in the pocket. He was brave enough, they got the fourth down conversion, not what would've been the onside kick. They got the fourth down conversion to keep themselves alive. But you can't get away with this again against a team that actually knows how to close somebody out like Birmingham, maybe even, well maybe dc we'll talk about them. And also St. Louis, I mean I don't think you can pull this against them. So for San Antonio, I think it's good for them to get the W. Obviously it keeps them a top, a very competitive division, but I can't imagine they can get away with this. Again, they have to find a way to keep an established run game or being able to just move the ball and move the chains at all. I mean again, they were just so lifeless in the first half offensively it was really an eyesore, but Memphis didn't put 'em away. We were talking in the group chat, a lot of the AJ Smith play calling and how that worked against dc. A lot of the short, I can't even talking about I'm the idiot here. And then that not working here against dc is that AJ Smith issue? Is that just Memphis? Am I smartening up? I always think of AJ as one of the smarter kind of brighter coordinators in the league. And so I'm just curious if he's already being found out week two, is that an issue? I mean it was found out a little bit last year. Now keep in mind also Brandon Silvers got hurt That didn't help their case. Obviously the Cole McDonald's experiment went a little bit awry. There was just a lot of problems last year with the offensive setup. It did seem like he was married to the wide receiver screen game a little bit too much in this game. And I think he can get in his own head a little bit. I want to see more adjustments from their offense throughout the course of the game. Now again, they adjust in the fourth quarter just fine apparently. But I think if you're talking about in the first half I got to see more adjustments mid quarter as opposed to in halves what's been going on and what had happened last year as well. So I think it's just a matter, I think Arie's smart enough, I clearly, I believe in his ability to play call, it's just I think sometimes he has to look at it a little bit as far as what's going on in terms of the alignment, what's going on with man coverage, are they blitzing what's going on? Sometimes their athletes are just not enough. John Tree Kirkland just wasn't the same four that he was week one, week one against dc. He was awesome. The second week it was more of Stevenson and other guys contributing In terms of, and I know they did that fourth and 12 whatever and that looked mighty short to me. I don't know. That was just, It was suspect I'll say that. Yeah, I didn't see the true view whenever we didn't see that. And then I liked how on the one, I think it was the first game where also this game where they were showing where the ball was spotted but then it wasn't at the line. I'm like, oh, this is great. But then they explained the center had already moved back the ball to, so I thought that was nice. I like having that transparency that ball is not at the, but then they say, oh well no, it's because he's already got the back for that. In terms of the Memphis of it, yeah, it is crazy to me here, San Antonio shut out through three quarters and then to just kind of explode there. Memphis falling apart. I don't understand where that comes from or kind of how they fall apart with how good they looked, especially last week. I know that game was a little slow, but I thought Memphis looked pretty good. I just don't know if Darius Victor can be the bell cow the entire game. I love Darius Victor. He's been awesome. I think they need to have a little bit more change of pace in their backfield. Again, just rely on case cookies to run around. It's going to get him, it's going to get him sent to the IR immediately. He's going to be put on reserve if they're not careful. So for me, they have to find another way to mix up their run game a little bit. And I just want to see them be able to not be so inefficient in the red zone. Again, there's too many short field goals. They can do that throughout a game. They have to find a way to punch it in when it matters. Anything else? We have a bunch of comments we'll go to before we go to the next game. Just kind of what people are talking about in the chat. Anything else from this game that you wanted to highlight? I mean, again, I really can't express how much of a pleasure it is to see Cody Latimer really be used in an offense that knows how to use him. I mean him being in the San Antonio offense is so good. When he came over for Orlando, I just thought that was such a perfect match for him. His talents were clearly on display with Orlando last year. It didn't always factor into winning obviously, but there was no doubt about his individual skills. And I'm glad to see that it's finally being put in place. I mean we're catching that game-winning touchdown with Garbers rolling out, when Garbers was rolling out in about three seconds left, I thought, oh my god, there's going to be someone open, but who is it? And it was Latimer right there in the end zone. So it's great to see his talents being put to full display. And I agree, just thinking back with the Memphis stuff too, and obviously there is Victor being on the show, I think it was two or three weeks ago. Yeah, it can't just be him running the ball a hundred times a game I think and he would burst. It's one of those like okay, we go and we go and we go and then finally you pop through. There was a lot of negative one or we're getting back to the line of scrimmage comments here, people talking, I have some star Christian here saying Memphis gave the gave away. We're talking a lot about attendance and everything, Scott, I got to admit USFL fan, we don't support our teams as well as the XFL fans do. And I don't know if it's just the way that they ran that, like you said last year of like, okay, we're basically giving away the USFL tickets and not that the FL was charging an arm and a leg, but it would be 35, 40 bucks to get into an XFL game where it was like, Hey, we'll give you a free T-shirt in a beach towel. Can you come to one of these SFL games? And I don't know if that's part of it. If that's pain now where you've diluted that ticket so much and not, we don't care about attendance and now we do care about attendance. Gregory here, my hats off the entire UFL family quality of play is greatly improved. And then we're talking about Jan here. Mike Mitchell says the league is so far happy with attendance. I know he said so on the podcast. But yeah, I still think I will say as we roll into this next game, attendance matters as much of, well no, I guess it would be the Sunday game, so we'll get to that. But the Michigan home game where Ara is texting me who we were on the Rod Pearson show last week and my friend and me and he's texting me like, wow, there's nobody at this game, right? I'm trying to explain to him St. Louis at 40,000 and this and that. You can't, but you get these people that tune in the game and the first thing you tune in is 7,000 people in the stands. It sits with you. And that's why I think attendance, not that we're making or breaking the bottom line by this, but you need to have enough people in there to make it look like a competent football product. I'm sorry, CFL fans. But from what I've seen, St. Louis Outdrew, every market from last year, nobody had 40,000 plus at a CFL game last year. Just going to say that right now. VC drew a lot of people I know, obviously Regina, obviously the Saskatchewan always draws really well. Obviously Winnipeg fills their stadium, which has a capacity mark, they can't get to that many. So I get it, but 40,000 is nothing to sniff at, okay. And for a market that's really only been around for not even two full seasons, I think that's really a testament to St. Louis. I mean, they show up. That's why they have the championship game. This is why they're able to have it. And I think the league, you can't put out a conspiracy theories or anything, but I'm sure the league would love nothing more than St. Louis to show up in that game and to host that because that would be absolutely ruckus and they may even have to open up more sections if that happens. Oh, I think it's going to be rocking there. One more comment here before we get to the game. Yeah, Darren. Hey Reid, it's the CFL so insecure that Jim Barker had to go on RP Ambassador after week one. Well, no, I saw that. I had seen that yesterday morning and see this is one of those people might think that I'm like, oh, Mr. Anti USFL or I used to be anti XFL when I said that they weren't kicking off whenever that was going to be. But the thing I will not tolerate is anybody, Nate is saying either the SFL or the XFL from you, the CFL or the NFL all Protect. That's where my, at the end of the day, my allegiances are to all spring football when it comes to that. And yeah, I was sitting there, I saw the interview and then someone tagged me in it and he was on and he said, it's the second rate for down league Jim Barker on the U-S-F-L-U-F-L RP while you're enjoying some of these UFL games. And then I just said, oh, let me get this hidden. I said, yeah, what if I said, Jim Barker's his second grade football commentator, what does that accomplish? And also Jim is in football scouting development was with the Argos. They have a lot of XFL talent on their roster. It's one thing that Mike Mitchell I thought, put this really well. It's one thing if you want to be tribalistic towards like I'm the XFL or you're the SFL. If you're a fan, if you're someone in football operations or coaching, these are all your compadres here. These are all your, whatever you call that. We're all in the same world here. Morgan, I just thought and I listened to the interview, it's certainly not as bad as this makes it out to sound, right? He was a little more like, ah, I just don't find it interesting to watch, but I just don't like that. I don't think anyone in the CFL, it's clear that having eight teams is better for them than 16. That's more players they can, Scott, I just don't like that. I go, Jim, it'll be June soon enough and you guys can play the CFL. If you're calling it a second down league, then why are you harvesting second rate players if that's going to be your messaging, right? And I don't think there are second rate players. I don't think any of them are second rate players. Look like you said this is tribalistic thought from personnel standpoint, this is not good. You can't do that. People cross over all the time. Look at all the coaches you had on your show, the players you've had on your show scouts, people who go back and forth between both. They don't discriminate. The real people who understand how football works don't discriminate between that. They realize football is football. If a guy can play, a guy can play. I think it's just more, there's always this distancing from Canada because they want to believe that they have the most premier talent and be able to repel an American invasion or say that any player from another league can sniff the CFL, which is not true at all. There's a lot of other mitigating factors for why players don't come up. Namely a ratio first of all. Second of all, you can't just believe that somebody from all of these other leagues can't play. It's just nots. Not true. It's not true and it's not beared. Its way out like that. Obviously there's people who come from all over that can play different leagues. McLeod, Bethel Thompson went back and forth. You have darn, what about Darnell? Sanky was in CFL. He comes down there Arlington and he goes back to CFL. Did people jump back and forth all the time and then I don't think this is really the right way to go about it. I am with you. I don't literally seeing this tribalism, especially from inside league offices. We got Sam here checking in, hit the like button and subscribe here. Like I said, we got 138 people watching between Twitter and YouTube right now. Appreciate that. Yeah, get us us to three. I'm so tired of talking about giving the tickets away. I just wanted to give them away and move on. So next game here. This was going up against WrestleMania. This was going up against lot of this busy sports weekend here, but this game, going back to the dome, the dome looked great. Like we said, Mike Mitchell reported record breaking crowd there, Liz Load in the first quarter and then it kind of really picked up and then it really max was texting like this is an instant classic read. And I'm like, okay, I'm watching Rock, rock and Roman and Cody. But yes, okay, this is a good, what did you make of this good showing Battle Hawks get it right at the end, the field goal kick there to win the game as time expired. What did you make of this Reed? I don't often say this, especially with how much football I've watched in my life. I say this maybe four or five times during an NFL season, but I can confidently say, this was a great game. This is a great game. This would definitely be one of the best of the season. I can confidently say that right now. Look, these were both two teams that desperately wanted to win. These were two teams that had pedigree. These were two teams that you could just tell. Both of 'em had a chip on their shoulders. The renegades had lost an embarrassing fashion in the second half to stallions at home last week. St. Louis lost the game. I think they believed that they shouldn't have lost two in Michigan and you just could feel it with both these teams. The dome was incredible. The energy was ruckus. I loved it. I love how back and forth this game was. I loved how Luis Perez competed. That man just never gives up. I think Arlington can feel confident having him as their starter and I know that's, of course we've already made him out to be the Spring King. He's won the UFL, the XFL championship with him already. But I just feel it. He never backs down and he always gives them a chance. I love how that guy plays ball for St. Louis. I think this is just such a showcase of all the weapons they have. Mateo Durant, oh my god, he's incredible. His speed was on par with just about any other running back I've seen in the spring leagues as of late. I mean he was just explosive. Every time he touched the ball, he made an impact. It was obviously noticeable with him not being in the lineup last week. We complained about it. A lot of people complained about them not having a run game last week. Well, they had a run game this week. I mean Durant was just there, but Karen was just spotting the ball left and right. Darius Shepherd, Marcel Aman, he clearly is ready for the season. Marcel Aman is already in the running for offensive player of the year in my book. He looks really, really rejuvenated. I know last year a lot was made of him being drafted by St. Louis. He really couldn't do anything. He was hurt. But this year he's explosive. St. Louis offense has the potential to be the best in the entire league. I just think they have to be under the impression that they're going to be in a lot of close games. I think that's just how they live. Anthony Beck seems to almost thrive off of it. He is like an adrenaline junkie. I'm sure they wish they could have blown teams out a little bit, especially the dome, but they clearly seem to be playing a lot of close games and I think they'll continue to play close games. But I mean, yeah, this was an instant classic. I really just feel for Arlington because I felt like neither team could really lose. It felt like even the loser felt like they won something, but at the end of the day, somebody was going to go home. Owen two, It is hard. I mean we had these questions about Arlington going into the season, how, I can't even say the word. Can they replicate what they did last year and going into the heater kind of in the playoffs, battle hawks? I don't know. To me they looked really listless last week. I mean that game was a sno against the Panthers here. And so they come back, it seemed like, like I said, that first quarter and they're okay. We really kind of got things clicking there always the way this goes and you get all these people tuning in, there's going to be this big record setting and then it's like nothing's going on. And so I'm glad that they finally picked up. I hope the ratings echo that. I think a lot of these games are on ESPN this weekend, so I have a feeling ratings will be questionably hovering anyway, we had a question before. When ratings come out, we'll get those tomorrow. Follow Mike Mitchell on Twitter. He'll be posting all that stuff when they come out from Nielsen. Has St. Louis kind of erased the questions now for you? I know Beck was on social media this last week. I'm disappointed we'll do better. I feel like he really carries kind of the weight of St. Louis and the city on his shoulders with this. Do you think that they've done enough to alleviate those concerns? I have trust in the offense. I'm still not sure about the defense. They played really well the first week, but playing good defense against Michigan I don't think is going to be a challenge for a lot of teams this year for this team. I mean I do think Arlington just tried to throw the kitchen sink at them and it didn't end up in their favor. I mean, Taylor Rus misk kicked, they would've gone up 27, 24. Then St. Louis is going go down the field and maybe you have an overtime situation there. So I mean St. Louis got the break that they needed and they took advantage of it. But I'm still as a full operation, I'm still not sure, but I absolutely trust AJ McCarran. I trust their offensive skill players. I trust them being able to score points. I just wonder about their ability to maybe be more ahead of a team and maybe kind of try to bury them. They haven't had that opportunity yet. They've had plays where they've sort of had mental lapses on defense, but I think they can still be formidable. Absolutely. I am not fulling on them on their offense. I am their defense. I'm still not sure about In terms of yes, half the games run ESPN, Andy, there's been an outburst in the chat half the game. So just god heaven forbid you ever say anything everybody, do you ever say anything wrong here? Matt's talking about what source do you use for snap count route runs? Andy, do you have any insights on, I don't know where is that like a P fff thing That's more P fff data? I have not accessed that data specifically yet. I have not really looked into PFF as much as some people have, but I know that some people track it themselves. But PFF would probably be the most accurate source. If you go to the pro football focus, they have all the player ratings and everything. That would be the most accurate if they, I assume they're going to keep tracking it throughout the season because I know the USFL had spotty tracking last year. They're getting better for it. And then no time for UFL? No, you're asking a lot of the same questions and people in the chat seem to be answering them. You're asking about where Jaco Pearson is. You're talking about asking where J Mar Smith is? Seems like people are answering in the chat. So I can't derail the entire, I'll do it this second, but I can't derail the entire conversation from that. So just to let you know that Well, jkor hurt. He still has the injury, but he will be back at some point during the season. I'm not sure exactly what week he'll be back yet, but he is going to be in the lineup at some point. But again, you're already joining a very full arsenal, Hakeem Butler and Darius Shepherd and Marcel Aman, there's only so many miles to feed. So even when JA comes back, I don't know if he's really going to be a focus in Seattle. He clearly was the guy. Now this offense, I don't know if that's going to be the case, but is the a luxury item? Absolutely. Yeah. Anyway, so getting back to this, yeah, time for UFL football, we can't answer every single one of where every single player that isn't on the roster right now is taking part. So I appreciate if anyone in the chat wants to help out with that. Anything else from this? I don't know, Arlington, again, we didn't have the highest of expectations, but certainly seems like champions here struggle. What do you make of this? What do they need to do? I mean, Arlington's going to have their backs up against the wall, which we'll get into later. But I mean they just, they've really had, their defense is not the same. I don't think they've been to really get the same push that they had last year and haven't been able to really rely on it. They just have looked, especially in the secondary. I mean they've just looked lost. Eight men got behind them last week. It was cane he got behind them. They've just had really bad lapses in their past coverage. I'm kind of concerned about their overall ability to contain teams. They've just gotten burned. I mean they go up 21 to 17 and then 17 to 14 with Sal Canel getting the touchdown and then immediately give up in that long pass play to eight men. And it just goes to show that their ability to contain these explosive plays has not been as good as it was last year. So for them, they've got to figure something out on defense. Obviously with Jonathan Hayes involved, they've got to do something with Jay Hayes. Excuse me. They've got to find a way to be able to get their act together back on defense. It's not been the same. But as far as their offense goes, I mean, I trust Luis Perez also, just, I want to say shout out to Daveon Smith who really unfortunately had a really horrific week with the lost his brother and kudos to him for playing this game. A heavy heart from an emotional standpoint. I maybe wanted Arlington to win just for him. And I know that's such a difficult thing. You can't wish that for every player unfortunately, because somebody has to lose at the end of the day. But that's just good interview on the sideline with ESPN and just kind of getting, getting into his emotions a little bit. Really raw stuff there. I really feel for him. I mean, he's been such a spring football lifer and really just unfortunate for him, but it's just part of life sometimes. And that's why football can mean a lot more to people. It's not just playing for money, playing for tv, exposure, playing to get back in the NFL. Sometimes it's playing for your family. It's playing for the people that you lost. So really just feel for him. Honestly. My heart goes out to him. It is a different level. I mean obviously all athletes are human beings and you get a lot of that in the NFL as well, and I think they a great job. But the step difference between the people watching these games and the people playing these games for the most part isn't drastic, right? Tyreek Hill's out there making millions of dollars and this is freak athlete. I just feel the relatability and I think that they do a good job with the Jake Bates thing last week. I think we do a good job of really humanizing a lot of that. And I think that I like that more and how we've done that this season versus like, well, this guy's trying to get to the NFL and this guy's trying to get, I mean, I know we're still doing that, but I like just hearing these player stories because ultimately, even if they're not the biggest stars now, Jake Bateson and we'll talk Michigan here, right? Coming up. But he's a superstar, right on that team. I mean, he might be the most over guy. I mean he's probably the most productive guy on that entire team. So any other thoughts on that? We'll move on. I mean, Jake Bates is probably more famous than Brandon Aubrey. I mean, Brandon Aubrey never got this kind of coverage last year. So good for him. That is really, the story is so fascinating. We can get into that in a minute. But yeah, I agree. Just continue to harp on these individual stories and really give the notoriety to these guys. They don't get that kind of exposure. They maybe didn't get that exposure in college. They certainly probably didn't get it in the NFL. And you really get to see what these guys were like in real time. I think that's really one of my favorite parts of these leagues, especially when they have the live interviews. That's really fun. One question here from PIP, and then you'd be nice. They were very rude about me being wrong about the ESPN games. I've attended. Summers continue to be bad in certain markets, and this just makes me think of Michigan here as we move in. Do you think teams are be relocated or they committed my 2 cents? I think you got to at least give it two years here. I think you can't, it's kind of like when they took over the commanders and what's his face was still the coach, right? Ron Rivera. And they're like, we need to fire him. And they're like, no, we're going to keep him through the year because we want the next head coach to know that we're committed to you and we're going to give you the time that we need. And I think with this, it's the same thing. You got to let markets know, we're going to give you a year or two years to get this going. We're not just going to pull the, I mean, unless there's six people in the stands, do you have any difference with that? I think you got to give future franchises the security that you're going to keep this going. I mean, there's a lot of unanswered questions with that, namely because we don't know what would've happened to some of the other franchises that weren't able to stay around. For example, with the XFL in 2020. I mean the league went bankrupt, so there was no moving of franchisees there. The USFL 2022, you had the Tampa Bay Bandits. Well, they got moved, but not really moved because they didn't ever play in their home markets. So that's not really moving them, it's just moving the ip. So the USFL has done that too. The XFL, we don't know would've happened to Vegas. I mean essentially because four teams went away just because of proxy of merging. But there was always talks about whether they're going to move or not. And so there's not really a clear answer to that. I would suspect that the XFL would be more willing to do that than the USFL, but I don't know. Actually, no, sorry, let me reverse that actually. I think the USFL would do that more than the XFL because the U-S-F-L-I think has all these ips in their back pocket, all these old brands and say, well, we could just toss this out and go try this market instead. Which again, I don't know, like you said, I wouldn't necessarily just pull that plugged so haphazardly now that you actually have people in the stands and you're actually are selling tickets to these home venues, that's really going to disillusion people further. You have to be careful about that, but I know that's the easiest, obvious answer, but relocation, it burns people. It really does. And you have to be careful about burning a market and then expecting to come back to it later. Yeah, they say Michigan would be the one Ford Field sucks about, let's get to that because I want to get to the Michigan game. We'll try to power through these too. We might go a little bit over the hour, but I want to make sure we touch on these. This was the Jake Bates invitational, at least for the first half. I tweeted about when Mike had the attendance. I hope Jake Bates mania kind of runs wild through the season of Detroit because it was like 7,400. I mean, this was rough. Birmingham still doesn't look the team that they were last year. Obviously we have the lack of Jaymar Smith and all of that. What did you make of this? Because Michigan, it really doesn't seem to have an identity at all right now. I mean, offensively Birmingham did everything they needed to except punch it in the red zone. They went one for six, which is a big problem. They can't seem to Memphis really take advantage of the fact that they can just run over teams. I mean, their running game is really strong here. As you can see across the board. You get Martinez in there, you got Maribel in there, you get Pearson, you got all these people that get in there and just start rolling with that football. But offensively, as far as the passing games goes, it's all over the place. Corral, it still looks really inconsistent. Adrian Martinez, I don't think it was really ever much of a passer, even in college. He was much more of a runner. As you can see. I mean, people are going to be asking, where's Dream r Smith? And I think the question is going to continue as far as they keep winning. If they keep winning, I'm not sure if he's going to just suddenly reemerge past the curtain. And I know that's a little bit weird. He played with Skip Holtz before in this league and in college. But for some reason there's no sign of him ever really getting out there at any point unless this team loses. So for now, I think they're just going to continue rolling with what they have and just hope that corral and Martinez figure their stuff out and start to develop. But it kind of reminds me a lot of Alex McGoo that first year in the USFL, I mean he really consistent. I was really unimpressed with his passing game proficiency and then he took leaps last year. So maybe that's just the thing. Maybe Holz is really kind of taking a longer term approach to this, but I mean offensively Birmingham could do whatever they want at least on the ground. I laughed when you were talking about people asking J Mar. I'm like, yeah, literally people in the chat are asking what's, but Joe has a comment here. I don't understand why Birmingham won't give snaps and qb. Would neither of the current two have been consistent? I agree there, but I mean Adrian Martinez comes in, he can run, I mean he all over the field. I think their top rusher, right? Really. I mean he had a really good game. Again, I mean his speed is so lethal, but the other thing about it is if you don't have consistency in the pass game, how are you going to be able to do anything? I mean you got J State Sternberg, you got Marlene Williams, you got some of these whiteouts, but you just don't seem to know how to utilize them in the red zone. It gets tight down there, corral through a hideous interception in the fourth quarter and could have gone up by double digits on Michigan and kind of let them in the game. Moving over to Michigan, man, 205 yards. Total offense. Woof. I mean West Hills after rolling through the first week looked nothing the same this week. Birmingham's defense I also think is part of that. EJ Perry's, not it. I just don't believe in him. I'm sorry I'm not really into the EJ Perry experiment, but I'm really not into their whole quarterback room in general. Brian Luki and a couple other people back there, I don't think it's really going to work for this Michigan team. I just offensively look just really lifeless. They have to ride the Jake Bates show pretty much. I mean if you want to keep banging 62 Yarders and 64 Yarders, that's great, but it's only going to get you so far. At some point you've got to do something on offense. A Mike Nolan football team doesn't seem like it's going to figure out itself on offense. I am sure they want to run the ball and Perry does have, at least from a standpoint of running, he can do a lot of things. He can run out of shotgun and he can do QB draws, but they have to find a way to establish some kind of passing game because it's not going to go very far. And this Birmingham team, I mean again, can just kind of overwhelm you with all the talent that they have and at some point they're going to figure it out. Michigan, I'm just very skeptical about their operation. We have your comment Pat. Typical stats guy, pat Rafino. Adrian is number two in the UFL in rushing right now, so yeah, I mean this is what they have going. I liked the Oh yeah, Philip, don't worry Philip Slate. That's fine. You check in here. I like the sideline talking with Skip Holt where he's really coaching the guys because both those, like we said moving up and down the field, but both of 'em having struggles in the red zone and I liked how he like, Hey, that was a good drive. Don't worry. I mean we've talked about him and sung praises just his, he's built for this. I feel like this is really the perfect spot for him and being able to kind coach these guys at the level they need to be so impressive there. Yeah, Birmingham is still not great, but it is certainly steamrolling right now. We knew that Michigan was going to have issues going into the season. I mean are they making a trade here? I mean it feels like they need to, I don't know. What was it? etling comes in and fumbles the ball and immediately pull back out. It doesn't seem like they have an answer of any of their guys right now. I mean they're going to have to trade for a QB. I don't know who that would be. I mean with Arlington last year, I mean just being able to get Perez but because Vegas had bigger intentions of having someone like Jalen McClendon who that's a guy I really miss. I wish Jalen McClendon was in this league. I was really excited about what he was doing with Vegas at the end of last year, but they had ulterior motives. Do you trade for someone like Quentin Dormy or do you find somebody not really smitten with their second quarterback and say, Hey, we'll give you something. Maybe a linebacker or somebody. I mean Michigan's defense is there. Frank NDA has 14 tackles. He's awesome. Obviously you still have Brelin speaks again, their defense is legit. I give them credit and they were able to hold Birmingham from really rolling away with this game because Birmingham could have trounced them if they'd been able to be more efficient in the red zone. I mean this could have been a runaway and that already dwindling crowd would've just been more unimpressed with what product they had on the field. But for Michigan, yeah, they've got to make a trade or something. I just don't think their quarter rack room's going to get it done. We have a comment here, appreciate with Scott. No one's going to give up their quarterbacks this point of the season, especially without injury. I know, but you wonder, does the league just for the state of parody be like, Hey, it was kind of like the least press trade last year was kind of weird and yeah, let's just kind right. They trade him for can't. It was a very lopsided trade that they got for that. It felt like the league was like, Hey, we need to get this going Here. Well, the same thing happened if you remember the 2020 with the LA Wildcats trading Luis Perez to the New York Guardians, same thing happened. Matt McGloin wasn't it? And suddenly the guardians were able to possess Perez and he started to turn that team around before the season had to end on ly. But I mean that's the thing. Does the league have the authority to do that? I still think that you allow these coaches to coach their team up until a certain point, but if you get to maybe week six or seven, but it's kind of the same thing in fantasy football for example. Teams don't like other teams trading for players off of bad rosters and being like, Hey, you can't just make your team a super team because the other guy's not pulling his weight. That's not fair. That's why there's a trade deadline. So I don't know if that's really the obvious solution. I mean be great if they did. I think for us as fans it'd be more fun but I don't know if the league, if they would just step in and kind of usher that along for the sake of parody Max here. Of course, no. Where is it here? Elise Perez for Ryan Mueller who the Vipers cut like a week later and then ended up on the Renegades again. I knew there was some that flew with that. I wish I just had an encyclopedic memory too of everything that's ever happened in the history of spring football. I can't even remember. Most of wrestle. Maybe part of it's my drinking but I can't even remember WrestleMania in the game last night. The best I can. I and you're taking notes, but anyway, there you go. Yeah, I knew there was kind of a fluky tre going on with that situation. Yeah, we'll see what happens, but I think Michigan, they need something. This is not going to work out. Any other comments on this? We'll get to the last game. We'll take questions, comments, get out of here. Anything else? Stallions two though here has everyone predicted in the Panthers here? We've talked a little bit to Jake Bates. I totally thought, yeah, he's going to come in with this 62 yard field goal because that's such the story. Good for him. He's able to be a rockstar for another year. Anything else from this I until further notice. Birmingham's your obvious favorite. I can't imagine that really Michigan or Houston or Memphis is really going to put up a fight against them. Birmingham is the gold standard in the USFL and I don't really see anybody competing with them. The XFL on the other hand I think is a very competitive conference that's going to be a dog fight until the end, but Birmingham I think has this really cinched right now. I just don't see any consistency enough from any of the other offenses or really of the other teams from a coaching standpoint that can really put up a fight against Birmingham for the time being. Yeah, I don't know. I mean and we have the game obviously the showboats. I like the Showboats is that number, I mean I've even stand this high. Is that your second team in the USFL conference right now? I want to but I mean a second team in the USS FL conference doesn't hold a lot of weight to it for me right now. It could be Michigan. It's just a matter of can they actually get more? No Memphis, I mean Memphis because Michigan's trash and so is Houston. I mean well Houston now we'll talk Houston here come up. They're a show in life but I dunno, I like the Showboats. Maybe it's just the masochist to me with Chase Cook is getting beat Up. I just really question their late game management. I know from a talent standpoint they're probably the second best team, but I just really worry about what they've been doing in second half that's just flirting with disaster. I'm concerned about them going forward, but I mean I understand again from the standpoint of their defense now Memphis is, defense is also legit. I'll give them a lot of credit there. Case has got to protect the himself. Someone's got to tell 'em get into zero and be like, Hey buddy, you've got a baseball slide, don't do this. Don't play hero ball. We need you. Yeah, Philip here where we're going to talk here, the roughnecks come up. Philip's a member. You can be a member of support. We don't get many super chats. I've always said on here. I'll watch my Kraken post game and they're like super chat, super chat, super chat, super chat. We just bought our tickets to St. Louis. It all rolls back to this. Although I will say Andy, I got our, because Sundays I get our audio download numbers, right? I mean I think I could go on during, I think I could go on the look, but they send me the numbers on Sundays and our post this show last week did really good for the audio. Listen, so that was good. It did good video wise and then it did good on here as well. Last game. We'll skip to this I will say and beer snake aside, which I'm already tired of hearing about. I mean I get it, it's a beer snake. The games at Audi Field looks so unlike any of the other games in either the XFL or the OS FLI really, really like that. I think the aesthetic of it is really good. This game we had quarterback injuries really came down to the wire DC able to, like we said off the top, kind of maintain their home winning streak. What did you make of this game? Much same to what I said about San Antonio. I'm not sure if the defenders really deserved to win this game either because boy, howdy, the roughnecks were giving them all they could ask for. I don't think the vendors really came out and played their cleanest game and really the blessing in disguise for Houston was that Reed Ette came in, stepped in for Guantanamo Guano and it just was night and day. I mean CNET really put in the work. I think the biggest thing that I really take away from here is that one of the turning plays in this game, Kirk Merrit looked really great out of the backfield and CNET hit him for that big pass play and then he fumbles the ball, it gets the ball punched out and that just turned the entire momentum of the game. Jordan Tom, good credit to him to be able to fight back. He throws that pick that gets tipped at the beginning of the game and gets returned all the way back for a pick six by corn elder and it really deflated the crowd. At first the DC crowd was just kind of out of it for a little bit, which is really what you need to do. If you want to spring and upset an out field, you've got to get that crowd out of it because it's going to be a fiesta the entire time. But they let DC get back from the game they took the lead man, Greg Williams, bless that guy. He sticks to his guns and he never changes. You draw up man coverage on the last play of the game on one-on-one situation when you know that Houston has to throw into the end zone never changed. Greg Williams, I'm sure all Jets fans will remember him fondly, but I can't get over how Houston really had a chance in this game. The two false starts on the last drive that ran off 10 seconds of the clock each. I mean that's just coaching this management, this coaching staff. I think that there's players a huge disservice. Once again, I'm really skeptical about the artists formerly known as the Houston Roughnecks because we all know who they really are and it really disappoints me to see the potential that they really had here to actually win this game and really get a huge upset. I mean you could have been the first team to ever win an Audi field as a road opponent, but as it stands, Audi Field undefeated 10 and oh defenders and Defenders have done it across three different seasons with different players and different coaches. I mean that's a testament. I mean that's really a testament. They embody their home crowd, which is always fanatical. They're crazy. The DC fans are nuts. If you had, I wonder what would happen if you had the St. Louis numbers in DC I think that would be just absolutely untenable. It'd be raucous. Yeah, packed beer snake section. As long as you're wearing the proper colors, they let you in there. Hey, we got, I wanted to put a cup on the, was I going to say the quarterback, the guano getting injured here. Read Sunnet coming in. Obviously you don't want to see anybody get hurt, but especially a quarterback to kind of make that change. But I certainly seem to give Spark there. He's going to be out presumably for a long time. Greg Parks tweeted out during the game or I think it was the post game, Hey, they said that he's hurt, he's not going to play for a month. It's like I knew he wasn't going to play when I saw he was not able to physically get himself to the locker room. I mean it seemed like a very serious injury. Is this enough now? I mean do we have something to work with here with Houston going forward with Reed? I mean I really liked Reed Sunnet with the San Antonio bras last year. Just again he got hurt and that was kind of the end of any offensive hope that that team had last year. I think it creates a spark for Houston. I'm still not sure about their overall operation because their coaching decisions have been suspect, but I mean I have to say they have more of a chance now than they did going into last week and I'm sorry, but the injury to Jared Guano is actually might be a blessing in disguise. I know that's awful to say, but it might've worked out. A lot of people were already starting to ask for a read Sun net and I think this might actually give them a spark, at least in the short term we'll see about long-term, but I still think guys, I mean Ruben Foster's just such a dog. I love him. I hope he doesn't get injured too much, but he's been so good for Houston. I've just been really impressed by at least their defense to kind of keep things in front of them for dc I mean this is clearly not the same DC team as last year. I think that they just don't have the same spark as far as the two quarterback system. It's not really working out the same way here. They don't have that guy like Di King that they can just plug in and make him run. I think they're trying to make something happen there, but it's not really the same. They've got to find out they're a little bit of their dynamicism on offense. I mean you saw Lucky Jackson, he was visiting for the game. He was on the sideline, which was great, but I think they really miss those kinds of guys like him to really have Jordan to throw to. So it's going to be a work in progress for dc but I don't think this is the same team that we saw in the championship game last year. We have a couple comments here, Jacob saying if we get Mark Thompson back or get Reed in that I think we could win a couple of games. Yeah, I mean we've heard about this off the email, the Mark Thompson injury and all the offense running through them. Scott still comparing next to F against us. FL. The league is tweeting out the conference records. It's part of it. Spoiler alert, I don't dunno to tell you Scott Friday is going to be us l attend, not care this, I mean this is all part of it, it's all a part of that. I want to get your thoughts here and then we will do a quick little preview and get out of here. Curtis Johnson, a friend of the podcast here came on preseason. Are we high on him here? Getting this figured out with the new quarterback and all that? What do you make of Curtis Johnson because Barlow, we know, I think he's going to study the DC ship even if kind of the pieces aren't there from last year, but what do you make of Curtis Johnson? I like them a little bit more last year at least stabilizing some of the collateral damage left over from Kevin Sumlin, but I just, your old buddy Paul I know remembers him very well, but I just think that there's a little bit of inconsistency in how he makes decisions, late games decisions, like I said, those two false starts are excusable, you got to fix that and for this offense, just fighting any semblance of rhythm I think is going to take, yeah, I agree. Maybe Mark Thompson coming back into the field when he finally is able to get back onto the field. Just something for this Houston team, but I think it just seems so identity list right now and that's really for me, the biggest thing about Houston. I just dunno who they are at all. They don't really have an identity to me compared to all these other teams. Although a lot of these other teams I think have an identity even if they haven't won as much as they wanted to Houston, I just dunno what they have. Yeah, Jacob be says Chris Johnson needs to go. So let's look ahead to next week or this weekend and then any other questions we'll get out of here. Like I said, reminder 50 50, oh excuse I'm on the wrong. 50 50 on if we are going to, there'll be a Friday episode, I'm going to be traveling so it's kind of one of those like, Hey Dorothy, I got to go do this. We'll see if Paul was still following this stuff. That would be kind of a funny beer podcast to talk about, but I don't think Paul's got enough of the knowledge about any of this stuff. We'll catch up. I'm sure we'll be posting some photos. Week three going to be, okay, so the defenders going into Arlington. We got the Showboats at stallions. Their home opener will be really curious to see the attendance there. Triple Michigan home games to open the season that is rough. And then St. Louis going into San Antonio, that is circled to me as the biggest game of the weekend here. 3:00 PM on a b, C. That should be a good showing for that. What game you're looking forward to here? What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think your marquee game there is the battle hawks at the Braas. I mean you expect a lot of offense in that game, right? That's going to be potentially a shootout down in San Antonio. Obviously San Antonio trying, if they got to 3.0 to begin the season really going to sizable leave in the XFL conference, that'd be huge for them. But the battle hawks, I think I figured some things out on offense and I really think that's going to be a hell of a game from a scoring standpoint. The other game I really have circled, I mean the renegades man, it's kind of do or die for them. They're already in trouble. If they go to oh three, that might, I don't want to say that's the death nil, but that's really hard to climb out of. I know they started off really slow last year obviously in their offense, but I mean the offense is not the problem for them. It's just really their defense now that I think has become much bigger of a concern and obviously RiNo missing. That kick was so uncharacteristic of him last week DC you wouldn't want to think to keep the momentum, but like I said, I'm not sure if they have all the pieces together that they need. I would not be surprised that Renegades can finally pull one out and get one at home. They desperately need it and this Arlington market I think would like to see that from their champions and so I have that circled as well for Birmingham. I just want them to show up. Let's see, Birmingham show up. You're the back-to-back champions. Everyone talks, all the stallion fans talks. Let's see what happens. Let's see if the Birmingham market really gets behind them. That's my question. Let's see an official attendance number from the Birmingham stallions. I think that would be important, but the one I'm actually going to tell you that I think is surprising I think might surprise a lot. I think the roughnecks are going to go into Michigan and win. I know that they're O2, but I think they're going to go in and upset the Michigan Panthers. I don't really like the offense for the Panthers. I don't really love what the roughnecks are, but I actually trust Reed Sunnet much more than I trust anybody who's taking snaps under center for Michigan. I know Jake Bates is a great story. I know they have a good defense, but I think this Houston team can come in and get an upset. That's my call the weekend. Yeah, I mean like I said, the Jake Bates thing is good and all, but that should not be the shiny moment of your offense is that you're a kicker. I mean that's great and they've gotten a lot of mileage out of that and it's been really good and I know they even had the former USFL, whatever the kicker was there and giving him a hat and all this stuff. We're going through all of that, but yes, I agree we need to have a little bit more there comments before we get out. Yeah, put your game of the week on here. Put who you're excited to see Foosball fans as DC versus Arlington's going to be good, Mike. Geez. Yeah, I'm ready for Birmingham. I'm just so afraid we burnt them out that first season. I know obviously you can't, we don't want to move the team, but I think that that really did more harm than maybe we anticipated kind of running all the games there back to back to back and then Max says, I hope if the bra is keep winning, we can see the attendance creep up. That's the thing. They started really strong last year, the braas dead and then the team was just duty and now where the team is winning and if they're winning hopefully a little bit more convincing, then oh my God, this ref or the umpire just got smacked in the face with his baseball. Oh my God, I'm watching them mirror the game out of the corner. He just fell it right into his face. But yeah, I'll be curious with the bras because I think that's a potentially strong market with a sexy team that has a lot of things going for it now I do too, and I think not having that morning time slot against the eastern crowd, the eastern crowd will really help. But San Antonio, I think about it too. They were so strong with the San Antonio commanders and again, losing that team, that IP and that league I think did some harm for the San Antonio market. You wanted them to buy back and be like, look, here's the team. We're keeping them. They're not going away. I think that they got to build that trust back up again. But I like the San Antonio market a lot. I really do. I love the city again and I really hope that they can find that consistency. I think they deserve to have a football team and a good football team and they do have a good football team right now. Very different team from last year. So for them, I mean if they can draw, continue to draw, plus 13,000, maybe even 15,000, that would be great. I don't know if we need ever get the 20 like that one time, two times we did last year with the championship game in the opener, but that would be great, but that to me would be gravy. Yeah, Mike every game has something. Yeah, I don't know. This feels last year when we had some of this in the eight games going on with the US F felony, it felt really, you have a lot of storylines here with all this stuff and I like that. I like having the condensed and I got to just keep track of eight teams and we got the eight kind storylines and we intermixing that way. Yeah, I know that it is that w Scott Bailey that writes down in San Antonio, he's always talking about them being burned and why. That's one of the reasons people are hesitant and I totally get that and that's why it's important. Do a two year plan here. Mike Mitchell's talked about, let's get through this season, let's make a good case next year and then kind of see where we're stand from there. Any other things from you, Andy? Anything else? Comments? We're just talking about games and attendance and everything else. Anything else you want to talk about? I just want to say mean the quality of football, I really have to say has been really good. And I mean for me, I like that there wasn't a whole premonition from the social media account about saying, oh, well we had this many close games this weekend. That was a big thing for the USFL and I always kind of batted, I sort of rolled my eyes sometimes when they made such a deal about how close the games were and I always thought, well, I'm not sure about some of the quality of these games sometimes, but I can actually say the quality of these games and these teams have overall been very consistent and very good so far. I'm pleased by what I've seen. Like I said that Arlington St. Louis game was awesome. That was really a great game. I hope we have another one of those soon and I'm sure we will, but quality overall, some of these quarters can be a little snoozy, but I do think that from what you're seeing from the players I think is what you want to see from a spring league. I really have been impressed by the overall quality so far. Yeah. Where is it the Foosball fan here this next weekend? Belong to the UFL this week three going to be, I know we have the masters I think starting Thursday so that I don't fall golf, but that's kind of the big temple event next week. But yeah, certainly no final four. Certainly no wrestling. I mean wrestling much of my life this weekend and so we'll be cleared out from that as the Mariners give up and run here. So yeah, I think it's going to be better. I'll be excited to see where these ratings normalize here just without a lot of the competition that they've had the last week. I mean they performed and we'll get ratings tomorrow, but they perform well against their competition thus far for the first weekend. Well, I mean I'm really glad that you, Mike, again, always talking about the schedule and where the schedule lies and where are these ratings going to be. They're going to run into somebody at some point. I think it's just been tough the first two weeks because they ran into the buzz saw that was the NCAA tournament for men's and women's now. I mean that wasn't even something that XFL 2.0 didn't really even have to run into with women's basketball, but Caitlyn Clark was such a sensation and that just such gangbusters the last two years with how much notoriety that sport's gotten now. I mean there's just another competition point. There's always going to be a new competitor. Next thing you know people are going to be watching and people are already starting to watch F1 races and you're going to be giving maybe, who knows, maybe MLS starts creeping into people's lives and really starts to take over. There's always going to be competition. You have to find a way to dig out your niche and be able to appeal to the people that are already in your space and then be able to work on getting other people involved in the periphery. But I mean there's no magic date I guess there's pros and cons for all sides. So you get into, I mean that would be a whole nother three hour podcast, but I think it's just always an ongoing debate and look, there's always going to be competition. It's just become the fact of the reality. Yeah. Last thing here, Abdul says Skip Balo said he watched the San Antonio Memphis game and praises the fourth and 12. Now they most certainly either gave him a sheet of paper that talked about it and either or showed him the 32nd clip and said, you're going to talk about this on the show. So I have seen who is it now? It's Skip and Keyshawn. I saw their segment from last week. Yes, they're most certainly because they're still doing the same. Wow, this is great. Getting players into the NFL. They just have kind of their talking points and like, well, the NFL needs to adopt this and they can have a developmental league. Keyshawn didn't watch a second of any of that and Skip most early did not. They have their notion of what this is and they've been told enough that they need to what they need to talk about that is all that that is. Yeah, I mean it is just an agenda item for them, but it's not really a viewing agenda that they really have in their own free time. And it's the same thing with Colin Cowher and all of them. There's not really this integration into the Daily Sports Talk sphere has not happened yet when it does happen. I mean credit to Pat McAfee for getting involved in it. Obviously good for him, but there needs to be more of that, especially on the Fox network. There's got to be more synergy there. If you're really going to be pumping up this leak, maybe you should really get some dedicated people to talk about this. Like I said, get Joel Klatt on Colin Cowher, get Colin to talk about it for a few minutes. Just be able to talk about it. Clearly knowledgeable. There's been some really good broadcasting from a lot of these guys, but especially from Clad Menifee. I'm really impressed by their presentation every time they're involved with the game. You got to get more of those guys involved. Yeah, you notice though today, pat, which I watched Pat McAfee because he was still at WWE e. There was no UFL segment today, right? I mean the UFL is really great for McAfee, but we don't have a lot to talk about on the Monday right here. We have a couple of weeks we're talking draft and Caleb Williams and all of that, but that really fills like, oh, okay, we need 18 minutes filled here. Okay, let's talk with Jake Bates and let's talk with destroying. Let's talk with all these people. But yeah, they had Cody Rhodes and m and our truth and stuff on today. They couldn't care about any of that stuff, so we'll get back to that. I still wish that we have the UFL today. I want to get Scooby on. We've been DMing about because he's doing that coming on the show maybe when I get back in town. But I still wish we had that Josh Lewin or whatever doing stuff, a little bit more training camp coverage. I know Anthony's working hard. I know Mike and everybody doing the pressers, but today I turned on the SHOWBOATS one and there's three people on it, so I don't even know if those are doing due diligence at this point. I've tried to get players on and coaches on this week before I get out of town, so there's certainly issues with that. So let's clock out here. Hour 15. It's 2 72 here between Twitter and YouTube. Should be good. I appreciate it guys like and subscribe, Andy and I. Like I said, off the top we'll be in St. Louis for all that championship game that have the Mark Hass and the professor and the stats guy. Pat Remo take over. St. Louis. Anything else from you Andy? No, Maria, thank you as always. Can't wait to see what happens and hey, maybe de destroying will actually attempt a fuel goal this weekend. So that's something to look forward to. I'll tell you that when people hopes the hate at some point you got to, we showed, and I know God bless Jane Oaks and I know I'm sure it's league mandate, but we're posting the highlights of destroying tackling during the game and almost broke his neck. I mean it was a very dangerous tackle and many of the comments were like, please, please don't tackle like that. We're really reaching here for this. We got to talk about destroys. Yeah, let's make a field go miss a field goal, but you got to kick this week. I can't just see you doing kickoffs and well we're over time. But yes, got a lot of hate on my tweet about not liking the USFL kickoff here in the UFL, which I stand by, but I got a lot of hate on that when I tweeted out. Are we tired of very drive starting from the 50 yard line now? It seems very divisive with that. So I don't know. Any last thoughts on that? That would be our ending point. If people want to see their office and start at the 50 yard line or start at midfield, they can watch maybe arena football. I don't know, but I know that's mischaracterizing it, but that to me, it's still something that drives me nuts because I want the field position to be earned. I've always said that and I still believe that way with the kickoff, but you know what UFL can go watch, see if the NFL is going to do it for an entire season and then maybe retroactively put it back into the game. So we'll see. Yeah. Abdul, I did notice that he said that. Did you know how God, we just cannot hit anything. The blue Jay is here at the warning track. God just killing me. I did notice that the RAM was punted. It did not go for 54 yard. Yes I did. I did notice that. But I'm getting a lot of heat right now, so I really got to be careful with how I deploy my, I can't be talking to Donald all the time. I got to be really selective about when I tweet about it, so I did notice that. Alright, excuse me. Alright guys, I'm going to go watch the Mariners, hopefully not blow this. I'll be in LA watch social media. I'll post out what we're doing Friday if we're doing anything, and then Andy and I'll be back next week. We'll be talking at UFL week three. Thanks to everybody like can subscribe. We'll see you next time.

Will UFL’s Extreme Makeover SAVE Spring Football?

Well here we are here back, not live to them. I'm so used to saying that here, but we are live with Mike here in the present recording this no intro. Today we're going to get right into everything. Mike Mitchell, UFL Insider with Sports Illustrated. My only plug off the top. If you enjoy the work that we do here and subscribe, thumbs up the video. We're about a hundred subscribers away. We get 3,502 free tickets to the UFL championship game. It's looking more and more like I am going to be able to attend that, so that is exciting. But two free tickets like and subscribe. Get us over that hump. We are here today one week following the UFL kickoff. I was in Arlington, Mike was on the show. We have Mike Mitchell. Mike, we have a ton of listener viewers submitted questions. We're going to get to all of those. I have 'em all bookmarked. First and foremost, we got week one in the can. What do you make of everything thus far with UFL? It was a lot of fun as a fan, as somebody who follows these leagues writes about 'em. I enjoyed every one of the games. I think there was some hiccups here and there, but I think overall it was a lot of exciting plays. A lot of plays that went viral, A lot of cool finishes, some unique aspects to the league. I think it can only get better from here. I enjoyed the broadcast. I've always been, one of my favorite things about the U US FL broadcast the last couple of years is that I'm a huge Joel Clap fan. Big Kurt Menifee guy and I like the Fox aspect. I know sometimes some people feel that maybe it's a little too much f Lish, but I think those guys are so knowledgeable. Joe Klatt is terrific. If you're someone who's a casual fan who doesn't follow these leagues and you actually listen to Joel Klatt, he's breaking down the tendencies of these teams the last couple of years. So what Birmingham likes to do on third down, what they typically do on defense, John Chavis, blitz packages, et cetera. It's just like if you're a casual fan who doesn't know much about these leagues, if you're listening to one of those broadcasts, CLT can teach you a lot. He can get you abreast of the situation. So overall, I like the opening week. I think there's room for growth and improvement there and we made it to this point and I'm glad both these leagues have United and hopefully they can build from this season. It's going to be a fun ride. Yeah, I've done a couple, I was on Rod Peterson show today as we record this and a couple other podcasts this week. I think it went about as well as you could expect, right? For a new league opening. I mean obviously this isn't really, it's a new league, but it's whatever. But to me it just makes sense. This feels like how it should have been all along if Fox and Redbird and had all got their act together three years ago, you got games on Fox, you got games on ESPN. We're promoting Pat McAfee's talking to the players on Monday. It feels like this is the prince that was promised here a couple of years ago. We're getting here. Sure. And kudos to Ben Fisher by the way, had a fantastic article last week leading into the week one of the UFL season where he kind of gave background. I mean this is stuff that I reported in the past, how Fox tried to buy the XFL out of bankruptcy and Redbird and Danny Garcia and Dwayne Johnson kind of beat them to it and how Ben Fisher to his credit got quotes from Jerry Carne from, I believe Tim Reed from Disney, from Eric Shanks of course with Fox. And they talked about they had wished they had gotten together earlier sooner and it might've been a different world. We wouldn't have had this particular setup if Fox and Redbird had just bought the XFL and then waited it out and brought out the league and all that. So here we are. We might not have had the Birmingham stallions and all this. Who knows what teams we would've had if they were just bringing back XFL from the grave again in 2020. So I'm glad these entities are together. Fisher also noted something that's very interesting. I kind of flew over people's heads that they told him and they wouldn't lie to him that Disney has partial ownership of this league as well. Now nobody knows quite the breakdown, but I think that's fascinating to have Disney, Fox Redbird, Danny Garcia, Dwayne Johnson, all as owners of this league. It begs a lot of questions because in the past these kind of leagues, the big thing is like, oh, can we get a TV rights deal? But if you're the actual networks that own the league, there's no deed for a TV rights deal. That's your in-House league right there. It's all about getting sponsorships, obviously attendance, selling, merchandising, selling off the franchises. So I mean it kind of eliminates the equation of, oh, I hope the UFL can get 50 million a year or 40 million a year or whatever. It's right. And so because the networks already own them, so they're covering all the costs, production and paying for the expenses. And so it's a little bit of a different dynamic. Excuse me, if the networks own the league. Yeah, We will get to, oh, so as we talk through attendance ratings, all that today, we have questions for all of that. It's your understanding right now, and I know you talked about this on the pre-show that we did, thank you for calling in for that busy Saturday. We're kind getting through this year and then it feels like we're on kind of a two year window right now as we look at attendance, everything. We're not going to freak out if next week we drop because I'll ask you here about TV radio. Is that your understanding that we're at least on, I've had talks with people directly in the UFL higher up, several people, and I know a lot of them have been kind of instructed to not let loose lip sink ships kind of deal. But from what they told me is that they feel like this is a new launching point for them and that the real test will come in 2025. Their expectation is that they'll get their footing this year. Their expectations are modest and that they'll build towards next year. And I, I've mentioned this throughout this whole process, both the leagues have merged because I don't think either side, and they'll never say this publicly, and I know this to be the case, they did not see the light at the end of the tunnel. And they feel by uniting together, by coming together, they can potentially, because the facts are out there for anybody who wants to see come out. Fox has been trying to rope in investors into the league and sell franchises for going on. Now, year number three, both Fox and Redbird have hired prestigious investment firms to raise money. They haven't been successful in that end. So I think they're doing this because they both, they're obviously very bullish about the concept of running and operating your own league. They think the concept is strong enough. Fox was so impressed with the XFL in 2020, that's why they stayed in this spring pro football game with the USFL. So I definitely think that 2024 is the launching points of 2025. And then when we get to there, because everybody, I speak to people even in Canada, I've been like, you are with Peterson there. I've been on Canadian shows, I've talked to Canadian agents coaches and they ask me, Mike, what do you think? Do you think this is really going to last? Because everybody's skeptical. Nobody will be surprised if this doesn't make it right, because we know the history, the graveyard is littered with these leaks. But they all asked me that and I told them, this merger has bought them two years. What happens beyond that? We shall see. So ratings came out this week, you reported, and I like to kind of preface while we do this, we still live and die by all this every week. I'm like, oh, it went up two points. It went down two points, but just, I like having the stage set here. We have a little bit of a runway here. It's not like it's got to hit a certain benchmark here by week three or else this thing's kind of falling apart. But you reported the ratings, right? We had 1.3 high, 1.3 for the Fox and the secondary game on that 1.1 and then 900 and the 800,000. What was your reaction to that? And then they'll all have the questions here from the listeners for everything else. What was your reaction to the TV ratings? I know you wrote about it on Sports Illustrated. Yeah, it was a stressful Tuesday morning. I can't tell you how many messages I get from people. What's the ratings, Mike? Where are the ratings, where the ratings are you going to report it? I got a couple messages. Where are you going to get your ratings from now? And this whole time I've been getting 'em from Nielsen. And full disclosure, this says this is not tied in completely, but I used to be part of a Nielsen Home way back in the day. It's kind of a unique science. It's not an exact science. The way they measure audiences, you're responsible, if you're a Nielsen home, you're responsible for that particular region. So if I'm watching, I don't know, walking Dead, all of a sudden my entire neighborhood is registered as watching Walking Dead. So it's not quite exact science and I am a little old school, but there are so many different measurements now between streaming and out of home viewership that's not really calculated in. So that Tuesday morning was stressful waiting for the numbers from Nielsen, from Fox. There are a lot of great people out there due to ratings, Austin Karp and Sports Media watch, sports TV ratings, all these guys. And then I get those numbers and then I was surprised when I got them. I had a feeling because even though this is a new entity and you consider it a new league, I see it as a bit of a carryover from what we've already seen. So I was a little bit lukewarm on how much appeal this would have for people watching. And then you throw on top of the fact that it's Easter weekend and then of course the heavy competition that's out there now. I mean women's basketball has become so popular now too. That's really changed in the last couple of years. And then of course NCAA doing what they do and then all the MLB stuff, et cetera. So the landscape is very difficult. So when I saw the numbers 1.1 million, 1.3 million, I said, wow, I had a couple people in the UFL reach out to me because they read my article Sports Illustrated, and they gave me a little bit of hard time of undershooting them. I thought they were doing that 8,000 k range, so they exceeded. That doesn't mean I'm absolutely correct, although I had people in the industry who read my predictions article and they thought I was spot on. So when I saw the 1.1 million, 1.3 million, I said, okay, wow. They did a little bit better than I thought they would. And then the Sunday numbers to me were impressive too. You've got that early start in San Antonio, 11:00 AM start and they do nearly a million viewers on that, and that's pretty impressive at 12 noon eastern to do that. And then they did 700 and that game was kind of slow. Admittedly the Memphis Houston game at the end, there was a little bit of drama involved. The game was close and there was a chance for Houston to steal one, but it wasn't as sexy as some of the other games. But I thought the numbers were very respectable. What's going to happen now as you're going to see the ratings go down? I think the reason why you're going to see the ratings go down, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of narratives out there of how the league tanked and look, it's so typical and all that, but they're running into a buzz saw this weekend. So again, I'm very tame in my predictions. I mean, they're going to be going up against the Final Four Women's Championship. They're going up against WrestleMania too, which I find that there's a lot of fans of these leagues that are also fans of the WWE and WrestleMania is a once a year event. It's huge. It's two days. You got the rock wrestling and the main event. And so I think those are going to take, those different elements are going to take away viewers from the league. The key is going to be the follow-up once March Madness goes away. Sure, there's other leagues, N-B-A-N-H-L, all that. They'll do their thing. But I think this league, because it has so many games on big network television will by default when the season ends, I guess these leagues last year, although it wasn't an apples to apples comparison, there were what in that 600, 700,000 range, whatever it was for the year. I think this league will do better just because they have more big network games. So by default, their yearly average will be better and they always do. The first week is the highest, the championship game is the highest. And we've seen that to their credit, USFL and XFL, we've seen their highest rated games take place. At least they're able to retain some of the audience that they have or close to it when their championship game arrives. So the next few weeks are going to be very telling. I think there's, they're going to take a little bit of a hit this coming weekend, but how far of a hit that remains to be seen? Well, and also WrestleMania is huge this year especially, and I've been a wrestling fan off and on my entire life and MS Seen Ford Field area, not all wrestlemanias are the same level, but this has really been built into that, especially with the two day nature of it. Quick follow up and then we'll get in where you're talking about it being a continuation versus a new league launching. I think that that helps maybe not have as much of a drop next week where maybe it's actual generated interest versus like, oh, this is a new league, let's go check it out. I think it's not like they've been marketing this for 10 years pushing to this date and everyone and then they're going to turn away. I think it being a continuation might lend a little bit more to this is actually the level of people that are invested in that. Does that make sense? No, definitely. They developed a niche audience. So the question with these leagues is I think they have, I know there's a lot of people who are detractors of these leagues. I think they've developed a nice floor. The question with them is how far can they get their ceiling? And everybody I've talked to has been, and I, it has been skeptical about whether or not they can reach a larger ceiling. And I know the idea of these two leagues coming together is let's own this space together and perhaps we put our efforts together and we can reach that light at the end of the tunnel that I was talking about earlier in the conversation. So I do agree, Reid, I think there's a chance, we'll see what happens with this weekend, but I think they've developed, see this is the cool thing about the USFL and the XFL now is you have established identities with these teams and leagues. There is legitimate fan bases for them and it's like watching a show like season three of a show, season two of a show. So they have identities. This isn't just some random new league where you don't know the players. They're guys like the Luis Perez is the Jordan Temo. We all know the Skip Holtz, the Bob Stoops. So the audience that's been around for these leagues the last few years is along for the ride. So you got a dedicated group, may not be as large as other sports leagues, but I think that can stabilize and keep the question in the long run is the ceiling, how high can they go? Can they get higher? Because we haven't seen leagues in this space perform like the XFL did in 2020, even though that league was getting trashed for their ratings. But I remember on Twitter where I would every week post sports ratings comparisons and the XFL was beating a lot of leagues. I couldn't do that with the USFL in 2022. I couldn't do that with the XFL in 2023. But I remember some of my most viewed tweets and my little whatever six year run now on Twitter were those sports because a lot of people were crapping on the X NFL's ratings. I said, oh yeah, so I would put NBA on NBC, the NHL on a B, C and then compared it. And it was funny, the XFL was beating the NFL combine, the NFL combine. The XFL led into the NFL combine and the XFL got a better rating. I know it's different. I know it's guys and shorts, I get it versus an actual game, but still, right. So anyhow, but I think the ceiling is the key on this. Have they developed a decent enough floor? I think they have a good product. I think it's a good TV product. I think it can get better. And when you put it into context too, Seattle, our regional sports is completely bottomed out. The network that carries the Mariners and the Kraken to put into perspective, I watch a Kraken every week, this full blown production. They got big stars doing the commentary, all that. I think root averages like 13, 15,000 a game. So it's really puts in when the XFL pops off 1.3 million versus this is not that. I know that you hate hockey enough. I don't hate hockey, I don't dislike hockey. I'm as football. As football gets over the years, I've become more of a casual fan of all the other leagues, but football's the one thing where I'm diehard. Alright. Eugene wants to know what has been the league's reaction to ratings versus expectations, especially given the competition March start? They're happy. Like I said, I got needled a bit because I said they would do 800 K and they ended up doing 1.3 and 1.1 million. So I got a couple friends of mine were teased me about that. They're happy with it. Are there some people within the leagues that maybe feel that they could have done a little bit better, I suppose, but I haven't communicated with those individuals because the way I look at it is they really, you got to understand there was a lot of consideration about this league starting in February or starting the week after the Super Bowl, but they just didn't have time to pull that off. Next year's timeline might be a lot different than this was. So they went right smack right in the middle. Usually what we get with say the XFL starting in February of the a f is, although the AF didn't get a chance to finish the deal, you needed to do the XFL in 2020. But what ends up happening is by week four, week five, week six, you can afford to take a hit with your league. If you're going directly against March Madness, you're like, all right, I'll take our lumps for a few weeks, they'll go away and then the end of our season we'll build up to the playoffs and we'll do better then. But to debut launch this league week one against it right in the heart of it, right in the wind of the storm so to speak. That's a tough one. So they were really pleased. The people I spoke to were really pleased that they were surprised that some people were surprised by the numbers and they were attendance too. I know they're really prideful about how hard they're working and I could see a lot of the teams are doing $15 deals and all these different deals and they're trying to doing free ticket giveaways and all this stuff. They're really trying to rope in people. So they didn't really have a lot of time to make this work. I know we've heard that excuse before, but I think the true measurement for a lot of this stuff, the ratings and attendance is really going to come a year from now. But so far to answer the question, they're pleased with what they've seen. Well, especially that second game going up against Caitlin Clark and all of that, and that was 12.9 million. I mean, it completely blows the water out of everything that's really come in that space before Abdul wants to know what is the percent chance, speaking of the start, the percent chance of the 2025 season starts earlier, mid February based on Reed's conversation with Daryl. It feels like it's heading towards that. Yeah, I think the discussion was initially for them to be after the Super Bowl. There are so many arguments for and against that. One of the arguments, there's a couple of different arguments. Well, if you launch after the Super Bowl, you don't obviously run into what they're running into now, which March Madness and all that. You also run into a situation where you're in the dead of winter where you have more people that are at home. So there's an argument for that. If your timeline is later, you run into the spring and summer where more families are outside and they're not at home early Saturday afternoons are doing things, and then of course agents and players prefer for their players for their season to wrap up. Before NFL teams have mini camps and all that we saw last year, both leagues have quality talent, but the XFL ended up having 69 players that signed with the NFL and IDENTIFI contracts, not counting all the mini camp invite guys. So 69 signed and then 42 signed on the USFL side. So that's 111 players total. So you can still get a good amount of players if your season ends in June and July as evidenced by the 42. But hey, 69, 42 or 27 more opportunities there. So I mean, agents and players want to have a better opportunity to get in the NFL. You got 35 players right now from the XFL and the USFL in 2023 that are currently rostered in the NFL. So 30% of the players that signed ended up in the league, we'll see if they make it for next season, but hey, they got a job in the NFL. So that's part of the goal of these leagues, even though they don't want to be a straight up developmental league. So as far as the calendar goes, I think they're going to debate it percentage wise. I don't know. Like I said, there's an argument for waiting until April. There really is. Here's the thing though, if they add more teams, they're also, I know we expansion, well, we have expansion. Expansion is talked about too much. I know, but if they add more teams that extends your season. So if let's just hypothetically, if they have 10 teams next year or 12 or whatever, that extends your season. You have more games during the week on television too. You'll have five, six games a week on TV rather than the four that they have now. But that would theoretically extend your season as well. So maybe if you start earlier, you can end May, June or something like that. Yeah, if you add teams and then you're starting late and then you're going late after that. Eugene has a follow up. Any talk consideration from the leagues now reverting to the XFL kickoff now that the NFL will use it. I know we talked about it a little bit on the pre-show at the end of the stream, but I am surprised they didn't about, I mean I know that we've been practicing in training camp for four weeks, but I'm surprised almost that they didn't do that. Having watched the US L kickoff again, now Greg Parks did a complete breakdown about all the given yards and all of that. Do you think they move back to that next year, the XFL style? It's fascinating. I've been watching the USFL for a while now, obviously, and their kickoff is just interesting to me. A returner will have 15 yards with, you'll see a returner run for 10, 15 yards without a defender even getting in the picture. You can argue whether that's a good thing or not. It's fun to watch returns like that and all that. You saw the opening kickoff of the season or Arlington's already in enemy territory. Honestly, I think the UFL is going to play it out and watch how it works in the NFL first before they do an about phase. Here's the thing, I do think the NFL is going away from, unfortunately they're going away from the traditional kickoff. It's because of safety. We've seen what they've done. They neutered the kickoff to begin with, no wedges, none of this different alignments, et cetera. So it sounds only 22% of kickoffs are returned and you've eliminated injuries, but you've eliminated the play. But I think the NFL is only signed up for one year with this kickoff. I'm so fascinated to see what happens, how NFL teams adapt to it, how it comes off. There's going to be people in the preseason week, one of the NFL season that are going to look at this radical looking kickoff and think this is ridiculous. Just go back to the old one. There'll be people that go, Hey, why don't you just use the UFL one? That was pretty cool. They moved the kicker back and they still get returns. So you'll get that argument too, right? So I think if it's not a disaster, because the NFL has some differences from the XFL kickoff. Obviously they're trying to paint it as their own. It's Sam Schwartz's baby, but they do have some differences. How many people are upfront? I think it's seven versus nine. Obviously two returners rather than one. So there are maybe those tweaks will make the kickoff a little more exciting. I don't know. I know Sam Schwartzstein and his team tried a bunch of those things already, so they trial by fire I guess. But let's just say it's crapped on by the critics. The NFL kickoff is just, nobody's like, this is ridiculous. Go back to the old kickoff, then the UFOs be like, Hey, we made the right decision by not going to that kickoff. But if it's a smashing success in the NFL and it's fun and there's a lot of returns and big plays and not every place, just the kickoff in the NFL is like I'm watching to see how strong, it's like an exhibition watching to see how strong the kicker's leg is, see if you can get it through the uprights. It's like the guys, the returner just walks away as the ball goes through the end zone. So it's become nothing play in the NFL. So I think they could go back to it, but I think they're going to react upon what happens in the NFL. If the NFL loves the kickoff and they're like, this is it. We're as far as we go, this is our kickoff from here on in. Then I think other people, not only the UFL, I think college football will follow suit. I mean you got the European League of footballs doing it. I think the CFL who's looking at it, if it's a smashing success in the NFL, the CFL will have it. So you'll have all levels of football using it. But first things first, let's see how the NFL implements it and how it works in their league first. Yeah, if the CFL takes it over that, that would really be this illustrious of that. Peter, Texas, Pete wants to know what's the status on selling teams as franchises. Are there any conversations about what that would cost or look like? And I guess to add to that, for mine, you talked about Disney and Fox kind of owning equity in this right now. So maybe there's not as like, okay, we got to sell tomorrow. So does that change any of that? And I guess how does any of that update now that we have all of this new kind of mishmash of all this ownership? Yeah, all the markets they chose specific for this merger, they chose specifically because they have designs on specific potential investors. I think I've heard for the longest time now that Memphis is a city that they feel is going to have maybe perhaps the league's first owner. So that's one of the things I've heard at Birmingham, Michigan. There's also hope there. All these teams were chosen specifically the surviving USFL teams with the idea of them being sold off. And I think I've heard a lot of rumblings about Memphis, so I wouldn't, here's the thing, it's very difficult to get eight good owners. You can get one or two of 'em, but it's very difficult. So we saw what happened with the a f, so it's not an easy task, but I think there's a good chance that if this league has success in the next two years, I think there's a good chance we're going to see at least one or two of the franchises sold off to local ownership. You would hope. Why wouldn't you want to own St. Louis? We saw you tweeted it out, the Battle Hawks beating out the cardinals and the ratings, how well they did locally up against Kaitlyn Clark and all that. And then so why wouldn't you, if you're in St. Louis, consider owning the battle locks and you figure the stallions by now, that was the hope of Fox that somebody in Birmingham would step up, right? You'd figure well see how their attendance is. It's a crucial week for some of these teams. The expectations are modest for attendance, but I think the threshold for a lot of these teams is 10 k and above. So try to shoot for that. The big thing with these games too is that you want, and I think they all had good crowds. I think you want whoever shows up no matter what the number is, 10, 12, 14,000, you want energized crowds that are into it. That crowd sounded great in Michigan. It wasn't the biggest crowd, and the crowd was decent in Houston. All things considered they team didn't look very good, but I thought their energy level was good there. San Antonio is pretty good too. So I think these markets, how they do, if they start to take off, if they have good seasons at the gate, Birmingham, Memphis, Michigan improved from last year. I think there's a chance maybe they can, I mean that's the ultimate goal outside of the NFL stepping in and funding this league. Somehow that's the ultimate goal is because they've centralized it. They're all going for the MLS model. And so what they would like to do is have it centralized control costs and then owners come in and that takes care of itself. It was funny, I actually want to pull that up because one of our listeners, they tagged me in that St. Louis thing and I texted Max, I said, has this been shared yet? He's like, oh yeah, that's been around. I'm like, oh. And I'm like, well, I'll tweet it anyway just because, and then it ended up, a lot of people hadn't seen it yet. So just let me see if I can share this just so we can talk about it super quick. This is kind of an ad-lib here. So the TV numbers by these are the local ratings for each of the teams. St. Louis beating there, the 4.5 on that. Are you surprised with the lower numbers here for Birmingham, which this is year three of them having a team with 2.6 and then Detroit 2.2 and then Dallas, the central hub of the UFL with a point a. I mean I know Dallas is huge, there's a lot going on. Just any takeaways on that since that's kind of new info since we've posted anything? Yeah, I'm not so obviously not surprised. It goes without saying St Louis's number. Okay. I wish it would be better. Detroit. I'm actually surprised it's that, to be honest with you, that there, and you would think by now that Dallas would be a little bit stronger for attendance was decent. You were obviously at that game. I thought I was a little worried before the game, seeing some of the photos that were out there and how the crowd was potentially going to look. And then I think it filled out nicely. Yeah, those numbers could be a little bit better. The Dallas number could be better. The Detroit number is fine. Birmingham should be a little bit higher. St Louis is awesome. I mean that's so cool to see. So I think some lessons can be learned here in the future in terms of it's probably never going to happen. But I keep looking at Oakland, which has no pro sports teams basically. Now, especially with the a's move in today, they're going to be playing in Sacramento. I just keep thinking of myself. If this league ever decides the journey a little bit differently on the calendar and maybe head to the west a little bit rather than just be sectioned off there, maybe Oakland will be in consideration. Could you imagine if you had an Oakland UFL team? That entire market, there's no baseball to watch, there's none of that. And don't get me wrong, there'll be some loyalists that still follow the a's no doubt, but it's kind of hard when they abandon your city. So for Oakland to have their own football team, they lost the Raiders. I think that's something for maybe it's cost efficient, it's not cost efficient, I don't know. But that's something to consider because you're looking at the example of St. Louis and what happens when you go to a market that's been shunned by pro football in general, and then you can see how they've embraced it and those numbers are very impressive and they're going to hold up. St. Louis is going to do well all season loan. Robert has a question here on Facebook. Speaking of attendance, what attendance numbers do the teams need to achieve to be viable? We talked a little bit about that, but for example, Michigan averages 9,000 per game. Will they fold for next season? I don't think so. When You're running fourth field, that's the problem you're running for. I mean it costs a lot to run Forward field. That's a tough one. That's a tough one. So I mean, like I said, for people I've spoken with, I think their expectations are modest in terms of attendance. I don't think they're expecting 20,000 in every venue. I don't think that's the expectation there. They'd like to do better than 9,000 for sure, but you got to remember last year I got the figures, but I wasn't able to release it for two reasons. I could have been a jerk and released it, but I didn't want to make the USFL look bad. That's the God honest truth. People told me not to do that, but I didn't want, I understand the non Panthers games, there was a couple 989 paid fans kind of thing. So I don't think that they're expecting 20,000 at Ford Field. I would love if they get to that point, that would be what a success. Maybe the Panthers beat the stallions this week and they start proving that they're one of the best teams in the league and they start to take off. They have one of the coolest helmets in the history of pro football. They have great history dating back to the old USFL. I'd love nothing more than to see that team take off. So you never know, maybe that market takes that team over time. I don't think there's a set marker. Like last year, if I'm not mistaken, this is off the top of my head, but I think the XFL sold 600,000 tickets. Now I have to double check that, but I'm pretty, that was, I'll have to double check, but I am pretty sure it was in that neighborhood in terms of how many tickets they sold for the season. So this league could do better than that. I have no doubt about that. And if you look at the, because last year you had Orlando, they had the Vegas situation. Vegas averaged like 6,000 per game, which is a miracle that David got that all things considered. And then Orlando was whatever it was, I think 9,000 or 10,000 thereabouts. The key is paid attendance. So they give away a lot of tickets and all that stuff. The key is how many paid. So that's important. I do think these numbers have to improve in some of these markets, but I think the threshold right now is like 10,000 and above. You'd like to build upon that. You'd like to do more obviously. But to expect all these markets outside of St. Louis to all of a sudden be hitting 20 K by now Birmingham, Birmingham is such an awesome team by now. They should be. They're trying to attempt to win the third straight championship. That's something that hasn't happened in football since the Packers in the sixties or the Edmonton Elks in the late seventies, early eighties. I know people look at these leagues differently, but it's professional football mean. So by now Birmingham should be embracing the team. So you would hope that my expectation for them is higher than it is for say, Michigan or what have you. I think they should do 14, 15, 16,000 and above, and they shouldn't be in that eight, nine, 10,000 range in my opinion. These other teams have to build up a winning tradition and build up their fan base. I think by now, stallions in year three should be doing better. It's funny because we talk attendance and you get, there was a CFL guy over the weekend posting the average attendance for all the CFL franchises last year. It's 110 years versus one week here just to be whatever. But to piggyback off that, and then I have another question from Darren here about attendance. You're talking about ownership. We talk about franchise ownership, but I have not looked at the seating charter this weekend. I've heard Memphis is pretty low. I know they're running into $10 ticket sales and you want, but yeah, if I'm buying the Memphis franchise with 4,500 paid attendance, 6,000 paid, what am I buying at that point? And I know we talk about TV ratings and all that. I think it was Ben Fisher that was on last year where the Sports Business journal was talking about you can't evaluate an MLS franchise that's getting a million viewers each week the same as you can USFL fca because you have season tickets and you have hundreds of years the people and they're buying the merchandise and the families and they're passing this on. And even just the mental hold you have in the communities, there's all these other intangibles that go into it. So I guess if Memphis looks really weak this weekend in terms of attendance, I don't know what you're buying there in terms of a franchise, It's tough too with football seasons because it has to go beyond the ticket sales in terms of your revenue because it's not like we've seen baseball games at 3, 4, 5, 6,000 fans, but they got an 81 home games so they can make up some money along the way there. So they can, by doing that, these teams have five games. That's it. And then if they get to the playoffs, maybe they host the game, maybe they get to six or whatever. But you have to be somebody in Memphis that figures with my money, with my promotional ability, I can market this team because the league is not willing for better or for worse because they know they can go into the red rather quickly. They're not willing to go all out on spending money on promotion and marketing. So for better or for worse, and a lot of leagues in the past tried this and they ended up going in the red immediately. So you're going to need an owner that sees that is bullish on it, that sees the potential and goes, you know what, if I take control of the showboats, I will boost attendance. I know exactly what to do in this market. So you're going to need those type of forward-thinking maybe egotistical, brave guys that come into market. You're not going to buy a readymade smashing success product. You're going to need people who are innovative and they feel like they have a handle in the marketplace and they can benefit from owning one of these teams. And then, am I getting a percentage of the shop sales for? How does that go? I mean there's so many. How does that go all in when you have central ownership and all? I mean, I know MLS has all that stuff. Darren wants to know, what do you think is more important TV numbers or live attendance numbers? I think TV numbers are more important because I think the more of an audience you can build, the more sponsors you get and the more popular your product is on television, your attendance will improve. So I think that's a very important aspect is building up your popularity on television because you become more visible and then you sell more tickets. So by default, so I think they go hand in hand. I think the big thing with these football leagues is they have to figure out, and Jerry Cardinal, I've seen him listened to him speak on many different forums. He's talked about monetizing. How do you monetize the fan base when they're not at the games? And that's a thing that these leagues haven't quite figured out yet, whether it be through fantasy, gambling, merchandising. So they haven't quite figured out how do we, because you have to be able, and for a football league to be successful and make a lot of money, you have to be able to profit off of beyond just the three hour window that your game is on. That's where they need to figure out. They need to build up their revenue stream. So they're all important. Each one of these things is important sponsorships. But I would say if I had to lean one way or the other, I think the ratings are a little more important than the attendance. I think your ratings, it is funny how it works though. I think your ratings improve too. If people turn on the TV and they see people in the attendance because then they see it's a hot product and this is interesting and let me watch it and this crowd is awesome and look how amped up they are and it enhances the game. That's what the USFL, unfortunately, they have so many great elements that the league lacked is their games had artificial energy with the pipe and crowd noise and all that. And if you flip it on, you go, oh my God, nobody's had these games and then you would just change. So anyhow, so they kind of all work hand in hand, but I would lean towards the TV ratings. Something caught in my mind. Did you watch? I was traveling. Did you watch the UFL today? I'm looking here on the ESPN. It got about 12,000 viewers on the ES ESP N YouTube channel talking about destroys debut and kind of all that stuff. Did you watch that? I did watch it. There are aspects of that show that it's very sleek looking. I like Scooby. I'm a fan of Daniel dopp. I've listened to him with the field. Yates do fantasy football. They try to do an interactive thing with the fans. I think there's a great gem of an idea there. It looks sleek, very professional. I don't think they're quite hitting on it. It's trying to be hip and the guys are walking around with the pads and all that and they're doing, and I think this show, if it finds its groove, it can be very formidable. It's very up to date leaning into technology, interactivity with fans. I love the concept of it. Like I said, I like the people that are working on the show. I did see it. I thought it was good. My expectation level. I think it could be so much better than what it is. I mean, it has potential. I think it'd be a very entertaining show. They'll have guests and stuff and that'll help. I think they need a little bit more of exclusive access with players and coaches and all that, which we get a lot of. We take it for granted now. I've been watching the XFL and the USFL. We take for granted all this access. It's ridiculous. We never see this. During NFL games, I was watching, I just wrote an article, defender's article, and I watching Reggie Barlow was ripping on Brandon Smith because Brandon Smith was on the sideline saying, you're not throwing me the ball. You're not throwing me the ball. They drop up a play on third down for me, drops it and the DC has to punt the football. And then Reggie Barlow's on screen saying, you begged for the ball, we throw it to you and you drop it. Good going. That kind of deal. I'm like, woo. That stuff. You just don't, I know NFL films does some great work and then after the fact you see some stuff. But some of it you have to question how much of it is cleaned up for television and how much is they make sure we don't hear any read call somebody a jerk or an asshole. So that kind of thing. But I think there's some of that element that I think the UFL today show can benefit from the extra added access. And I think the league, in some respects, it's a work in progress. I think it can be better. I like what they do. I did watch it. It's available out there. They need to do a better job of promoting that. It's coming up. I like the whole idea. I like the idea of a highlight show after the fact and bringing some personality and some flare to it with some cool post-game reactions, some news. I think there's potential there for it to be better than it is right now, as is. It's okay. I enjoyed it last year. There's nothing wrong with it, but I just think it can be so much better than it's, Yeah, it is just like you were talking just ways to exist outside of just a Saturday, Sunday. I know they do it on that makes sense. Do the the post game. But except for these coaches media calls, and I know TMU had a thing they sent out today that you could download. Trying to keep this league and the zeitgeist during the week right now is it's always kind of the problem. And I think the CFL has an issue with that sometimes. I will say really good job with the YouTube channel. I mean the XFL one as well, posting clips and everything. I thought they'd done a good job in terms of being able to catch up and do all that. Even if the one of 'em is the super cut of destroying kicks or whatever. I thought that was kind of funny. Yeah, that's another thing. There's so many hard work and people in the league. I thought it was an impressive week on social media for them weekend, especially in comparison to last year. I thought they did a very good job because last year you'd go an hour, an hour and a half. Come on man. You've had all these cool plays. You're just like, I know I'm seeing it. But the point is, you have to put it out there and then you have to show those highlights. So it's a part of the viewing experience. Now you got the phone in your hand, you're doing it for people who don't have access to TV anyway. But I thought they did a very good job with social media. They're doing a good job on their YouTube channel, a much better job than they did last year. There's areas for improvement. What you have to do is you have to put yourself in the shoes of a fan whenever you're doing any of these things. And you have to say, okay, as a fan, when I watch the NFL, what do I want from a postgame show? Then write that down. What do I like from their Postgame show? Write that down. What are they missing? And then I think you need to do that. You need to do that. What do I do? Like the XFL social media teams, these special teams, if they're NFL fans, they have to sit there and go, what do I do on Sunday mornings when NFL games are about ready to go, about an hour and a half, you have a routine of going to see the inactives. Every team post them. Why can't we do that? So I mean, every routine posts their injury report every day. So it's not a bad thing to copy. I had the NFL. There's some things, right? Because there's stuff they don't do, right? The NFL, and you could see it in the UFL because the UFL with the transparency, with the review, all that stuff, it's ahead of the game with the technology they use with the first down marker. That's way ahead of the game. The access they give the U-F-L-X-F-L-U-S-F-L have given you on the sidelines with players. I don't know if we'll ever see that in the NFL, like players being interviewed during the game. It's so cool. I think it's cool. I know a lot of people traditionalists don't like it. I think you don't always get great moments. I know, but I think it's cool that right after somebody makes a big player, or the crazy thing is they didn't really, the old school XFL would've went to Jean de Lance and would've went right in his face and said, why'd you spit on that player? And that would've made us a heck of a television. But I guess they avoided that. They kind of interviewed destroying. But I mean, hey, it's part of the game. So anyhow Destroy. I got a lot of heat on that. I'm like, if you like, what's his name? Delo Hay de Hay. Donald Delo. Hay Donald. I'm like, it's fine. Well, here's the thing with him and I get it. I give him total credit for building up the social media deal that he's built up. That's awesome. I would never be able to do that. I don't know how he did it. Good for him. I know he got in trouble for it in college football. So the world has changed a lot now with the NIL. So I think it's cool that he came out the other side. I think it's also kind of cool. I know he was with the Toronto Argonauts on their practice roster a few years back. I think it's cool that he's getting an opportunity. He's got to deliver when he's given the opportunity. He didn't do very much. And I know they're building him up because he has a following. I get it. But when he gets the chance, he's got to deliver. Now, he didn't have to do anything in that game for the brass who had a great debut, but under that new regime. But we'll see. He's got to come through. He's getting a golden opportunity. He got a golden ticket here. League's given him, it's helped him that he's got that social deal, that he's got that popularity. It's an interesting story. But if he falters, I mean then he's got to produce. When he's given the chance to make field goals and to help his team win, he's got to come through. Otherwise there are going to be people who think of it as a publicity stunt until proven otherwise. Yep. So we've avoided asking this question. Here we go. Pip wants to know. Mike, what are your thoughts on adding teams after year one? How many teams should they add? We got to touch on it. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Absolutely. Expansion. Expansion. They discussed having 10 teams and then I'm not surprised. I know there was a big controversy on this. I'm not surprised Going into this season, Going into this season. I'm sorry. Yes, they discussed having 10 teams. They came close a couple occasions. They decided upon eight for this year, then revisited for next year. So I think there's a good chance, I would say better than 50 50 that we get two new teams in the league next season. It doesn't mean, now there was some controversy attached to this because the recent trademarks, the Ohio Bulldogs, the Nashville Tuners, I do know that if there wasn't a merger that the Vegas Vipers were either headed to Nashville or to Arizona. So make of that what you will, whether they would've been the Nashville Vipers or the Nashville Tuners, who knows? But is it, I don't know there History with that. Is there history? Not that I can recall. See, that's why I'm like, that is a terrible thing. The only way I'd sign off on that is if you tell me right now they have a Nashville owner that wants that crazy name. If you tell me right now, I'll say, okay, yeah, his money's good. Right? Okay, sure. Tuners it is. I don't know. I mean the doers is the greatest spring football league of all time. I mean, maybe the tuners. I'm changing my tune. I'm changing my tune on the tuners. There You go. You never know. Maybe the logo, you could do the tune thing somehow looks kind of cool. I don't know. Could Work fork, I imagine like a tuning fork, right? And then It Could come out and make it like, right, It could work. It could grow on you. I mean there's a lot, the origin behind a lot of these football names. I mean, the Packers are meat packers. They didn't have any money that franchise, so they named it after the meat packers right there locally. So they needed somebody to fund the team. So Packers it is. So anyhow, but maybe you never know. But Nashville and Ohio, I do know that the idea was for Viy to go to Nashville, Arizona. And I do know that Canton just missed the cut. So I put Pictures tuning for just so we can get an idea. It looks pretty good. That might work. I don't know. You can sell me on it. Big on it almost has a Trident look to it a little bit. Yeah. I love it. So anyhow. But yeah, I do think this league is going to go barring them if they have a horrible year at the gate and their ratings are very bad and things collapse. I could, and they don't have a good championship rating and they don't do very well as far as sponsorships and all that. Let's say the year's a disaster, which I don't think it'll be, but let's just say it's just completely craters. They don't do very well. Then it's possible that they decided let's just stay with eight teams again. But I really think that they came so close and people were telling me, Hey, the Canton would be a part of this and that they would have 10 teams when they decided on eight. Ohio was on the chopping block and I'm a huge supporter of, I'd like to see 'em in Columbus, but anywhere in Ohio. I think it's an awesome football place. So I think that'd be very cool. So I think we're going to get two new teams. That's a hook too, by the way. I think they almost kind of have to do that. They need a new hook for 2025, not just, Hey, we're coming back for season two of the UFL. I mean, that's cool, right? But I think the hook is we're going to have, we're add on two teams. We'll have five weekly games or I think that would be pretty cool. I think the fans want it. Fans always want expansion. It just has to be done the right way. The right choices have to be made, but I honestly think we're going to add at least two teams next year. I thought that hurt the USFL going into season two. The biggest stories were okay, Memphis is playing in Memphis and Michigan's playing in Michigan, but that wasn't enough, like you said, to get casual fans like, oh man, they're adding two new teams and I mean, I don't know what, it's a non-zero number of people that supported the Michigan Panthers more when they were in Michigan, but I don't know if it was that, oh man, now that they're here, now I'm all, And there's always going to be people unhappy, right? Let's say they choose just hypothetically, they choose Ohio and Nashville, there's going to be a bunch of people that go, why don't you go to San Diego? Why don't you go to Oakland? How come you don't have any in new Northeast teams? Why don't you bring back the malls or the stars or the generals or the dragons or whatever. So there'll never be people that are fully happy, but I would be happy if you added two more teams. That means more players, more jobs, more games. So I'm all for it. I think they need to have a good season this year and like I said, not have an awful year at the gate. Awful year in the ratings. If they do that, they'll come back for next year, but they'll be limping into it. Eugene, this might be a quick one. I thought he wants to know any plans on flex scheduling. We had a little bit. We have Flex last year where we shifted time slots a little bit And they do that during the season. I think that's a very good idea, especially as you get have, I'd have to look at the schedule, but it's a very good question. I think as you get towards the end of the year, depending on what the playoff picture looks like, I think you need to flex your best games into primetime or into the windows, the A B, C, Fox windows. Fortunately the league has whatever it is, 31 games on both those, but you might have two teams that are out of it and they might have the primetime game on Fox and I would like to, if possible, I would like to do that. So I think they did do that. They announced ahead of time during the XFL season. Oh by the way, we're moving this game to this time and this game to that time. So I think that's possible for this season. I think ideally you want to wait towards the end of the year when you get into those final few weeks of the season before you start. I think everybody's still alive until you get to week eight, week nine, week 10, and last year was crazy. We had three, four and six teams make the playoffs in these two leagues. One of them was a sea dragon game. I remember we got the email and we had tickets, so, oh, this game's going to be whatever time now mirror. Twin wants to know. I know Alt Fantasy is doing their thing. I'm in the league and it's been good so far. Plans have A-U-F-L-E-S-P-N partnership for fantasy to get some more fans involved. I mean, I know we had Darryll Johnson on, we've been talking injury reports and kind of all that stuff, but trying to, it just feels to me like they never really grasped this and we had Eric Eger on and Jovan on and the pre-show I would literally hire, if Fox doesn't have this, hire someone to do fantasy DFS brain trust for we win of these leagues. But what do you make of this? And I'm trying to get these fans in. Yeah, it's very old world thinking that they're not up on top of this. As far as fantasy football goes, I haven't heard a thing, I've reached out, I've asked, I haven't heard, Hey, we plan on doing this this next year. We plan on doing this. I think they just want to maybe develop partnerships with the popular DFS sites or what have you. I could only imagine how successful their app would be if they had, how much traffic they would get if they actually had fantasy football on their own app. Everybody would sign up and If they had injury reports on there, if they had all that on there and the transactions on there, if they had all that on there, you would get people every day checking that multiple times a day when Multiple times, yeah, you have to think about it again, put yourself in the shoes of an NFL fan. What do NFL fans do? And that's what I do during the week. I play fantasy football and I pay attention to every team's injury reports and I do all that stuff and it's immersive. It's part of the process of being, you can't wait for that first practice report. You can't wait for that first injury report. I'm not even a gambler. I pay attention to the lines too, the over the under. So that's all part of it. And I have, unfortunately these leagues have yet to get it right from the a f on down. They haven't delved into it or figured this aspect out if they need to hire someone to do it for them because it just seems like an old world thinking kind of deal where they don't, none of the Jerry Card now's not picking up running backs from the cardinals. I very unlikely that Danny Garcia is making trades in her fantasy league, so they have no knowledge of it, they don't understand the worth and they just do not get it. They don't understand how fantasy. There was a time Peter King was just retired. He wrote an article for Sports Illustrated where 10 Ways to Save a Boring NFL. And I remember in the early nineties there was a time where the NFL was considered boring and I really think that fantasy football was a big reason why the NFL started become the monster that it is because it just made people in their markets, fans of every team and show interest in every game. And that's like where we're at. It's a red zone and all these channels, all that stuff is fun when you're playing fantasy football. Good lord, stressful but fun. And then also even if the game is lost or it's not a competitive game anymore, it gives you a reason to kind of watch all that stuff. Because I remember, and they even tried to talk about it this weekend, wasn't a great weekend for me to do commentator analysis because the one game we were in the press box, two of the games I was at bars and I was watching on the airplane, the other one, but they're like, oh, they kicked the field goal. If you're betting the over on this game, you're a happy camper. I'm like, I don't know sports betting at all. I was just on the podcast and they're like, Hey, what are your prop bets for the weekend? I'm like, you were asking the wrong homie for that one. But even I understand that there is such a large portion of that they would just watch the games just to bed and play on 'em. They don't even care about the league at all. What's funny, I had a tweet last week, I bring up his name, Maddie Fresh, put out the lines. So I went ahead and I replied to it and I gave whatever who I thought the favorites were and it only had four likes to tweet. I was thinking, ah, nobody even noticed. I said, I like Michigan and San Antonio's home underdogs and I take Memphis outright and obviously taking Birmingham, I didn't think anybody saw it or cared about it. How many people reached out to me and said, wow, Mike so much, how did you know this was going to happen? I'm like, what? And people who are into this are asking me my opinions on DFS. They're asking my opinions on props, on spreads, all that. And so I got lucky sometimes you're completely off. But I had a feeling about those teams covering, I had no idea Jake Bates was going to kick a 64 yard field goal. I knew San Antonio was going to be better than people were making 'em out to be. And I knew DC especially early in the seasons going to have struggles. They lost too many big time players so it not affect them. So anyhow, but there are people, my point is to say there are people out there that are so into this stuff and that they're waiting for you to provide this and when they don't, they turn away from your league. It's unfortunate they just haven't quite none of these leagues could figure it out. I don't know if it's just older people that are just older generation that don't understand it, they don't get it, but they don't understand. You just have to pay attention. You have to pay attention to what happens during an NFL season, how immersed fans are. That's how you monetize your fan base when they're not at the games through, well, You have entire TV shows on NFL network now that, and I watch L Network a lot, RIP, good morning football right now while they figure out what the heck's going on with that, but they have entire programs, hour long program, get in your fantasy set lineups. It is such a stupid thing, but the world is invested in this now. I mean I don't get it. I can't justify Dorothy would divorce me, but it's such a thing that like you said, for them not to understand and my last point, and then when you don't provide the stuff, then these markets dry up, right? I remember USFL season one, I'd have people on every week like, oh shoot, these are guys that actually know all the football and they're taught because they got to know all this and you get to week eight nine and they're like, yeah, we went from having a hundred thousand dollars pot to $10,000 pot or however it works because like there's not enough interest to justify doing it. It's unfortunate. And that's the thing. That's the thing what the NFL has fantasy football and gambling have turned casual fans that, hey, I'll check out the NFL game when it's on Sunday to everyday fans, 24 hours a day fans, they're completely bought in and so it's a big part of it. It's huge and that information is free to give out. I'm hoping that one day that actually they'll have someone who comes to them and pitches them on it that has experience in the field and that can help them join the year 2024 because they're really way behind on that. So they don't understand how much interest and traffic that'll drive if they do it. I have eight guys that have been on my podcast in the last six months and a heartbeat and be able to revolutionize that. It's crazy. Sorry to interrupt. It's all good, but it's the truth. And then the people who are like the Matthew Berrys of the world who I respect, the field Yates, all these people that Daniel Dopp was doing, he knows all about fantasy football. He has good opinions too in that area in the NFL Stephania bells, these people would have more interest in the UFL if you actually had straight up fantasy football. And so one day, I don't know, We got this will be rapid or this is actual football now we'll talk here. Rapid fire here. There's multiple ones in here, so we'll kind of rapid fire this and then I have a final round out question here. We'll do Federal Hill. I can't even speak now. Friar wants to know first question Houston really that bad? Yes. Here's the thing though that what will keep them in games this year? If Mark Thompson's head's on correctly and he's healthy and that defense we saw, I'm Mark Thompson. I'm working that. I'll tell you that they have a chance. Mark Thompson's the best running back in the league and their defense is really good. Their offense put 'em in bad spots in week one. Memphis is so much more talented overall than they are. They still had a chance in that game. So Houston's bad, but if this makes any sense, they can be a competitive bad until they get the quarterback position correctly and figure that out. They're going to have a hard time stacking up against Case Cookes in Memphis. Obviously Birmingham with Matt Corre and Michigan now with their defense. So we'll see what happens to EJ Perry. But Houston is that bad because they can't right now stack up at quarterback until they figure that out. But I do think they can be competitive every week because they do have the makings of the top-notch run game and a really good defense. Next question. How did the Rams get so good? They got 41 new players, they got 50 player roster, they got 41 new players and it's not just roughnecks from last year. Yeah, they got a healthy John Trey Kirkland. That kind of helps. But if you notice some of their new imports like Anthony McFarland, these guys, you got to give Mark Lily bridge credit. You could see a lot of recent Mark West Stevenson wide receiver, slot receiver, six round pick of the Buffalo Bills. Mark Lily Bridge Bridge did a very good job putting that roster together and I think a lot of people were overlooking what he did and they kept thinking about last year's promise. They only have nine players and the ones they brought back from last year, Delante, Scott Alize, Jose Mack, those guys are really freaking good. So you want to bring those guys back. I think hot San Antonio, you don't see that very often in a football team. I know there's a lot of turnover in the NFL, but like 41 out of 50 new players that's quite the makeover Will thrive with the Showboats If he could stay alive. I admire his toughness. He stays in the pocket up until the last second and it makes me worry about him staying healthy because he waits. I love the fact that, and you heard the announcers there, like Lu Bill was so impressed with Cook. I think this is their first time calling a game with him. I know they've heard of him, knew about him, but I was like, yeah, you guys are learning for the first time how tough this kid is. I think Kku is the one quarterback that I trust overtaking Birmingham in the USFL conference. If he can stay healthy, Memphis has a very talented roster. Got to remember Case Cookes was in that first stallions championship when he left the game. Unfortunately right before his wedding would've broke his leg or whatever. The stars were winning that game when he left and then it got craziness, whatever it was. KJ Costello and Alex McGoo battling it out. Both starting quarterbacks got hurt, stallions came out on top, but Kki is a good quarterback. They kind of slept walk through that game last week. But I think Memphis is a chance to be better. I remember getting yelled at because I wasn't at the USFL championship game that season after I was working I think four weddings in five days or whatever it was. That was always fun. What is the issue with dc? They lost their three biggest stars. So think about it in any sport, does it matter if it's football or any sport? If you lose your three best players, if you take any team in sports and just take your three best players off of it, you're going to have an issue. So I mean there's no disrespect to Jordan Temu who I thought had a decent week one, he was actually victimized. I think they had five drops DC he threw two touchdown passes that were negated because of penalties. Mr. Lance, see you later sir. So I think that the loss, two of the wide receivers in the NFL and Chris Blair and Lucky Jackson were fourth and fifth in the XFL in receiving their yards per catch were ridiculous. They produced so many big plays. Teams tried to put eight men in the box to stop Abram Smith and they paid for it dearly. When they did that, it was difficult to defend against the defenders. So Abram Smith is a huge loss and until somebody steps up, I think the Kiki QT pickup was a good one, yet he should have two touchdowns last week. I think Brandon Smith has to play better this week. Ty Scott had a nice debut, his first game with the defenders. I think that this team, they got a wake up call and they got a huge game coming up on Sunday against Houston. That might be ugly. Both those teams only scored 12 points a piece last week. So DC's got a lot of pressure to keep their undefeated streak intact in DC and to get their mojo back because they kind of lost it in that championship game to Arlington. That was a game they shouldn't have lost. And then San Antonio was two steps ahead of them physically and mentally last week. Does the league go through Birmingham? I predicted the stallions would win the whole thing. So I'm obviously bullish on them. I have a lot of respect for Skip Holtz. It's kind of interesting. They have 13 players from that 2022 championship team, so they got a lot of big leaders from that. They're trying to win their third straight championship. That staff is very good. Continuity helps. They're the team to beat until proven otherwise, until proven. They're the kings of the spring. So until proven otherwise, until they're knocked off throne, you got to respect the ring. Was St Louis lost just bad luck or was there something else they could have done to win? I don't know. St. Louis kind of deserved to lose that game. It's kind of crazy. They lost on a 64 yard field goal. They were thoroughly outplayed at the line of scrimmage. They did not play well. Anthony Beck was ticked off after that game because their performance, they're better overall than Michigan on paper, clearly have a better offense. They missed opportunities. A G McCarran missed a wide open touchdown down the field. They just were sloppy in that game and I think last year they got away with that. They played some games like against San Antonio where they were outplayed for three quarters and a half and then found a way to pull that off in the end and they almost did the same thing in week one. A lot of pressure on St. Louis too. They got a huge game coming up with Arlington. One of those two teams is going to be o and two when the smoke settles on week two. I don't think it was bad luck. I know that's hard to say. What other opposing team kicks a kick? 64 yards twice. But the football guards were like, well you guys don't deserve this one. So I think at St. Louis had won last week, they would've stole that one because they really didn't play it very well and Michigan kept EJ Perry turning the ball over in the red zone. Kind of kept St. Louis alive to make that little Marcel Aman comeback at the end. And then the final one to bounce off or bounce off at that Panthers contenders question mark. Whew. That defense is really good. They're running back. They're like Houston in a way. They have a big time running back in West Hills and they have a big time defense. The question is the quarterback is kind of spunky like he's a good runner and he's tough EJ Perry, but he can't play like he did last week. I Michigan has some moxie to 'em if that quarterback can straighten out and their offensive line played. Okay. Although St. Louis I think kind of won that battle. The line of scrimmage. Michigan has a chance. They'll be in every game. They'll be in every game. EJ Perry's got to play better though, otherwise if they stunned Birmingham this week, I think you got no choice but to respect them. If they go to two and oh and they beat St. Louis and Birmingham and back to back weeks and stop those offenses, then you have to tip your cap and say that the Michigan's for real, especially on defense And then bonus one here before the last. Do you like the U-F-L-U-S-F-L-U-X-F-L, the whole conference keeping track of all the wins and all that? I'm not surprised by it. You knew this would be a part of this whole thing. I get it. Part of me I to look at things from every different angle. I get the argument that these two leagues, they should be united. We got to stop this crazy Pickering we've been doing the last few years. I think there's a bit of a complex on the USFL fan side. They understand it a little bit because their games had no fans in attendance. They had the fake piped in crowd noise. A lot of people were loyalists to the XFL league in 2020 and they were just waiting for the XFL to come back. So the USFL fan has felt like disrespected. So of course they're going to hang their hat on, hey, we're just as good as that league because people are telling them the XFL has more fans, they have fans, organic fans in attendance. The XFL had more players signing at the NFL. So they hear all this talk you now it's just one week. Right? So I know Birmingham beat who I think is the fifth best team in the XFL last year because Seattle was better than Arlington last year. DC was obviously better than Arlington last year. St. Louis, they didn't make the playoffs, but they're seven and three, they're better. And even the Houston roughneck to falter at the end of the season, they were better overall than Arlington. They just, Arlington won two games at the end. So they got a 64 yard field goal from Bates and you got Birmingham beating the fifth best team from the XFL last year. I know they were the champs, but they weren't the best team in the XFL. So it's just two games. It doesn't end after this. But I think there's a chip on the USFL loyalist side because they felt like they were being belittled or treated as if they didn't count or if their league was inferior. Maybe people won't like it, but that tribalism is going to be a part of this. If there was social media back in the sixties, NFL fans back then were crapping all over a FL fans calling that league a gimmicky league. And then so when the A FL came up with Joe Namath and beat them finally it was like a badge of honor in the nineties. I remember the NFC used to win. It felt like every single Super Bowl. So I used to remember the discourse back then where NFC fans were just saying the A FC shouldn't even be a part of our league because the bills get to the Super Bowl, the Broncos get to Super Bowl, they're not going to win it anyway. It's all about the Niners, the Cowboys, Washington, the Giants who won multiple Super Bowls. So world changed a lot in the next decade or so, but this tribalism, I get the people on one side that are enjoying it. I get the people that don't like it and don't think it's necessary. I hear the arguments. I'm not surprised by it though if you didn't see this coming, the league's playing into it too. They could have easily not named the conferences, but they're playing into it as well. It's a storyline for 2024 moving forward. We'll see. And I'll say this little, just my little thoughts here, this deep end, the podcast, I don't know if I've ever really talked about how it's so interesting to me. You're talking about the USFL fans and all of that. To me it's like the XFL was around and I was a fan. We weren't doing any of this stuff. Paul and I went just to DC as fun. I mean just to go drink and have fun and hang out, had a great time. And then when it went away and people were sad and then it's like, well maybe it's going to come back. And I felt like even through the spring leagues of IT all and the fan control football and even the flirtation with the CFL, I think a lot of us were kind of waiting for the XFL to come back waiting for the XFL. And then yeah, when the USFL came, you got a lot of people that went all in on that league. That to me it felt like you're not patient or you're trying to take this hot shot that's kind of, we're in this gap in the marketplace right now and you have the USFL podcast, you had all the USFL, the media group, whatever those guys call all the avatars and all that stuff. Then the XFL came back and showed maybe how it's really done. And yeah, I get that inferiority a little bit of that. At least that's my take is you kind of jumped off the wagon here at the one stop when the rest of us got all the way to Oregon on the Oregon trail or whatever, if that makes sense. Now you're trying to I that to me is where that divide always came. I get it. Yeah, I get it. Reed, here's the thing. I remember when the a f came out in 2019 and the XFL had announced that they were coming out and the AF beat them to the marketplace. This is back when I used to actually frequent message boards. I remember AF fans talking crap about the XFL. I remember them saying, I remember them saying the XFL, it's a command again, it's going to be a gimmicky lead. We already beat you to marketplace. They foolishly thought they had a relationship with the NFL because they were an NFL network and they were, Ebersol was selling that Charlie Ebersol. So there were a lot of fans trash talking XFL fans saying your league is not better than ours. We're with the NFL, et cetera. We're on CBS. What networks are you going to have? It man's an idiot. This could be a gimmicky league, all that. Look how stupid the XFL was in 2001. So there was tribalism during that and then there were fans on the XFL side. They were saying the a f is not any good, no kickoff. You have no good rules, your league plays awful, et cetera, et cetera, and we're going to actually have fans. We're going to have energy, all that. So I get it. What I find funny too with the USFL is that there are USFL loyalists that didn't even watch the XFL in 2020. There are USFL fans that don't know that the overtime shootout XFL 2020, the tiered extra points XFL 2020, the clock rules XFL 2020, like all this stuff, the existence of X, it's funny how it worked, but the existence of the XFL in 2020 is what led to the US FL. And then a lot of the rules that you see, there's definitely that tribalism. Some people like it, some people don't. It's going to be a thing. I think in week three there's no outside of conference games, but this week we got two of them. We got the Memphis and San Antonio and then it got technically another USFL versus XFL game with the roughnecks, which is really the gamblers against the defenders. So hey, if it gives USS FL four oh, you'll definitely hear it. The birdies will chirp the ones that are on that side that kind of want to say, I told you so. I told you either we're as good or better than you. We were always better than, you can't really, even if somehow the XFL conference teams win this weekend and it's two two, you can't really claim superiority. It's going to be a thing until champion Crown. Because right now half the team's undefeated and half the team is winless. So if one side feels like they'll never win game, the other side feels like they're never going to lose. But that's after one week, you can't really declare anything. But if there's anybody who's questioning, who was questioning the quality of the USFL, they're mistaken to think that it was like a vastly inferior league because there are quality teams and quality players. We're getting these supercharged up teams now too with all these teams that unfortunately didn't survive. Last question, and this is the theme of the episode, so we might as well actually ask this question on here. This is from Reed in Seattle. Here. Will U NFL's extreme makeover save string football? Yes. Is This enough? Yes. Yes, I think so. I think this is our best chance. The first article I wrote about in Sports Illustrated as far as the UFL goes is that I feel that if this doesn't work, unless the NFL does their own league, which I'm old enough to remember when they tried that and they had teams in Canada and all over the world and in the United States, San Antonio, et cetera, and it didn't work for them unless the NFL decides to do it. I think this is your last viable chance because look at the networks that are involved. It's extremely expensive to run these leagues. I think this league's going to be around for a while. So I think this is it. Will there be somebody who tries to partner up with CBS or something like that and try to sneak into it? Sure, why not? But I think this is your last viable shot to make Spring pro football and I think they're going to be all right. I actually think as long as these owners are fine with, here's the thing, they want to make a lot of money. So if they got to have that mindset where they're going to hit, if they're okay with getting on base, maybe hitting a double rather than hitting a home run or a grand slam, then this will be around, they throw their arms in the air after two years and say, you know what? I don't think this concept's ever going to be the home run we thought it was then. So I think this story has a lot of chapters left to be told. I think I agree with you. I think that expectations have been tempered. I think egos have been checked. I think there was a lot of, I think it's coming together as a merger or not as mergers like a marriage or when you got to work with someone in class you don't really like and you got to like, Hey, we got to settle our differences here and make this work for the common group or the common good of whatever. I bought what Daryl said, Daryl Johnson, when he said, we realize we need to practice what we preach. Basically if we're in it for the players, we need to set them up for the best success. And that's coming together and kind of lowering, not fighting, coming together. I buy that. I take that that they really took a hard look in the mirror and said, if we're trying to do this for the player, we need to figure this out. And I like the united aspect of it. I like them coming together, joining forces. And look, the fan bases eventually are going to join forces too, because when we get into the UFL off season, we're all going to be celebrating all the guys who sign NFL teams. It'd be something they had 111 players from the X-F-L-U-S-F-L sign, NFL contracts. We're all happy when we see John Trey Kirkland back in the NFL, Matt Carrell back in the NFL, all that kind of stuff because it's a validation of the league itself. So if they have 120 players sign, it's not that you need to use the NFL name to show the value of this league, but it does help that the success rate of players, you hope that there are some superstars that come out of this league. It helps show the value because right now we've seen people with their opinions out there. They don't think there's anything special about the UFL, like Sims and all that for pro football talk, talking about how this league's not special, they don't have special players, so they do need to deliver on special players. But I think there's a definitely need for this kind of league. And I like the fact that they've united and I think they can make this work. They're fiscally responsible. The question is can they do enough things correctly to capitalize and to open up revenue streams? It's the same thing I ask about the CFL. So I root for these leagues. There's no doubt. I'm not a fan of any one of these teams. I don't care who wins and loses the games. That's a good thing kind of for me as far as being a media member because I don't have to be a fan boy, I'm a fan though. However, for this league, nobody has to root for the NFL. They're going to be around forever and ever and ever. I'm rooting for this league to make it, to finally be the league that makes it and succeed just the way I root for the CFL to stay afloat and get through the hard times and adversity and to evolve because that's such a tremendous football league. So anyway, that's just my thoughts on it Though. When we start getting players assigned to these leagues, it's going to be the USFL conference. X number of players signed the XL conference and player signed. So that's So funny. Yeah, but you know how that That's True. You got a point. You got a point. I mean I'm sure the stallions will lead the way. We saw that the stallions and the battle hawks had a ton of signings. I felt bad for all the other U USS FL teams. It's like the stallions had a bunch of signings and then all the other us, we got three, we got two, I got four. And then the stallions are like, we got 19. So anyway, but yes, Reed, you're right. You're right. I totally forgot that angle. Yeah. Anyway, with that, we'll put the pin in it. I appreciate it, Mike. Hour and 20 minutes here at checkout. Mike's work on Sports Illustrated. We're getting all that website stuff figured out, but follow Mike on Twitter, post everything on there. Same with Anthony Miller. All the work that he does. Both you guys writing, covering all that stuff. And again, Anthony was with us for the kickoff and doing all that stuff. So really appreciate that. Like and subscribe. Give us the 3,500 subscribers eventually. Eventually I'll be done talking about this. Mike, anything else you want to say? Yeah, congratulations Reed. You've left the mark of positive one on this space, which your podcast and everything else. You have great guests on the show. You've done such a great job covering these leagues over the years. All the great guests you have on, appreciate you and what you do in this space and what you've done. And hopefully you get to that mark you want to get to in terms of subscribers and everything else. But I appreciate what you've done. And I think your name sometimes it could be a detriment. Mark has, I've been on. People call you Mark Cast. That's terrible. It's A terrible name. It's terrible. Yeah, it's a terrible name. I don't think it does your show justice. It's stuck now. It's the brand. There's no turning back at this point. A I can't get into it. I was going to get into something else here, but I got to let it go. Maybe we'll talk, we'll talk out, we'll talk off there. But once again, Reid, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Thanks to everybody out there who took the one hour and 20 plus minutes to listen to what I got to say. And thank you for reading my work and checking me out. A Sports Illustrated shout out to Casey Sager and Art Garcia who do tremendous work at Sports Illustrated. They're just great editors. So I just want to say that. Yeah, no, it meant a lot. Thank you for all that. Yeah, when Evan and I were at Texas Live the Friday night of the kickoff, we were having dinner and one of the league higher up came over. I saw this person in the thing. I go, oh, they're here. Came over and said hi to us. Said hi to Evan and I. So I appreciated that. Meant a lot. Taking the time to come to me like, Hey, read, it's good to see you here. And then again at the kickoff they said, are you coming at you any more events? Hope to see you out here. So I mean, I think it's the beard, but at least they can spot me from across the room. So I appreciate it and subscribe. We'll see you next time and thanks. Thank you.