Hello and welcome to the MMQB NFL podcast. I'm Conroe. That's my dog Ernie upstairs barking at the FedEx guy. Albert Breer's here and I'm going to start in New York because Albert I can't believe that we're still doing this Taylor Swift thing. And now the NFL is doing the Taylor Swift thing. Do you see that they are their subhead on their Twitter pages. The Chiefs are now 2 -0 as Swifties. I did not see that but I am more and more. It's fake. I think so too. I think on Friday like the radio show I did in Boston. They leave me at the like and these guys are really creative and they kind of like took me through their full like tinfoil hat like conspiracy theory. You know like you know what this actually really makes sense. Like because the NFL has forever chased the female demographic and they've struggled to get it. And they know that there's nothing more buzz worthy on that side of the aisle than Taylor Swift. And they were shameless enough to cut like I mean we've seen some of their shameless acts over the years to try and get the female audience. And this wouldn't even rank in like the top 10. You know what I mean like this would just be sort of par for the course that they would do something like this. So I really like I am officially on this Monday morning Connor especially after the 10 million shots that box last night. I'm all the way there. This is all fake. This is all like this is all contrived. This is it. Everyone wins situation. Taylor gets to promote her movie. What else is it? There's one other thing right is a new album coming out. I can't keep track of all of this. I have no idea. OK. So Taylor gets to promote that stuff with a different demographic. Right. Like football different demographics different than hers. The NFL gets to try to take a swing at the female audience. And then Travis Kelsey gets an enormous benefit from this. Travis Kelsey's following has exploded. Nine hundred thousand new followers. This is like an everyone wins situation. And it's all fake. A 14 point 14 whatever place jump in Jersey sales. Like we were taught in school to follow the money and it's right out in front of us. Like it's like you know we're not even it's not even like they're hiding it. And I think I'm only read some of this stuff sometimes, though, and like like over the last week, like actually clicking on some like people dot com links, you know, I've seen some stories she reads. And I always think that the page six type stuff, you know, and I always think it's funny when there's like an insider into somebody's relationship, like who would be the insider into your relationship? Connor, I, you know, when they when they when they when they put sources into your relation and then people's relationships. Yeah, the sources be I mean, it would be like my neighbor or like my mom or my wife's mom. It would be like, yeah, I think I think they're fighting, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have a publicist. I always think that's great. Like is the sources into the like the insiders into the relationship? Like is that person like just coming over and hanging out on a Tuesday or something and that makes them an insider? So Brian Costello, who's awesome, Jets beat writer for the New York Post, and he tweeted the the bio for the NFL's Twitter page, which is the Chiefs two and O's Swifties. And he's totally right. This is the kind of stuff that fuels nutjob conspiracy theorists, not just the ones with the podcast. But the fans who watched that game last night and saw their saw the outcome derailed by an extraordinarily questionable call on Sauce Gardner. And listen, I'm not saying it's good, bad, right, wrong or indifferent. But if you're a Jets fan and you've already seen your entire season railroaded by the NFL's greed and desire to milk whatever they can out of this franchise and you had to do hard knocks. Every single game is on prime time. Your schedule is ridiculous, ridiculously front loaded and impossible at the beginning. You know, I don't know what else you could think right now other than your team is just being actively manipulated by by the league. And listen, I don't believe it. You know, Andy Benoit and I used to fight about the I used to get him going on the NFL's fake thing a while back. We had a lively discussion about that after Peyton Manning's second Super Bowl. But I don't believe it. I'm not one of those people. Well, you're not making them go away. I just noticed I just went to the NFL's Twitter page. It is now the header is three shots of tail left. And like if you look at the bio, I think this is a tailor. I think this is a tailor reference. We had the best day with you today. Maybe is that a reference? I think it has to be right to be clear. I'm not anti Taylor Swift. I think she's a fine musician. Yeah, I think she's a genius. Like, yeah, I think she's a legitimate genius and everything she touches turns to gold. And there's a reason for it. She's obviously incredible. Yeah, I just don't like I want you know what? I think I'm hot, too, because I'm coming off the I wrote about the way those are the lyrics to it. Those are those are lyrics from a Taylor Swift song titled The Best Day. Okay, I think I'm just a little hot coming off the Toy Story broadcast, too. Did you did you catch any of that? I was actually coaching third grade football during the Toy Story. Okay, good. Yeah, I threw that on and I was just like, what are they doing? And I get it. You're trying to get kids to watch football. But how about just allowing kids to watch football or to have kids play football and not to watch like a I mean, the technology was incredible. But it like it looked like a like a like Minecraft, you know, and like I just felt like I watch it with my son for a minute. And I was like, they're trying to just it's like cocoa melon. They're just trying to hypnotize them. So we we bang that thing fast. I mean, I just feel like that's like there are some people at the league office who don't have enough to do. And that's how things like that wind up coming to life. Like like fix, fix the problems. Like we're focused on Taylor Swift and the Toy Story broadcast, like like digital chains so that like chains don't break during the game. Grass fields like like like fix the actual problems with the games. My God. Anyway, twenty three twenty, the Chiefs beat the Jets. The Jets fall to one in three. The Chiefs are three and one. I think my takeaway from this game is the takeaway that everybody had, which was this was a feisty, very feisty Zach Wilson game. I think that Robert Sala, to me, win or lose, just earns so much credit because during the week he knew he was going to get demolished. And he said, you don't throw people away. You just don't throw people away. And I give him so much credit because honestly, this is job on the line stuff. And he stuck with Zach Wilson. He dug in. There was no sample size. And Zach played really well. I was very happy for them. And look, like I think that the biggest problem that Robert Sala had was like, can he continue to sell Zach Wilson to the locker room? Because the premise of that entire team, the construction of that team this year was we're going for it. Right. So there are guys in that locker room like Allen Lazard and Adrian Amos and Randall Cobb, guys that were like that are older vets that are there to chase the ring. And like guys like that aren't going to have patience. They don't care what this means for your franchise in 2025. They care about right now. And the younger guys in the roster are going to be worried about what's going to get them in a position to get paid. So it can be hard to sell a developing quarterback to a locker room. And I'll give Robert Sala credit for standing by Zach Wilson, because if he didn't do that, like it would have been impossible. It would have been impossible for Zach in that locker room. you And, know, it sort of made me think of something I said earlier in the day about how Josh Dobbs should get us to question everything about how we develop quarterbacks, how the NFL develops quarterbacks, how the NFL nurtures quarterbacks. Because, you know, you have this guy in Josh Dobbs who got what, six years to kind of learn away from the bright lights. And then because he was on different teams, because he had different experiences, because he was developed away from game action, because people invested in him, because he had a chance and people had patience with him. And, you know, every single movement of his wasn't, you know, litigated on a public level on a week to week basis. You know, he had a chance to kind of get better in the background. And now you have a guy who's so adaptable that he could be traded a week before the season and start and take maybe the worst roster in the league and have a competitive over the first month of the season. It really like to me, like looking at Josh Dobbs makes you question everything. And so if six years can do that for Josh Dobbs, why are we throwing guys out after two or three years? That's what I don't get about it. It's fair to make an assessment on a guy and say, like, he sucks now. But to say guys never going to be good, just ignore so much history. You know, like Alex Smith is a phenomenal example of it. Right. Like how many times was he given up on in San Francisco? Yeah. Like, oh, he can't play. But no one was looking at the fact that like he had five coordinators his first five years in the league. He had two head coaches. Everything was completely unstable around him. And then Jim Harbaugh gets there in 2011 says, no, I'm sticking with him. And he takes off and then he's in the league for another decade as a starter. You know, like it's just we have so many examples of the of why we shouldn't make definitive and declarative statements about young quarterbacks. And yet we do it over and over and over again. And like I do, I think like the intention of the Jets in the first place was we have to press the pause button with Zach Wilson. We may have wronged him by playing him too fast. Right. And by putting too much on him too early. And so the whole intention on bringing him back this year was to allow him the chance to do the Josh jobs and develop in the background for a year or two. And that got blown up. But just because that plan got blown up like that's not Zach Wilson's fault. That plan got blown up. It's not anybody's fault. So now you're going to just completely throw the kid out. Why? Because Aaron Rodgers got hurt. There's a lot of like really faulty logic that goes into the way that he's been talked about over the last couple of weeks, I think. I agree. I'm not just saying this because I wrote about it, but to not even, you know, I think we're in such a easy Twitter dunk society that when Zach Wilson and Nathaniel Hackett get paired up, everyone's just like, oh, this is going to be terrible. And without looking at any of the history of any of these guys. The AFC championship came with Blake, Blake Bortles. He got Ryan Nassib drafted out of Syracuse. I went to Syracuse. Do you know who was the quarter? The last quarterback drafted before Ryan Nassib, Donovan McNabb, Donovan McNabb. I was going to say I was going to say Troy Nunes. Like I think drafted as a quarterback. I think there was a couple of quarterbacks that turned into tight ends, but in literally broke all the school records with this guy. And then he got Kyle Wharton, I believe, to the doorstep of the playoffs. Yeah. Two MVPs with Aaron Rodgers after he was lost in the woods for a little while. The guy's good at what he does, you know, and we're seeing in Denver now, who knows? Make your own judgments about what happened there. But I think that this thing could work like, OK, yeah. The Jets are one in three, but their schedule softens up a little bit. They played a lot of their best defenses up front. You know, Zach Wilson is going to look bad against the Cowboys, but how many other people are going to look really bad against the Cowboys? Right. And now in the next few games, like they have the Broncos coming up. I mean, Zach Wilson could could legitimately put up 50 points against that team. The Eagles, who are really good defense giants, Jets, Giants before Halloween, which if he can handle the pressure. I think that's coming off a buy, too. So it's coming off a buy. You know what Wink Martindale is going to do. He does it well, but you know what he's going to do. And then the Chargers November six, the Raiders November 12th. You don't play a really good team. You play the Eagles in the bills in the next month and a half. Otherwise, you're good. Well, we're kind of like that's like and that was the whole logic behind this. And I think we talked about this last week. To me, the problem with going away from Zach Wilson, like in the whole in the first place, was a there's no better option out there right now. Right. And B, once you go away from him, you can't go back again. You know, so I think so. I think so. I knew that like it was if we bench him in consecutive years, we can't sell him to the locker room again.