Wow, there sure are a lot of sports happening right now. Ordinarily that would be the sort of sentence that you’d end with an exclamation point, but honestly a period of this much sports—the giddy but tension-free start of the NBA season, which is already happening, the giddier and extremely tense end of baseball’s long march into October—takes a lot out of a person. Those are some notable sports, and they’re happening both entirely too close together for the taste of some staffers and all the time. But who wants to talk about that shit, right? A full three-eighths of the NFL season has happened already, which means it’s time to ah recap that particular part of the NFL season, I guess. Gangly Sacramento Bureau Chief Patrick Redford joined us to do that important work. And buddy did we ever do it.
The fact of the matter is that, while there is objectively important baseball and contextually significant basketball happening, everyone else is already talking about that. And also the NFL just gives us more to talk about at this point. Pat Mahomes is a controlled substance, the Raiders are a lurid psychedelic overdose, the Giants are some sort of vague metaphor for the collapse of our institutions, the Houston Texans are working on some sort of pain-related Marina Abramovic thing with their red zone offense, and we’ve still got five-eighths of the NFL season left to go. Chad Kelly could still be our MVP! You don’t know that he won’t be. Stop pretending like you know Chad Kelly won’t be the MVP, please. Enough.
Anyway, this Deadcast is not all NFL garbage. There is also a hugely productive dive into the Funbag, with a lively discourse on the shittiest type of television commercials, the least effective methods of political advertising, the end of civilization as we’ve conventionally understood it, Mike Pence cuckolding Donald Trump and then talking about what an amazing honor it was to have done so, Tom Cruise risking his life to make dumb movies seem more realistic, and a tender memory from Patrick about what it’s like to attend a Phish show with your mom. Some of this is traumatic and some of it is less so. But we’re not even halfway home yet. There’s plenty of time to work this all out.
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