A new story from The Bill Simmons Podcast

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Football coaches, Bill Belichick, up on a lifeguard stand. Ground level is too short. The offensive coordinator literally has binoculars sometimes. They put him in the cheap seats past the bleachers. No, man. Happy medium, lifeguard stand. Pop up, see everything. First person to do it, immediate advantage, 100% work. I don't know. I'd be like, well, I don't know if it would work. Well, lifeguards do it and they save people's lives. I think you could call a blitz. I really like where you went with that. My fear on that one would be the sweep left where the guy's running where he gets tackled and kind of out of bounds and then flung and gets thrown into the cameraman. But if he gets thrown into the lifeguard stand, go back to extend. Somewhere there's a booger mobile. There is a booger mobile somewhere in a deep warehouse in Bristol. When you said the lifeguard thing, I thought you were going with referees, not head coaches. That's good too, Jacoby. That works too. See, this is what the best half-baked ideas are is to build upon. The tennis umpire sits up on a lifeguard chair so they can get a good view of everything. A basketball referee, maybe like some Mad Max stilts that they kind of swing back and forth on. But like a- No, just for doing drywall. Just an elevated- At the goal line, judges, at the very least, should be in lifeguard seats. An elevated view, there should be an umpire or a referee at a football game that just has a different perspective than ground level. That's fair. I wonder if they're worried it would block the fans. Mm, yeah. I like it. I mean, that was a perfect half-baked idea because it intrigued me. We were able to come up with some counters to it, but there's definitely some there. I like the idea of Belichick sitting on a giant lifeguard thing. What coach would be the funniest to get knocked out of one of those? Probably, I don't know. Probably like Pete Carroll, right? Cause he'd hop up and be like, I'm okay, I'm okay, that's great. I knew that would happen. All right, ready? Yep. We got classic Coke, you got diet Coke, you got vanilla Coke, you got Coke Zero, you got cherry Coke, a thousand different Cokes. You got fountain Cokes, two liters, one liter pans, miniature Cokes. Little glass bottle Cokes. Little glass bottle Cokes. Airplane diet Coke comes with a little napkin. It has a little equilibrium on it. You can only pour it if you're sitting down, you can only drink it if you're sitting down. And it's specially formulated, so however, how your taste buds get affected when you're in the plane, and diet Coke tastes great up there, airplane diet Cokes. It's just a quick idea. Yeah, no one bets a thousand, you know what I mean? No one bets a thousand on these. Okay, this is gonna sound like a gimmick, but you know what? As opposed to lazy rivers everywhere. Just sold a lot of the best ideas ever. Yeah. Basketball, eventually someone's like, hey, let's build the entire offense around shooting three pointers. And they're like, yeah, wow, that worked. How come we didn't figure that one out? That was sitting there right in front of us. And then baseball recently, you know what the big revolution was? Let's build the entire offense around hitting home runs. Like, yeah buddy, try to hit it out the ballpark. That works. Football, we're halfway there. Like, let's throw the ball, sure. What do you think about this? Now Bill, I'll throw it to you. An entire offense, not just part of the offense, this is the first drill we do, it's the 12th drill we do, and we put our conventional plays on the fringe. An entire offense, methodically drilled and based around laterals. Oh, like a rugby offense almost. Yes. Yeah. It's like, all right, now once you catch it, what do you do with it? Travis Kelce was trying to do these laterals on his own. I could see the Chiefs actually doing this. And everyone's so afraid of the people with the best hands in the entire world, and the guys who are the best catching the ball in the entire world, are afraid of having Travis Kelce throw them a two-foot lob. An entire offense. An entire offense should go beyond laterals. So, I feel the same way about this idea that I feel about when Patino tried to do the full-court press, which I still think was a good idea, but he forgot the part that guys making a lot of money or veterans don't want to be in a press, but if you brought in, I wrote about this in my book, the five worst guys on your team become your press guys, and they just come in for four minutes, and it's like, for four minutes, this is gonna suck for you guys, because we've practiced this, these are our press unit. Same thing with the lateral, oh, here comes the lateral package. That's great. And it's like, you're at midfield, it's like, oh my God, the lateral guys are out there. And then it's just kind of a gimmick for five plays. And you know what the gimmick is? When they don't lateral. Like, oh, it's not a lateral! Here's the thing, I'm for anything that makes the other team have to prepare for something during the week, because you always hear about how, oh, they gotta prepare. It's like Malik Cunningham on the Pats. He should be the third quarterback, and they should run a package in week one with him, because then after that, every week, they're gonna be like, fuck, it's Wednesday. You know, they got that Malik Cunningham guy. We gotta at least, all right, so when he comes in, we gotta practice with it. Now it's like another thing you have to worry about. I'm offering more things for people to worry about. You're just burning hours of footage. Yeah, more preparation. Belichek mentioned Taysom Hill. Oh, Belichek mentioned they did this in 1947. Can someone go to the microphone library and see if we've got that game film? He's gonna be able to pull it off. Love it. Wow, so what's your next half-baked idea? This is a big, this is too boring, but it's, you know what, it's not too boring. It's a great idea. It's a, it's so stupid. Just, it's just a chip brand called Too Much. Salt and vinegar, too much. Too much salt and vinegar. Oh, barbecue sauce. Too much barbecue chips. That's it, Too Much. Hold on, Kevin, can I say one of the greatest things you've ever taught me? Wow, sure. Is that one of the stories was that your, I think it was your grandfather would order like Italian subs and say, give me more oil and vinegar than you think I want. I say that all the time. I'm like, give me more than you think I want. It's just kind of like piggybacking on like the Too Much. Like, it's just like, sometimes I'll order something and be like, give me more Dijon mustard than you think I want. Because that's how much I want. That's exactly right. People are like, like, Wiles, are you good at basketball? I'm like, I'm a little bit better than you think I am. Like, ah. So we were working on ideas with this person who every time they came in, they would bring food. Like they'd bring like cupcakes or whatever. Really nice guy. And one time he brought in these gourmet chips that I'd never heard of. And they were like the best chips I'd ever had. So I went and bought a bunch of them because there were these different flavors. And one of them was a barbecue and it was actually Too Much barbecue. It was the only time I've ever had potato chips. So I'm like, wow, this is just an overpowering amount of barbecue on my barbecue chip. My point is that's the only time I've ever been overwhelmed. Yeah. Where I was like, wow, that's actually Too Much. I don't think there's too much salt and vinegar on a salt vinegar chip for me. There's a lot of room for growth, let's just say. There is, there really is. Because I was like, how could I just make the saltiest vinegar-ist chip? But then you gotta be careful. You're like, wow, we put 200 milligrams of salt on each chip. Someone's gonna come in, you know, a Disruptor brand and be like, we put 210. So you just go over the top with Too Much. Whatever the competitors got, Too Much. We were putting Too Much on. Cheez-Its came out with Extra Toasty. You didn't even realize that Toasty was a variable in Cheez-Its, but they have Extra Toasty now and my kids go crazy for it. Extra Toasty Cheez-Its. Mine's the most toasty, the most toasty. You know what my Starbucks afternoon order is? No. If I'm near a Starbucks, I get the Trenta Ice Coffee with Extra Ice.

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