Ray Kowalczyk called me Tuesday at 6:47 in the morning, which is the hour Ray calls when something has truly broken his brain. I answered because I know that hour, and I know that voice, and I know that if I don’t pick up he will leave a voicemail of approximately eleven minutes in which he forgets halfway through that he is leaving a voicemail. What Ray wanted to tell me, breathlessly, was that the long snapper for a team I will not name because long snappers deserve a small measure of peace, has launched a podcast. The podcast is called Snap Judgment. It is two hours long. The first episode is about his cold plunge.
We are now at the point in this country where every man who has ever strapped on a helmet, and several who only watched from the sideline holding a clipboard, has a podcast. The quarterback has a podcast. The backup quarterback has a podcast that is mostly about the quarterback. The tight end has a podcast with his brother. The other tight end has a podcast with a different brother. The kicker, God bless him, has a podcast called The Point After, and if you think I’m making that up you have not spent enough time staring into the abyss of the NFL media ecosystem during Divisional Round week.
I looked it up. I counted. Of the twenty-two projected starters in one of this weekend’s playoff games, fourteen have their own podcast, three are regular guests on their teammate’s podcast, and one is contractually prohibited from having a podcast because of an ongoing dispute with a mattress company. That leaves four men still doing their actual jobs without also operating a small media concern out of a converted guest bathroom with a ring light.
My old coach, Sal DiMaggio — not that DiMaggio, a different one, a man who smelled permanently like Bengay and rage — used to say that a football player should have three things to say to a reporter: we played hard, credit to the other guys, on to next week. Four if it was a loss, and the fourth was usually ‘ask coach.’ Sal believed that a man who talked about himself more than fifteen seconds at a stretch was probably also the kind of man who’d fumble in traffic. I think about Sal every time I see a 6-foot-5 defensive end in an Adidas tracksuit explain his morning routine to a microphone shaped like a kidney bean.
The content, if we are being generous and calling it that, is mostly three things. Recovery. Mindset. A thing called ‘building the brand,’ which as far as I can tell means selling a protein powder to a man in Boise who will drink it once and then put the tub in his garage forever. There is occasionally football. Football, on these podcasts, is the thing the athlete does in between explaining why he switched to a copper water bottle.
Dr. Harlan Prestwick — some kind of sports-media academic, I met him once at a banquet where they served chicken that had been threatened rather than cooked — told me last fall that the average active NFL player now generates ‘forty-one minutes of audio content per week during the regular season.’ Forty-one minutes. My father, who coached seventh-grade football for thirty-two years in a mill town, did not generate forty-one minutes of audio content in his entire recorded life, and he was a man with opinions.
My neighbor Petey Corrigan listens to all of them. All of them. Petey is sixty-three, drives a Tacoma, and has somehow convinced himself that knowing the nickname a Jets reserve safety has for his French bulldog is the same thing as understanding football. He came over Sunday to watch with me and, during a third-and-long, leaned in and said, ‘You know, he talked about this exact situation on his pod Wednesday.’ Reader, I turned the television up. I turned Petey down. There is a button for that, and we should use it more.
The thing that truly galls me — and I want to be clear, because I am not against these young men making money, they are one bad hit from selling insurance in Toledo — is that the podcasts are all the same podcast. Two guys. A third guy who laughs. A sponsor read for a sleep app. An ad for a sports book where a man with a voice like unbuttered toast tells you to bet the over on a player’s reception total, a player who is, incidentally, sitting right there on the podcast, nodding.
Divisional Round weekend used to be a sacred thing. Eight teams left, cold stadiums, grown men in face paint, a broadcast crew that knew when to shut up. Now it is a 96-hour bonus-episode content cycle. Every franchise has ‘dropped’ something. The Lions have a Spotify exclusive. The Ravens have a documentary. Somebody’s wife has a lifestyle brand launching Thursday that is timed, and I cannot stress this enough, to her husband’s first playoff start.
Here’s the part I don’t get to say enough, because the column has a tone to keep and I have a reputation to uphold as a man who hates joy: the players themselves are mostly fine. The ones I’ve actually talked to, over forty-some years of this, are craftsmen. They study tape. They ice things. They know the exact angle of their teammate’s hip on a stunt. It’s the machine around them — the agents, the ‘content strategists,’ the 29-year-old producer named Braeden who pitched Snap Judgment over a kombucha — that has turned the sport into a LinkedIn conference with tackling.
So this week, when the Divisional Round kicks off and someone tries to hand you a bonus episode hosted by a second-string guard and his high school friend, my advice is to do what Sal DiMaggio would have done: turn it off, walk outside, and yell at a leaf. The game is still in there somewhere, underneath all the audio. You just have to be willing to sit in a room quietly and watch it, which is apparently a lost art.
Denise is bringing chili Saturday. She says the recipe is from a podcast. I am choosing, for the sake of my marriage and the playoff slate, not to ask which one.