Diante Lee on Super Bowl Expectations, Will Darnold lead Seahawks over Patriots, Rooney rule dishonesty | 02.06

ladies and gentlemen welcome to the right time a wave original my name is bomani jones thanks for listening wherever you get your podcast thanks for watching us on youtube subscribe like rate us review us give us five stars you only give us four stars i'm inclined to believe you are a hater it is deontay lee friday coming to us live from you are actually in san francisco right now i am in san francisco right now it's chilling in downtown sf man it's been a while since i've been here too so it's good even though that game is not in nobody san francisco at all at all i just want people if you have never been to the bay area to look up downtown san francisco to levi's stadium and i want you to look at that long ass blue line if it's blue all right because chances are it's going to be a lot of orange and red in there all right that there is a there's a big logistical problem i think we're having the having the super bowl out here you know there are a lot of broad terms in geography i am from houston which is a broad term 100 however um like new york is a broad term but if you are coming in to visit new york it narrows very quickly right right but i feel no term is broader than bay area one area means a lot of things and people like y'all from the bay I those of us who ain't even from there know you need to be a little bit more specific way more specific I was just talking to somebody yesterday like if I walked up to a random Super Bowl goer and asked him if they had ever heard of Hayward California chances are they have not if I asked about Vallejo they probably only know it because they eat 40 or kick the sneak all right you know like this is it is way too nebulous a term for the amount of cities and areas that it's in I was actually talking to a native yesterday and they're like you know san francisco in the bay area is really a place for locals i think that that's a lot of california when you kind of talk about it right you kind of mentioned it with with new york city i think la is the same where it's so sprawling that when you say la people can get whatever image they have of la and you're probably accurate based on where transients and tourists come but for the most part out here in the bay you've got a bunch of hills that ain't nobody trying to walk right you got a bunch of areas that don't nobody know about out here. You got bridges going in all kinds of different directions. So, you know, I think it's hard if you are not a Californian, not a native Californian to figure out exactly what it means to be in the Bay Area and even in San Francisco specifically. So this is my thing about this Super Bowl, right? Obviously, San Francisco and Oakland are not the same city, right? But like, again, being from Houston, where Houston, the north side and the south side, those are really like two in if you said they were two different cities they would be two different cities that would be big enough to be different cities only one yeah only one of them would have the teams right but they would but you know i feel like if you said san francisco and oakland were in the same city you could sell the argument right 100 very different places but if they were under the same city limits you could sell the argument much like all the five boroughs in new york city right Yeah, I think that's great. I think that's a great way to kind of think about it. And then just shooting off from Oakland, you know, Berkeley is Oakland adjacent, but not Oakland. You know, Alameda is its own thing. Right. But what I'm saying is you cannot sell San Jose as being the same city as those other places. And they get roped into what they call it, Bay Area. Like I went once, I did a talk once at Santa Clara University. And you fly into San Jose to go to Santa Clara. I've been in the Bay Area before. I've been to San Francisco. I've been to Oakland, okay? San Jose might as well have been 500 miles away, dog. It might as well have been Eureka. What's the other one y'all got up there? Petaluma. It might as well have been one of those as far as I was concerned, and that's where the Super Bowl is more or less. Absolutely. It's funny you bring that up. I think that that's kind of inherent to the California experience, right? Like people say you're from someplace, and then they ask more identifying questions, and they are quick to tell you that where you are from is not the place that you just said you're from. All you got to do is say the wrong thing about being from L.A. and somebody will let you know, that's the valley. That ain't from where we're from. The Bay Area is just like that in that regard. I thought I was going to graduate school in L.A. I was going to Claremont. And I just can't. All you need to know about Claremont was when I moved there, they ain't had BET on the cable. On that note, we have an actual fastball super bowl man like we are here we're probably getting to some other nfl too because something else happened with the eagles that all the football people keep telling me is a giant deal and we may need your help in explaining it as you as you prepare to wreak more hell upon nick seriani but um i the more i think about this super bowl i feel like and it's unfair because we all know how hard it is to get to a championship in any sort of way but it sure does feel like the Patriots got there without really doing that much. And I know that's not fair to say, but it can feel that way at some points. I feel like I watched Seattle beat the brakes off San Francisco and then like win a game that what may have been the Superbowl, right? The NFC championship. Right. I feel like the Patriots played one half against Denver and that's all it took. Right. Right. And you know, the game against the Texans, they were playing. CJ Stroud was playing for them. Right. The Chargers had me at left tackle, you at right, you know, so they was running to the right, but still, you know. No, I'm with you. It's funny, like, I was talking to our buddy Charles McDonald about that yesterday, right? Like, you bring it up to a Patriots fan, and of course they're going to get cagey, and they say, hey, we played three elite defenses on the way to the Super Bowl. And you did. You got your ass kicked by all three. Somehow you find yourself here. Yeah, they scored 10 points against Denver. I mean, it took Jared Stidham literally losing his mind on one play to decide that football game. All right. It took five CJ Stroud turnovers and Drake May dropping the ball a whole bunch on his own before you guys were able to pull away in that game. Like I think the Chargers are just kind of dead in the water going in, evidenced by the fact that they immediately fired their offensive coordinator after that football game. All right. So I do think that I would never say that a team's road to the Super Bowl is fake because there's just so much attrition that goes on in this. Right. I will always kind of give give at least a little nod or a little kind of a little kind of acknowledgement to what it takes to get there. But I was looking up yesterday on True Media that they have only run 40 plays on offense where they were trailing by more than eight points all year. wow i and started going back right because i'm like historically what does this mean so over the last decade there were only three other teams that did this the 2015 patriots who were lost to history because they ended up going to a bunch of super bowls again after this this is a team that lost denver in the afc championship game people should go back and watch that team that offense we're talking about prime rob gronkowski okay we're talking about fresh tom brady all right and they they were a wagon before running into Denver. You had the 2019 49ers, which was at that point in time, the best offense outside of the chiefs in football. And then the 2023 Ravens who might be the most impressive of the three, because they played nine teams that made the playoffs that season. If you think that the 2025 is the same team that I just mentioned with those three, then we are looking at two entirely different sports. You know, they're not the same as what we are typically used to getting in the super especially out of that conference so i think the stat we've seen and i can't remember exactly what it was but i don't think do they have did they have the weakest schedule by opponents record of all time or are they just in the mix of teams that i want to say they're in the mix okay because i know the worst for a very long time was um the 99 rams right and also on that list is the 72 dolphins Okay. For those of you who were too young to remember it, the 99 Rams looked like a video game. Like they looked like nothing we had ever seen before. The 72 Dolphins, obviously the only team to go through the regular and postseason undefeated and untied, right? They were, that was the middle team of a run of teams that went to three straight Super Bowls and won two. I'm saying all that to say at no point did we ever say this about the New England Patriots, right? The things that I'm saying about those other teams that's never the way that we felt about them and again we're all acknowledging you got to do something in order to get here but i've watched this team play these playoff games and at no point did they look impressive right the most impressive thing that they did was the stones on that josh mcdaniels to run that that that bootleg for drake may to get that first down to ice the game but what am i saying the most impressive thing they did was not let him throw the ball and granted it was in the crazy snow right so I don't want to I don't want to sound like a hater but you saw it and I did too absolutely you know I think about I think about the 2015 Panthers right the cam MVP season they were able to kind of beat up on a mostly down NFC South that year but you get to the playoffs and you kick the shit out of the Seahawks and you kick the shit out of the Cardinals who were the next best team in the NFC and by the time you get to the Super Bowl it's like we're not going to talk about how light your schedule was when you were undefeated for the first 14 weeks of the year or whatever it had been right because we got those signature moments that just hasn't happened and i think it's fascinating people don't know what to do with this team because it's rare that you get this kind of pathway to a super bowl for a team that is going to have one of the top two candidates to win mvp the guy who might be holding the mvp trophy never had an mvp caliber moment in the playoffs up to this point and now you were playing maybe the best team in football and the team that when people ask me as I've been walking by the one that I continue to kind of couch by saying I don't want to be the asshole and say that the Super Bowl is going to be a blowout but I've watched that other team play and what who they have beaten to get here is a hell of a lot more impressive than what we've seen from New England well quarterback postseason runs are interesting because I mean it's going to come down to this one game sample that is in front of us and we are evaluating May on a three game samples sam darnold if we were to have evaluated him really previously on about a six or seven game uh sample had been poor until he got to go against i mean the rams defense they're not quite the make a wish foundation but they do make dreams come true right absolutely and they had him looking good but i think about those 2020 bucks the last tom brady championship and people won't remember this but that was not a strong postseason run no tom brady right like he made some plays i don't to pretend like he didn't do anything, but he didn't play well in that run. They got to the Super Bowl and he certainly played well enough, but it was in part because it looked like the Chiefs had nine people on offense, right? 100%. That's still the most, I don't, people think that this is just what the kids call it, glazing. Nah, man, it is possible but Halls put up the most impressive performance I had ever seen in that game. We'll never see that again. I don't care what the outcome was. We will never see that again from that position. I've never seen a quarterback look like that, right? Like you're a basketball guy. You've seen those NBA efforts where somebody says, hey, 41 shots is what I got to do to not lose by 50. Then 41 shots it is, and I'm going to shoot 32% from the field. And hopefully we can just hold on long enough. We don't really see that in the NFL context, and that's exactly what that game is. It looked like a high school situation where some guy is really, really just like, almost like those clips of Zion with his high school team. Except those clips are always him and his merry band of white boys against another married band of white boys, and it was just Zion. But you know when you see this happen where there's like some monster guy that's on one team and it's nobody else. When we get to our break, I'll give you the comparison that I will make to this that would work for California football. But it's the one dude that's on, and you're playing against the number three team in the state. Absolutely. And the only person that's good is you. That's what it looked like. Absolutely. It's when your disciplined team that run the wishbone get to the state championship. and now you got to see the team from the large metro area that got all the athletes. Yes. And it's just, but they just got that one running back. And every time he get the ball, you'd be like, yo, he only got three yards right there. But did you see the spin that he put in the stiff arm that he hit him with right there? Absolutely. That's the kid that's going to Rice or Stanford, right? He going to be the ones who don't go pro in something other than sports, but he's great for the high school level. Yes. Yes. I mean, that's what Mahomes looked like in the course of that. Just like, what else am I supposed to be doing here? Right. Like, what about where? Well, you know what? This also happens in high school and not so much anymore, but it used to be where you'd have a running back that was bigger than the lineman Mm hmm Yes Right I got a perfect I got a perfect story for that I went to go see royce freeman who went to school in the imperial area of southern california so we talk in desert land and i watched him come and play a private catholic school so this is very much the exact kind of situation that you're uh describing here and the second i saw him get off the bus for warm-ups like ah that's what oregon looks like i need to take a picture of this to show the rest of the high school players what the difference is between this kid and this team that might end up going to win a state championship because he's bigger than their starting guard it happens it happens but let me tell you you make it interesting you talked about seattle like we've seen them when they look good they look good and especially when they can run the ball like and it's in a way that's like i don't understand why they can't run the ball because what i've watched when i've watched them they haven't been able to run the ball but it's like they look like they should just be able to run on anybody like what's the hold up there i don't know i think that it's one of those kind of weakling things right on offense especially you start talking about offensive line right that the worst of the group ends up negatively impacting the team a lot worse than the best players in that unit can positively impact them because if you look at their tackles abel lucas and charles cross they look pretty good in the system they're big guys right they block pretty well gray zabel i would say is probably one of the best rookie linemen that we got um out of this past draft class but I'm right there with you you think about this is a Shanahan scheme which is supposed to be able to take scrubs up front and be able to get movement and they they run the play calls that are supposed to work against the defensive looks that are supposed to work and it's two yards it's four yards it's six yards when it could have been 20 I think that this might be one of those games though where you get that Kenneth Walker hits the edge untouched for 30 40 yards because there is just a significant speed difference between the way that Seattle plays on offense and what New England looks like on defense so you know you don't even feel good about their defense I really don't I really don't I really don't I think that the AFC championship game had they actually gone and beat Bo Nix I might have felt a little bit differently because then you would have beaten Sean Payton with the quarterback that he trusts right I might have believed it a little bit more but this is a team that has played in the snow twice against two very bad offenses and has gotten the gift of a whole lot of turnovers. You watch them on a snap by snap basis. And I think that some of this is reflected when you ask like Seahawks people who have been around the team, what the feeling in the locker room is, what the feeling is coming out of practice and just about everybody there for as gracious as they'd like to be. We'll let you know, like we watched the film, you watched the film and you tell me what you think is about to happen. And usually when you hear that from a football player who has been programmed over years to be as deferential as possible to their opponent it kind of lets you know where things stand i don't think that anybody would be surprised if seattle comes and kicks their teeth in on sunday when the team that talks like that says watch the film that's when you get nervous like i don't know if you know the story on um 06 uh florida won the sec championship game i think they played against arkansas in that game they won it and then whoever their film guy was whoever was tasked with like watching ohio state and Ohio State had run through the nation undefeated that year, right? The film guy comes up to Urban and looks at him, and Urban's like, so what you got? He says, two touchdowns. He's like, what do you mean? He's like, we're going to beat them by two touchdowns. Like he said, just simply by watching the film, it was clear that they were going to win that game by two touchdowns. And, of course, they won it by four, I want to say. But, like, that was just what they got off Davos. So when somebody says something like that, It's like, ooh. The thing that makes it interesting to me about this Seattle team is, and I think for most of America, this is probably the case. Part of it, I guess, is because of so much of the discussion around Sam Darnold because he's somewhere between famous and infamous because of the kind of interesting nature of his career. I don't feel like we know very much about who these other people are who are on this team. I even felt like with the Legion of Boom, by the time we got to a Super Bowl with them, Even though it was really like the second year of that run, in part because he had Marshawn Lynch, I think in part also just because Richard Sherman had talked himself into our consciousness so much that we paid attention to everybody else. We knew who the dudes were who were on that team. I don't feel like we really know who these dudes are that are on this team, but they've been apparently the best team in the NFL. Well, and I mean, there's no mouthpiece there. It's not that they don't have a Richard Sherman. They don't have any mouthpiece at all. because outside of Sherman, then you still have Michael Bennett, who was a talker, right? He's interested in his own, right? You have Russell Wilson, who just has a public persona, even at that stage in his career, right? Because we had spent so much time with him at the college level, right? You have Marshawn, you had, you know, you had Golden Tate at a point in time. You had Pete, right? So like everything they're projecting at that time is, if you're not looking at us, we're going to make sure that you look at us and give us a certain level of respect, or we're going to force it up out of you. I do think with the Seattle team, and some of this comes down to coaching too, right? Like you hear Mike McDonald talk and it's like, that's a schemer. That's not a guy who is walking in trying to win your hearts and mind over with some inspirational speech. He's going to tell you, you line up here, you do this and you're going to win. And I think that the players have kind of adopted that as well. The same is true of Clint Kubiak, right? Like Clint Kubiak getting in front of the microphone and giving you a Sean McVay-esque, you know, three minute answer on why he made a certain decision. He's just going to show up with the pencil, put it on the paper, and you go do what it is that I drew up. And I think that the players kind of come across that way as well. And when you think about Sam Darnold, for a guy who has had an opportunity to fail as many times as he had, and I think that you made this point on social media as well, we would typically kind of have a tighter grasp on who that guy is off the field, what his motivations are like, how he reacts to all the things that he has been through in his career. I honestly, had he not been a USC guy, I don't think I would have ever heard his voice prior to making this Super Bowl run. And it seems like everybody there is kind of cool with it being that way. Only thing I ever heard him say, I did not hear him say, and that was when he said he was seeing ghosts. Seeing ghosts, right? Right? That's the only time. Also, Mike McDonald, if I was the security guard at that stadium, he better wear his lanyard everywhere. Because if he tried to walk past me without, hey, hey, hey. Hey, hold on, partner. You and the polo. You in the polo. Oh, partner. Hey, I'm in a hurry. I got to get to the game. Hey, everybody got to get to the game, partner. Exactly. You can get a hit. You can get the headphones anywhere, big dog. Show me some ID. Absolutely. And then you can pass. Step to the side with me real quick. Come step to the side with me real quick. Yeah, yeah. Hey, can somebody talk to him right now? Exactly. This white man think I'm going to just let him by. I don't know. I don't give a fuck who he say he is. I would have no idea. Darnold. Yeah, and I was making the point about Darnold where I just. Everybody. and I'm curious you especially someone who works in works in coaching and people who don't know Deontay's a high school football coach um I just felt like we got so revisionist on Sam Darnold like how could the Jets let go of Sam Darnold were you here exactly he was bad like there was there was no way and look a guy like him at his size with his talent I think they got a third round pick for him or something like that and you could always go find somebody to try again on him No, no, no, you could not. But everywhere he went, he was treated with a very particular sort of optimism of like, oh, no, we feel Kyle Shanahan. What's Kyle Shanahan did it, right? Like Kyle Shanahan doing that is like when a musician that's really famous or really big, like the Beatles talking about Chuck Berry. Now, all of a sudden, everybody got to get down with Chuck Berry because the Beatles said Chuck Berry was that dude, right? Absolutely. And then they jumped in the time machine and they went and did it. I felt like that was when Kyle Shanahan said that about Sam Darnold, like maybe you need to go do that about Trey Lance. Like we, anyway, don't, sorry, going all over the place. My point simply being Sam Darnold was not good in these other places. And he fell apart last year from Minnesota, like a team that already, look, they got it wrong with McCarthy, but the mistake was not letting Sam Darnold go. Even this year, Dominique talks about this. They have not coached Sam Darnold. Like they think Sam Darnold is that guy, right? He is a starting quarterback. Nobody made a mistake in letting him go. It's just worked out very well for Seattle. And somewhere in this, Geno Smith's got to be like, you know, I could do that, right? I mean, 100%. Like, I feel like no shade to Sam Darnold and not trying to do too much to big up Geno Smith, who had a terrible year with Oakland. But something tells me Sam Darnold with Oakland would be terrible, too. I mean, we saw that with the Jets, right? We saw that with the Jets. I think that the comp that I kind of drew a couple weeks ago coming out of the conference championships is like, I think that this is the closest that we're going to get to Brad Johnson in this era. a guy who was benched basically everywhere he went before he got to Tampa. And when he got to Tampa, people were looking at John Gruden like, you left Rich Gannon to make this guy your starting quarterback. And you're telling me that this team is going to go win a title that way. And then he shows up and does literally just enough to get them over the hump. Hold on, right, right, right fast for the younger people. Yes, you left Rich Gannon, two-time first team all pro and one time MVP. MVP. Sounds crazy to say now, but it happened. And it was not. Y'all got to go watch. And it was real. yeah y'all gotta go back and watch rich gannon okay that's a name that i think you know how we had social media would have been a meme by the end of his career but you talk about prime rich gannon that motherfucker was slinging the rock okay at a time where slinging the rock was not as widespread as what you might you know what it was also at a time where a guy like rich gannon he was another one hung around for a really long time absolutely but like it was a quarterback time where a guy like rich gannon because you know one thing john gruden loves a quarterback that ain't that good and he found by the with the right guy just good enough but not that good at the same time and it was which means that you got to do what the hell i say yeah i'm gonna throw to tim brown and jerry rice just throwing it out there you go i mean you're talking about the bad the last best years of tim brown too when he was always open and jerry rice like you said so yeah i think that i think brad johnson is probably the closest comp you can come up with and it's funny it's funny i was looking at some of the some of the recent games he had before he entered the playoffs right because he's been on this street of not throwing any interceptions and not losing any fumbles i'm like man this is very similar to the quarterback that ended up winning the championship last year right i thought you were gonna say jimmy garoppolo i mean and it's it's in that it's kind of in that realm too during that 2019 run right where the guy's not turning the ball over and now all of a sudden things do look functional because your quarterback is not literally handing the football game away um and i would say it's funny because usually you get to these games and you start asking like all right is an old guy going to show back up but this comes back to what we were talking about earlier the level of competition that they just had in the nfc championship game is about as tough as it's going to get for any team you know who was making a playoff run um this season and if you were able to beat the rams with matt stafford playing the way that matt stafford had been playing i gotta feel like sam donald you can come out here complete nine complete 19 passes for 219 yards, two touchdowns, both of them happening within the five-yard line, and you'll get Super Bowl MVP, and nobody is ever going to remember a single snap of the game that you just played. That's kind of where I think we're at with this team, and I think it's a fascinating place when we start talking about the hierarchy of quarterbacks and what it takes to be a Super Bowl-winning quarterback because the A-list guys will not have won either of the last two. You know what's going to be really funny is that if Seattle wins this and Sam Darnold is Super Bowl MVP. Now, to be clear, no one was looking for their version of Jalen Hurts after the two Super Bowls that he went to. But there is going to be a discussion about how somebody needs to go find their version of Sam Darnold after this, with nobody even having any idea what the fuck that means. Whether it's all supposed to find somebody that we think is sorry. Right. Exactly. Right? We just supposed to go, we supposed to go find what exactly is that? Yeah. You know, you know, you know what, you know what that is. That is just advocating. What you're saying is never give up, right? Basically don't give up. Don't ever give up. And if, and, and if that's the case, you know who I'm going to say, everybody would need to go look at two guys did because don't give up. Don't ever give up. Trey Lance and Anthony Richardson. I knew those were going to be the two. I knew those were going to be the two. I knew those were going to be the two. hey look i feel like trey lance never trey lance never got a chance right like i think anthony richardson you could argue got a chance he didn't do much with it trey lance had some bad luck and just weirdo kyle kyle shanahan another guy who prefers his quarterbacks not be good absolutely you know and it's going to be interesting when we start talking about a guy like you know jackson dart maybe i have decade from now especially if things go poorly in new york he's going to be the exact kind of quarterback that i think would fit that description of like just talented enough for me to close my eyes and convince myself that this is a guy that we can win games with and let's build something around him and ask him not to blow the game for us you know and I do think that you know in this era now where these quarterbacks are making so much money we are going to see teams I think especially to your point if Sam Darnold wins this who genuinely convince themselves that a better pathway to winning a championship is having a Baker Mayfield, a Daniel Jones, a Sam Darnold, and hoping that you build literally the best defense in football than trying to just go get a really, really good quarterback. I mean, there just aren't that many of them. And you know what? We're going to break here and come on the other side of it because I want to ask you this again from a coaching perspective because I have a theory on this that I feel like may be too simple, but I want to get your read on it coming up next. Listeners, think back to a first date where you were really interested in someone. You probably asked them important questions like, what are you looking for? Well, the same goes if you're hiring. You definitely want to address key questions first to see if someone could be right for your role. That's why you need ZipRecruiter. When you post your job, ZipRecruiter suggests screening questions to help you hone in on top candidates faster. And today, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Bomani. ZipRecruiter's matching technology immediately finds qualified candidates that check all your boxes. ZipRecruiter recommends screening questions you can easily add to get the highest quality applicants. Ask key questions and hire faster with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Bomani. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Bomani. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. It's the last call for football on FanDuel. One final Sunday, one last kickoff, the final chance to place your bets before the NFL season closes its tab. This is Super Bowl 60, and FanDuel is making sure you're in on it. If you're a new customer, bet $5 and get $200 in bonus bets if you win. So whether you're backing the favorite or riding with the underdog, make it count. Because after the Super Bowl, the season's over, and football is officially done. Last call for football on FanDuel, an official sportsbook partner of Super Bowl 60. Visit FanDuel.com slash Beaumonti to get started. 21 plus and present in select states for Kansas in affiliation with Kansas Star Casino, or 18 plus and present in D.C., Kansas Royale, opt-in requirement. Awards are non-withdrawable, restrictions apply, including bonus and token expiration, leg requirements, and max wager amount. See terms at sportsduel.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-helpfor.com. Call 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut. Visit mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland. Hope is here. Visit gamblinghelplinema.org or call 800-327-5050 for 24-7 support in Massachusetts or call 1-877-8-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY in New York. All right, we are back with Deontay Lee. and we're talking you know it's always a time to talk about quarterbacks and quarterback development and i find that people like me can very often and these are people who are not football players and not you know of that world it's real easy to point at all these things that we think are stupid in the ways that positions are coached evaluated or whatever it is and we're like hey man they don't like nobody knows who's going to be a good quarterback look at the draft look how many times they miss so forth and so on and the thing I hear people say most often is that quarterback is the worst coach position yet no one seems to really offer us solutions for how to coach it better my hot take is it's really hard to throw a 10 pound thing of air down the field in a spiral with a million things going on there simply aren't that many people who are capable of doing this at the level that we ask them to do it i would i would go as far as to say that that talking point which i heard all the time growing up right especially you think about like the late 2010s as the brady's the roethlisbergers matt ryan all those guys are phasing out right and we're kind of in that in-between phase where the young guys hadn't really taken over the league that that that phase where they didn't realize you needed to have some wheels in order to play exactly right And so they basically doomed a whole generation of white dudes because they didn't tell them it was okay to run. Shit, I mean, you think about those drafts between 2013 and 2018. I mean, it is a wasteland of quarterbacks. You can go farther back. You can go farther back. Like, you take it back to 2005. Post-2005, you'll pop up with a Matt Ryan and a Matthew Stafford. But overall, it's nasty in there. Dark days. Dark days. Some Christian ponders in there. Blaine Gabbard. Blaine Gabbard. Sorry. Blaine Gabbard. Blake Boris. Same guy. Different year. But I bring that up to say, like, I would say that today that talking point has never been more asinine. I would actually say the quarterback coaching has never been better when you look at just what the baseline is over the last two to three seasons of where these guys are. You can speak to this, you know, you can speak to this because you have a longer view of this than I do. a quarterback like baker mayfield does not get to get to tampa bay if they're bringing you to tampa bay every year we're looking to replace you right like i got to see in my childhood i saw trent green get treated like he was the gum on the bottom of every team's shoe everywhere he went today a guy like trent green will be somebody they're saying oh we can coach that up and get nine wins out of that guy right and people will be confident and happy about it i think that we of definitely i think there was a time where that was true i think to your point a lot of this is inviting people into the rooms to play quarterback to work with quarterbacks that weren't being invited into the rooms decades prior right i think that getting more athletic guys getting black quarterbacks in the mix has been a big i think has been a big piece of this as well and what that has done to reshape people's priorities at the position but ultimately i think that we're in a great spot with quarterback development and quarterback coaching. The problem is, like you said, there aren't going to be more than a dozen guys at best who can do what we're asking people to do, right? Like, and this is in a time where quarterback has never been safer to play, receiver has never been safer to play, it's never been easier to protect the passer than it is right now, and we still are maybe topping out at about 10 to 12 guys in a given year that genuinely look like they are difference makers at this position. yeah like the argument that i make or the point i make is hey man them dudes was running the ball all the time back in the day it wasn't just because they were uncreative right now granted it was also a different set of rules then right but throwing the ball is really really dangerous hard right and dangerous that's kind of like what happened to mid-range jumpers in basketball well it used to be that they could clothesline you right you might want to stop 15 feet from the basket and take this nice safe jump shot exactly this floater means that i get to stay standing okay like we talked about this the other day talking about michael ervin hey man well michael ervin is like i played when there was pain it used to be a whole different game over there like i don't know if you remember this so when steve atwater went in the hall of fame a couple years ago i was like what is his video gonna look like because it's just gonna be a series of things that you can't do anymore like it would it would be like like running the steve atwater field before he goes into hall of fame would be like running amos and andy's greatest hits hey man we can't tell those guys we don't say this stuff out loud no more people don't put microphones in front of people who say this stuff no no we would have been deplatformed and to think in the time of Atwater there were also dudes like Andre Dirty Waters who we said hey you're going too far buddy Atwater was not going too far you think about that in today's context I mean I was watching when the chart I think Tony Jefferson lit up Travis Kelcer one of those receivers late in the regular season and the same again the fact that Mahomes got hurt and the outcry I saw on social media was like oh man this is about as clean as it gets by the spectrum of safety catches a wide receiver crossing the middle of the field that don't see him coming this is about as good as it gets i grew up with sean taylor okay i saw bob sanders be willing to risk your life and his to knock you down i once watched sean taylor and in retrospect this is the most ridiculous thing i've ever seen when he took the punter out at the pro bowl oh 100 buddy buddy rest in peace but it was the pro bowl man like like yeah first of all i don't know why you guys are running a fake putt or anything like that at the Pro Bowl. I think that Sean Taylor's counter was, I felt disrespected. Yeah, you're playing with me. You're acting like I'm not me out here. Yeah, you can't. You're playing like I'm not me. You can't provide that man the opportunity to do what he did in that moment. Absolutely. Can't put it on the board. But yeah, if quarterback is so badly coached, man, why are everybody getting all this money, right? Right. Like, doing all these things, it just seems impossible. And I just don't think that people can grasp is that somebody figured out that if you can get one of these three, four, five dudes who could do it, we can set the world on fire. And everybody keeps trying to make every quarterback into one of those three, four, five dudes. Right. As opposed to, like you say, the Baker Mayfield situation. And look, there've always been guys like that. Teams have figured out how to coach and build a team around. The best football team I believe that I have ever seen was the 1991 Washington team. Mark Rippon was their quarterback. And if you don't know nothing about Mark Rippon, it's not your fault. Right. I would say that I would say that those early 90s Washington teams are about as close as you could come to like a perfectly constructed football team. You go back and watch the Brown of football that they were playing. It was beautiful. And they didn't ask very much out of their quarterback. So I think that you're right. And I think that the other thing that's happening, because we're seeing more success with these kind of mid tier to below mid tier guys, that becomes problematic is we keep trying to drop the threshold lower. That's really what the issue is. Right. Like when I see Tua Tungvaluwa, who I think is a functional quarterback, but people try to convince me that he's in the same conversation as the people that I would conventionally believe are top 10 quarterbacks. That to me is a reflection that A, we have come a long way with developing the position and B, people still don't know what the hell they are watching when it comes to this position. When I see people talk about Michael Penix before he had blown out his knee this past year and try to convince me that that is going to be a franchise changing level quarterback. well buddy i've watched atlanta for all my life you have had franchise changing quarterbacks you judge him up against farv vic and ryan and you tell me that that's the same thing that we're looking at in this guy and it's just not and then i think there's a name that i won't mention on this podcast i think for everybody sanity who a lot of people are trying to convince themselves will be the next franchise quarterback who just got a new about bo nicks oh no no no no we talking about uh Northeast Ohio. Oh, the other one. The other one. The other one. The other one. The other one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and I think that this is. Boy, man. He and J.J. McCarthy, I think, are like the ultimate reflections of maybe the threshold has dropped so low that we are trying to convince ourselves that literally anybody can be let up in this club. Hey, man, I've never seen a broader consensus of people down on somebody quite like the world is down on J.J. McCarthy. I mean, outsiders. I mean, insiders. everybody's down on him i ain't heard nobody sound as as there are people like me and you who get frustrated with the conversation around shador sanders but we don't even though neither of us thinks he's that good we don't like talk bad about him right they talk bad about crazy about that man they talk crazy about that man which is a wild swing because he was from a college football perspective as close as you would have seen at that level to what we've seen in the nfl with Josh Allen. And I think that you've done a really good job of pointing out that there's a lot of wish casting that happens with certain quarterbacks about wanting them to be successful. I think that JJ walked into the league with that kind of groundswell behind him. Some of that is Harbaugh kind of stamping you as a guy right before you get to the league. And you get with Kevin O'Connell, who we all view, I would say, as a good quarterback developer, given what he's gotten out of Kirk Cousins before he went to Atlanta, what he got out of Sam Donald before things went sideways this past year and i think everybody kind of looked up after about a month and said oh no this ain't it completely percent not it completely out completely out um and i can't say i blame him because i watch him and i'm like oh that's zach wilson i've seen you before it's that bad it's it's zach wilson-esque it is that i watched the windows couple games late you know he was out there when they want him you know he was out correct he was out there when they want just like you know zach wilson was out there when robert sala was putting together great jets defenses for a couple of years uh i to ask you right fast about the Eagles Their offensive line coach just left Now, it seems like their new offensive coordinator wants to hire his own full-on staff. But you football people really looked at this as a bad news situation for the Eagles. It 100% is. I don't even know if there's a way to spin it positively. And I think that, A, there's a lot of complation happening because there's so much up in the air with Philadelphia right like there's the AJ Brown storyline which we probably won't even get to for another week or two right as they kind of assess what the trade market is going to be because I do think ultimately he's going to be moved there was a good week where people in Philadelphia were wondering whether or not Vic Fangio was going to retire as defensive coordinator and then your offensive line coach says and I think that this is very important that he said i am not retiring my time with the eagles organization has come to an end right and then i went and i read tim mcmanus at espn and some of his reporting i thought was really painted what was going on with this coaching regime and about as negative a light and much more negatively than i would say anything i would have said right because you're talking about a guy who has been running the run game who has developed guys like jason kelsey lane johnson jordan mailata i mean these are three people lane johnson maybe notwithstanding because he was kind of a physical freak coming out of college at the time in terms of speed and size and all that but Jordan Mailata is an international pathways guy and Jason Kelsey is one of the smallest offensive linemen that we have ever seen become a hall of fame player ever and you took the ability to design the run game away from that guy right to the point where he said I don't even want to be here no more after I've been here for a decade decade and a half I don't know how you could spend this positively And I think, again, it kind of points what what we've been talking about in my few appearances here, which is that you've got a head coach that I just don't think has a tight enough grip on the wheel. And worse than that, it feels like every time they fail, people start looking at Nick Sirianni and saying, you don't get to talk to me like that, which is crazy for a guy who has the winning percentage that he has and the Super Bowl appearances that he has. It feels like everybody walks out that building feeling like I can take a lot of shit from a lot of people. but not that guy. I also want to point out that trading AJ Brown is like trading the doctor because he said you got cancer. Right. What's happening? Like you fired that man for being right. Because I think every time he does that, by the way, he's never mad. He's never disrespectful to anybody when he does it. You just listen to it and you're like, that checks out. How are you going to argue that? When a man touched the ball, the offense looked good. In the last two years where he hasn't touched the ball a whole lot, we keep asking what the hell is wrong with this offense. I'm not saying the correlation and causation are the same. I'm just looking at the trend lines. That's all I'm saying. Him reading that book on the sideline will never be, not be the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life. I agree. Like, think about how bad it has to get for you to reach the point where you're like, here's what I'm going to do with this guy. Not just any book. one of them self-help yes find your find your best inner self yes yes somebody gonna ask me what's going on over here somebody somebody gonna ask me what we need to know right right uh what to ask you this also well I was thinking about it um we talked about the Rooney rule earlier this week um you be coaching you be black you're doing both at the same time obviously at a different level but I'm curious though because football is still football right and you still going into some rooms i'm sure where people have to get themselves like wrapped around the idea of you what i do think is interesting is that i've noticed in the nfl that in the last few years black defensive coordinator hiring i like with my eyes i see that going up right like i see moves being made there man they just ain't trying to let a brother call no plays like i talked about how this is the era of the boy genius and the only black boy genius i could think of on offense that's ever been was Brian Johnson, who was the offensive coordinator at the University of Utah at 25, but nobody's ever let him call plays two years in a row. Right, right, and he might not get that shot. I've thought about that, obviously, for a while. Once I became a coach in 2016, that was always a thought of mine is where I want to take this, what the trajectory looks like, and I knew two things for certain that was going to change my trajectory. A, I wasn't about to be doing all this round-the-clock recruiting shit that college coaches do, right? So that kind of wiped that off the board for me. You also weren't going to make me no running backs coach. You weren't going to make me no running backs coach and make my recruiting area the greater Houston area, right? Or, you know, going to South Louisiana because you don't got nobody else on the staff that can go in these rooms and talk to these mamas and daddies, right? and i knew another thing was if i wanted to get to the nfl level that the best pipeline to set your trajectory as high as possible is not afforded to somebody who looks like me they ain't letting your black ass touch quarterbacks and they ain't letting your black ass touch that play sheet right like that was always a line right exactly that was always my thought now i do think there are more black quarterbacks black quarterback coaches across the league than i would have imagine but then you got to look at who they're connected to and it's typically us looking out for us right Gerard Johnson is in a great spot in Houston right now but if he leaves Houston you are now leaving a black head coach black quarterback combination right that is a tough spot a tough selling point I think across the league for reasons that have nothing to do with Gerard Johnson who should be you know the kind of quarterback of a Sean Mannion is getting coordinator looks I don't know why Gerard Johnson can't be set on a similar trajectory. And I think, and I was listening to your show actually earlier this week when you pointed it out, I think that the other piece of this that people really have to grapple with in our line of work is how they talk about the damn rule. Cause I think that this was an abject failure in my estimation by the media and how we talk about the Rooney rule specifically and the way that teams are interfacing with that rule. There shouldn't I should never read a tweet ever that says this team is now free to pursue interviews with the candidates they want because they met the quality. They met the requirements of the Rooney rule. That's not the spirit of the rule. That's not why it's here. But what it does do is identify exactly what this rule is and ain't right. It's one of those kind of saying the quiet part out loud. Right. Which is not new information for people who pay attention to this. But I do think that as we see regression happening socially across all these different spaces, I think that it is definitely showing up in the coaching field. And when you leave a coaching carousel where over a quarter of the league turns over and the most color we got at head coach is a child of Lebanese immigrants. And I love Robert Sala in this league. After what I thought was some small steps towards progress, I think that there is a lot that we as media members need to do to be able to hold these people's feet to the fire. Because what happened, I think, over this past hiring cycle is about as close to unacceptable as it gets, given where we've been and where this league likes to lie to us and tell us that it wants to go. And I think the media point leads to something that we always have to remember, and I think people misunderstand, is that when white people are talking about race, they're talking to each other. Exactly. Typically, right? Like, it's race as it affects their lives. And for the media people, they white buddies that they're calling up to talk about this stuff are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So now we can go ahead and we can get in the streets and we can do whatever. And never for a moment, do they stop? And like people view the rule to me as like I say, as an impediment, as opposed to, you could use this as an opportunity. And this is why I always say when they blame the rule, they're so off is that back in the day, Mike Tomlin got hired because he got one of those interviews with Miami. And then the word got around that he had killed it. And the Steelers were like, yo, well, let's do that. The only people that went from doing that are the teams in the NFL. They have the ability to do that. they just like now we don't even like doing none of that no more apparently and the stakes are so high here where it's like hey man don't y'all want to like vance joseph who was doing a great job as the defensive coordinator with the broncos he did not do a good job as the head coach of the denver broncos but at this point you would think that somebody else like he figured somebody would let him be the sam jar on the coaching you know what i'm saying well if he was on the other side of the ball he is a head coach a year ago if not two years ago well you remember raheem was like, hey, put me on offense, dog. That's the only thing that's going to work. And then I think it was the Falcons where the defense got so bad that they had to, all right, come on back. And they had to put it back at defensive coordinator. And then he got lucky. He got to go work kicking with MacVay. Exactly. I mean, and that's to the point of you have to be lucky enough to get into the network that they care about now. Raheem happened to be in Tampa Bay when Kyle Shanahan was in Tampa Bay. Ta-da, under Gruden. So now you've got just enough of a connection now where people can say, and I think that I think that for him I don't know I don't want to say this about him because it reduces his own qualifications but I do think based on the way that we've seen owners and GMs make these hires I think a lot of Raheem getting these shots is you get us access to the tree that we want to get access to but we don't have other ways to pluck at it otherwise you get Raheem you get a Zach Robinson who ended up failing as an offensive coordinator but he at that time was the next hot shot offensive guy that can go call plays here right I think that that is a problem that we're all going to have to deal with and I think that it's fair it's fair for us to ask not just these owners and GMs but these head coaches I like Sean McVay as a person I think that he's a very earnest you know coach I think that he is about the right kind of stuff when it comes to player development I think it's fair to ask why his offensive staff looks like his offensive staff right I think that that's 100% fair to ask I think that Kyle Shanahan has done a pretty good job with trying to diversify his staff and most people who go that work that are people of color that work on offensive staff end up getting a shot mike mcdaniel for whatever jokes i might have about mike mcdaniel and you know he did go get a shot he gave mike mcdaniel the most important part of his offense which is the run game they had a great run game and he ended up getting a head coaching look as a result of it but some of the rest of these guys the lafleur's the kevin o'connell's a lot of people have respect for his coaches i think that if we are going to improve this that fire i think needs to trickle down to them as well. We need to ask exactly why the coaching pipeline that they acknowledge that got them the gigs that they've got coming up, working with quarterbacks, working as an offensive coordinator, why it is that their staff always ends up looking the way that it does on a year-to-year basis. All right, last question for you. What is the funniest name that you could imagine turning up in Epstein files? Ooh, that's a great question. That's a great question. the funniest mmm funniest and legitimate not like the tip line any name that don't matter what the name is honestly just because she has been so unhinged over the last couple weeks my first thought went to Nikki honestly that whole young money that whole young money conglomerate would be the funniest for me personally right because then you get all the people who are in their little fan bases falling out that's a great question though what about for you who'd be the funniest well my original one was tim tebow now i just thought of another that's great yeah now i just thought of another one ringo star is look up and ringo in there try to make it happen hey man i think that i think that ringo would be a funny one i think that i'm i would like to see what the dynamic looks like on the opposite end of it you were talking about it with the tish family right and you got to go home and go sit at that dinner table somebody gonna ask some questions for you i would like to see what the gender dynamics would look like in reverse i want somebody to walk in and be like hey so that's really what you went to huh lady yeah okay this is how we rocking when you out of home when you're away from home you're on them trips so that's how you wound up having dinner with bill gates huh right okay no no no no no it's cool it's cool it's all good I guess I got more. I have more to learn about you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Jesse, you know what? Multitudes. You can tell you multitudes, don't you? Nasty-ass multitudes. Nasty motherfuckers. That is Deontay Lee. Check him out at the Ringer. Talking about football, my man. Enjoy the week in San Francisco. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Bo. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us here on The Right Time. We do this four times a week. Ryan Brumley handles everything behind the scenes. Thank you, sir. Hit the voicemail line, 323-596-7767. Remember, follow the right time. Subscribe, like, rate us, review us, give us five stars. You only give us four stars. I'm inclined to believe you are a hater. We'll talk to you guys in a couple of days. Take it easy.