Go Long

Back home in Georgia, he has a 4-year-old daughter who loves playing soccer, doing little flips and pretending to be a ballerina. Glover predicts that she’ll be very tall. He apologizes in advance.

Here in Green Bay, he has virtually gone through all necessary paperwork to adopt another child at his day job. Country to the bone with a bushy beard, warm eyes and mellow accent that hints at a tender heart, Glover views his profession as another form of fatherhood. When Love relays a play inside the huddle, linemen smack their hands together, trot up to the line of scrimmage and — at this precise moment? — the same paternal instincts kick in.

Glover imagines No. 10 in green is kin.

“I’ve got to protect J-Love,” Glover says. “It’s all in my head: Do my job, reset, refocus each play. Protect the quarterback. Don’t take no BS from nobody.
“Don’t be touching him. Why are y’all getting close? Get away from him!”

Refreshing rhetoric. This team’s soul needed a thorough cleansing after last season.

For too long, players stood idly by when their QB took a cheap shot. No more.

“It’s time to be who we are. We ain’t taking it from nobody. Stay away from J-Love.”

He shakes his head. He’s growing quite fed up with defenders who think they can sneak in extra shoves after the whistle.

“Stay away.”

Go Long

This same mastodon of a man offering a stern warning to the entire NFL should’ve disappeared from the sport. Twice. Glover, a 202^nd overall pick, entered this league as the most disposable of employees and then endured two breaking points that expel players of his rank to 9-to-5 jobs all the time. It’s hard to imagine a worse start to an offensive lineman’s pro career.

First, after playing all of 13 snaps during the regular season, the rookie was vaulted into the team’s wild-card game at Philadelphia when Elgton Jenkins suffered a stinger. In a span of three plays, he both hooked 336-pound Jordan Davis and tackled Moro Ojomo for a pair of penalties. On the Fox broadcast, Tom Brady and Kevin Burkhardt go from utterly speechless — “wow,” one mutters, “geesh,” the other echoes — to full-fledged pity. Gnawing on his mouthguard, face covered in sweat, Glover is immediately benched.

The Packers lost, 22-10, and fans naturally took fanatical action.

Glover estimates there were 15 DMs in all. Some were laced with more vitriol than others.

Mostly? These team owners admonished Glover for failing to do his job.

Jokes Glover: “I’m like, ‘Yeah, you’re right, sir. You’re right. Why didn’t I just do that?”

Public humiliation to this extreme often vaporizes the confidence of linemen to dust. Over the years, I’ve seen the pale look of horror in their eyes before. Part of the problem is the fragile nature of this profession. Nobody gives a damn if an offensive lineman is perfect on 59 of 60 snaps. One bad rep can make any guard, any tackle Public Enemy No. 1.

And here was a kid from a small school flailing for his life on 28 playoff snaps. This Philly nightmare easily could’ve banished him for good. Into the offseason, however, Glover did not go into a shell. He repeated a few words to himself — “don’t nobody care, don’t nobody care” — and remembered what Towns told him. There were zero benefits to toiling in the past or fast-forwarding into the future.

Of course, he didn’t need to wait until January for the NFL to club him upside the head again.

The drill during training camp was innocent enough. During individuals, Glover simply moved off a “B block” and felt something minor in his back. Like straining his pec. He figured the muscle simply needed to “calm down” and continued to practice.

The next drill, the pain was sharper.

A scan revealed that he had torn his latissimus dorsi (lat) muscle completely off the bone.

Packers medics told him they had never seen this in the NFL.

“A crazy freak accident,” Glover says. “I’m like, ‘OK. So this crazy stuff happened to me for no reason? It wasn’t even anything powerful.”

His 2025 season was over. No games, no snaps, no sensible hope for the future. Briefly, Glover even wondered if this was career-ending. Mom remembers her son posting an apology on Facebook — he thought he let everyone in Dooly County down. She told him he’ll come back better than ever. “You’ve got to believe,” she said. Still, another offseason guaranteed another opportunity for the Packers to sign and draft people to take his job. By July? He’d be one of 90. On the roster bubble. Damaged goods in their subconscious.

All mental strain that could’ve killed off his NFL career.

Lay this out in such blunt terms and Glover hardly blinks.

“Those things — if you think about that? — it’ll drive you crazy,” Glover says. “Because you could think of a million negative things. You’ve got to say something positive. Because it’s easy to think of something negative. It’ll lean on you and sit there. You’ve got to feed the positivity.”

This was one maxim imparted by a man described as an unsung hero in Green Bay: team psychologist Dr. Chris Carr.

Glover’s been seeing Carr since his rookie year. There are classes each Thursday, an interactive app and — through his injury recovery — the young lineman met with Carr 1 on 1 repeatedly. He describes each session as “a mental meal.”

All in all, Glover didn’t view the long wait as a burden, rather a 365-day blank canvas. A chance to evolve.

Day to day, Glover felt himself get stronger. Glover actively chose to conduct himself as a leader, showing up to lift weights before most teammates even woke up. If there was one benefit to this torn lat, it’s that it happened in July. He refined his technique, matured as a pro and made the 53-man roster. By Week 4, Glover got the call to start… and knew exactly what fans were thinking. “From the DMs I got,” he says, “they probably weren’t too excited.” This time, he felt wholly prepared for anything on gameday.

Upon taking the field in Tampa Bay, Glover repeatedly told himself: Protect the quarterback. Protect the quarterback.

“I was ready,” Glover says. “I don’t know what my grandmother and my mama instilled in me, but I feel it in everything I do.”

With that, he looks inward. He tries to pinpoint and articulate those characteristics.

An exercise that requires emotional bandwidth. And a napkin, or two.

He reaches for the cell phone in his pocket and taps open Instagram.

Not to find those nasty DMs. He deleted all those. No, Glover wants to show us his proudest block as a member of the Georgia State Panthers. It’s the third reel in an archived collection. As the left tackle on a wide receiver screen, it was Glover’s job to pull wide and seal off the cornerback. A difficult trek for anyone lineman. But if you make contact, the result is glorious devastation.

This cornerback — Reddy Steward — weighed about 175. In other words, nearly half of Glover.

The video begins. No. 73 in blue chops his feet, fans out and manages to launch Steward airborne.

He wasn’t finished. Glover felt the need to douse this pancake in maple syrup by then dive-bombing on top of his victim.

It’s funny. Throughout this two-hour chat, Travis Glover’s voice is exceptionally soft. Compassionate. Then you listen closely to his actual words and realize this southern gentleman is coldblooded. Glover admits he belly-flopped this poor wretch for a reason. Steward made the All-Sun Belt first team in both ’22 and ’23. Today, he plays for the Dallas Cowboys.

“I was like, ‘Oh yeah, if I hit him hard enough, he ain’t going to want to keep playing,’” Glover recalls. “That’s why I jumped on him. He was pretty good. So if we get him a little weak, a little tired, it was good.”

To his credit, Steward managed to stay in the game.

On his way back to the huddle, Glover did hear a Troy coach screaming that this was a dirty play. Whatever.

There were many moments like this one through his 57 starts with Georgia State.

Which begs two questions: How did he land at a Sun Belt program created in 2010? and Why did he stay there?

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For starters, he picked up the sport late. After one fall of youth ball at age 9, he didn’t play again until 11^th grade. Mom wouldn’t allow out. Coaches stayed on Sandra — even visiting her at work — but she wanted her boy focused on academics. Oddly enough, Travis wasn’t exactly begging to play. So once Mom said yes, she wasn’t sure how this whole football thing would even go. Travis was so quiet, so cognizant of the fact that he was the largest human being in every conceivable social setting by 6+ inches and 75+ pounds. “Everybody’s expecting aggression or bullying — the stereotypical stuff,” Sandra says. “But he was never like that.”

Once games began, Sandra implored him to bring it and Travis admitted he didn’t want to hurt anybody.

He also didn’t know what in the hell he was doing. Glover simply ran into people.

But the more he hit, the more comfortable he got, the more he transformed into a “totally different person,” Mom says.

Western Kentucky was his lone FBS offer for a while. On the eve of Signing Day, a scholarship opened up at Georgia State and he decided to attend the Atlanta school a short two-hour drive away.

Stayed loyal, too. As NIL warped college football, Glover heard from power schools. And he was never blinded by their lavish offers. Instead? He was annoyed. He was ticked that all they wanted to discuss was money. In his mind, transferring would’ve been nothing but a temporary sugar high because there was a good chance he’d spend the entire season standing on the sideline. “I didn’t want to chase money,” he adds, “I didn’t want to chase the lights.” He believed his only shot at making the NFL was by staying on the field. Granted, this was a high-stakes bet. It’s not easy for any 21- or 22-year-old kid to decline life-changing money.

Let alone one who had just become a father.

Amari was born in the thick of it all.

Travis was forced to grow up in a hurry.

“I can’t be childish anymore,” Glover recalls. “I’ve got to lead the way.”

In-between practice… and class… and lifts… and diaper changes, Glover took on a job at a place called “Hot Dog Pete’s” right by the football stadium. He didn’t go through the motions, either. Glover worked his way up to a manager position. Hot dogs. Corn dogs. French fries. Ice cream. He did it all. He was so good at his job that — by the time he headed to the pros — the place permanently shut down. (“I was running the spot.”)

Through his agent, Marshall Rosenbach, he soon linked up with longtime NFL pro Lee Smith at the former tight end’s training facility. With Triple F, in Knoxville, Tenn., Smith created an O-Line-, Tight End-specific training ground for prospects. He was cut his first camp with the New England Patriots. He knows from firsthand experience that most all rookies are not prepared for the rigors of pro football, calling the business of pre-combine training a “racket” and a “hoax.” Yes, Smith can also shave a lineman’s 40-yard dash time from 5.3 to 5.2 seconds. But there’s so much more to the sport. And unless you’re a high draft pick, your margin for error in training camp is microscopic.

Smith bounced back and lasted 11 years. Along with fellow ex-pros Jon Feliciano and Rodney Hudson, and the trio’s 440 career games, he believes he’s built a more realistic NFL launching pad. Glover was one of his first clients.

“He’s like a son to me,” says Smith, who played for the Bills, Raiders and Falcons. “He’s the kind of guy you’d let take your daughter on a date and go into a bar fight with. There are very few humans on earth that check those two boxes. That’s what I always say about Josh Allen and Travis Glover’s another one of those. He has a special place in my heart.”

Glover was invited to the Hula Bowl and, later, the Senior Bowl.

The NFL dream neared.

But first, trauma. That December, he watched the life leave his grandmother.

Martha Towns was a force of nature. The “fabric,” the “glue,” the bedrock for the entire family, her daughter Sandra says. She had 10 children, 28 grandchildren. If anyone was going through anything, they called her. Not that a call was required. Towns made a point to spontaneously reach out to as many family members as possible daily. She’d know exactly what to say to completely turn your day around. And with Sandra working all week as a prison warden’s secretary to keep food on the table, Travis spent endless days with his grandmother. Never a daycare. The result: a very special, very deep relationship. When Towns yelled Travis’ name those final hours, Sandra remembers her son — in a state of shock — nearly picking her up out of the bed. “Baby,” she said to him, “where are you going to take her?”

Transitioning back into NFL mode felt impossible.

A week later, Travis and Mom boarded a plane to meet with his agent.

“I could tell that my son’s heart was in the same place as mine — wanting to go back and just be with family,” Sandra recalls. “She always encouraged him, always told him that he could be anything that he wanted to be. He held onto that.”

So when he started throwing around dumbbells again at Triple F, he did his best to press on. He was all business. Smith and Glover never discussed the episode in the weight room, and the ex-tight end is a man who’s dealt with his own share of trauma en route to becoming the voice of reason in every locker room he occupied.

At this fragile moment, all Smith saw was determination.

“He knows that’s what his grandma would’ve wanted,” Smith says. “So he came in, didn’t skip a beat and handled everything like a grown man and did what he needed to do. It was really impressive to watch. He is literally one of my favorite human beings on the planet.”

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Clearly, this loss is still affecting Glover.

That day, he lost part of himself.

But he also knows her fight’s living on in him. Glover calls Towns “one of the most amazing women” he’ll ever meet in his life. A world-class cook. A fountain of wisdom. A devout Christian who’d quote verses from the Bible verbatim at the top of her head. Family DNA is strong. Back when he was in eighth grade, Glover and his little brother settled into the living room with their Chinese takeout to watch the BET Awards when, approximately two bites in, Mom flew in to say her mother’s house was on fire. Lightning struck the breaker box. Thankfully, an uncle smelled the smoke, noticed the fire inside the kitchen and everyone inside managed to escape in time.

The house was destroyed. Grandma and Grandpa Towns moved into Glover’s home.

To this day, Glover refuses to watch the BET Awards.

Or take Mom. She’s also tough as nails. Sandra still works Monday through Friday, and Glover assures she’s witnessed it all on those surveillance cameras inside the prison.

Or take Dad. Travis Sr. was an excellent football player himself and even played for the same coach as his son. Jimmy Hughes told Travis Jr. stories of Travis Sr. tackling the quarterback and running back at the same time because he didn’t know who had the ball. He stood 6 foot 3 inches tall and was naturally strong. “The way he grew up,” Travis Jr. says, “lifting refrigerators and stuff, he built that strength.” That is, until the accident. Until a terrible car accident his senior year left him paralyzed on the left side of his body. Travis Jr. says Dad cannot use his left hand, walks with a limp and has a scar on his head.

Driving down a hill, his vehicle slid underneath a truck and he needed to learn how to walk again through intensive therapy. He was lucky to survive. With his one functional hand, Travis Sr. now runs his own lawnmower business in Cordele, Ga.

All genes, all experiences equipped Glover for everything he’d face in a league that spits out players annually. When he became a new father — and the NFL closed in — he refused to stress at all. As far as he’s concerned, the emotion does nothing for you. There’s no reason to expend such negative energy. So now whenever anyone in the family is stressing out, they don’t call Towns.

They call Travis.

He calms them down.

“Ain’t no need to kill yourself from stress,” Glover says. “Let’s get through it.”

After weathering two years of turbulence with the Packers, he’s here. The kid grilling hot dogs and flattening collegiate corners has a chance to be the missing piece on a championship contender. And he’s not overwhelmed.

“No challenge,” Glover says, “feels too big or too tough.”

During practice, he refuses to walk off the field. Ever. Even if the distance is 2 ½ yards, he’ll gallop to the sideline. It’s all mental, all a reminder to remain the same person he’s always been.

“Don’t get lazy,” Glover tells himself. “Jog off the field.”

Once practice concludes, he doesn’t care if it’s raining, snowing or if the wind chill dips into the negatives. Glover refuses to hitch a ride across Oneida St. back to the locker room. He’s got to travel on his own two feet and recruited a handful of rookies to do the same. When Jager Burton and Dillon Wade missed a day, Glover was not pleased inside the locker room. He gave both the cold shoulder. “You good, Glov?” they asked. “Yeah,” he said, “Just a little lonely. I had to walk back by myself.” They haven’t missed a day since.

Again, it’s more mental than physical.

“I don’t think it’s as big to other people,” Glover says. “But it’s a big deal to me.”

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When it’s time to play on gameday, there’s nothing highfalutin to his play style.

“I try to maul people,” he says. “Protect the quarterback, protect the guy on my right, guy on my left. Hit people, hit them hard, have fun.”

As this 2026 Packers season enters a critical stretch, Glover isn’t worrying about who’ll be playing where from left tackle to right tackle. He jokes that he’ll line up at wide receiver if called upon. (“I might not be very effective, but I’ll go do it.”) With or without Zeitler, odds are the Packers will be counting on him to mount a playoff run. That’s life on an NFL offensive line. Right when everything seems settled, lightning can strike that electrical unit.

The No. 1 objective for everyone is the same.

Keep Love clean and Green Bay can beat anyone in the league.

Glover spontaneously laughs thinking of throws his QB has made this season. He calls him a “fierce competitor” who’s also strikingly… chill.

“I love everything about him,” he says.

Every football player repeats the same trope of never getting too high, never getting too low, stayed even-keeled. But few live it. Few manage to maintain a steely disposition when 22 moving objects are colliding at dangerous speeds for three hours. Such laser-beam focus is Love’s greatest weapon, and it’s infectious inside the huddle. Back to ’24, Glover was blown away by his quarterback’s command. As the play clock ticks, Love has answers for everything.

There’s no guesswork. He speaks with conviction.

His calm becomes yours.

Heart rates settle down.

“You feel it,” Glover says. “That’s literally what I said one time. He got in the huddle. He was talking. I was like, ‘OK, he’s good. We’re good too.’ He’s chill, so we’re chill. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. You just feel it. It’s kind of crazy. It almost feels like not real. It’s this feeling you get in your body — ‘OK, bring it back down.’ The way he’s talking, he commands the whole thing.”

The ball’s snapped and Love’s brand of quarterbacking is an extension of such tranquility. He’s unbothered by all chaos around him. Even amid that Minneapolis hellfire, hit 15 times in all, he threw for 387 yards.

“No flinch. No flinch.”

Glover’s ascent from nowhere helps.

When he’s not busy protecting his quarterback, he finds ways to pass the time in football’s smallest market.

He’s gotten into reading… sort of. If a book is awful, he refuses to waste his time getting to the finish line. That was the case after picking up 2Chainz’s new memoir at the airport. He read two chapters and couldn’t last any longer. It was horrendous. Glover is finishing up “Chop Wood Carry Water” and has enjoyed “The Warrior Ethos” by Steven Pressfield. The part that stunned him? Mothers in ancient Sparta who disowned their kids if they returned home from war. It’s intense. He’s learned to shut off the outside world when he reads this book gifted by director of player engagement Grey Ruegamer.

He’ll hop on Madden, 2K and Siege to connect with his uncles, cousins and brothers back home.

He’s gone full Wisconsin, from bowfishing with teammates in Suamico to developing a damn good shot from 40 yards with his compound bow at a 3D archery range in De Pere. Glover hasn’t put the latter to use yet in the woods. If anyone wants to go deer hunting, let him know.

Glover isn’t with his daughter’s mother, but the two have maintained a healthy relationship. It pains him to be so far away during the season. Glover wants to instill all of his grandmother’s lessons into Amari. At age 4, he’s already seeing the “fierceness” and “toughness” that defined Towns. Nodding toward a nearby coat rack, he says Amari would leap off that ledge with zero fear.

He’d love to get his entire family up to a game at Lambeau before the arctic freeze sets in.

For now, videos must suffice. By the time Glover gets to his locker after games, there’s one from Mom waiting for him on his phone. She’s leaping up and down. She’s screaming “Go Pack Go!” one moment, then telling him exactly what he did wrong the next — “tighten that up!”

“I’m going to be forever in his corner,” Sandra says. “He has always been an exceptional young man and he could have chose any path, but chose not to get in trouble. I’m proud of him for having a mindset that he wanted a better life for himself. I’m 10 toes down behind him. Regardless of what anybody else has to say about him. Rome wasn’t built in a day. He won’t be stopped.”

Smith, an NFL survivor, fully expects Glover to last in the pros for several years.

He knows those paternal instincts are serving him well.

“Travis is not going to take his foot off the gas because he’s getting playing time, he’s getting loved on,” Smith says. “His character and his natural physical ability and traits that he has to be able to play guard and tackle and all the things that he’s able to do, barring injury, the young man’s going to play pro football for a long time.

“I cannot talk about how much I love him.”

As Plae Bistro’s lunch crowd clears out, our conversation winds down.

This was a perfectly fine meal. He enjoyed it. Nothing, however, will ever compare to his grandmother’s home cooking. His mind races back in time once more.

“Collard greens, dressing, fried chicken, black eyed peas, really anything. I don’t think I ever told her anybody about this…”

Glover pauses. His eyes close. His voice cracks.

Without warning, his emotions are hijacked again.

“She… she… three years before she passed, she told me she was going to make me a cheesecake. I didn’t want to bug her about it, but I wanted to ask her about this cheesecake.

“She never made it. So, I don’t eat cheesecake no more.”

More tears pour. He repeats this line — I don’t eat cheesecake no more — four times in a whimpered hush.

Simply, he didn’t want to bother her. Towns passed away and he vowed to never eat cheesecake again.

Glover stares ahead as the melancholic, yet soothing “How Good It Is” by Morningsiders plays overhead.

“I feel her willpower within me,” Glover says. “I know she didn’t live for no reason. I feel everything that she stood for, and I know that it’s in me. I know she had her purpose and I get the benefit from it and hopefully I can live on like that. She’s a great, great woman…”

His voice tremors, then fades. There’s no way to punctuate this thought. Travis Glover is still struggling with the loss of a loved one. Who knows what his future entails on or off the field — hardship is a guarantee.

This time, though, he wipes his tears away.

He won’t look backward. He won’t look too far ahead.

All he can do is take grandma’s advice, lift himself up and exit through the front door.

Real Football: The Nonsensical NFC Least

Tyler Dunne — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 14:16:53 GMT

An NFL season can turn sideways in a hurry.

Look no further than the NFC East.

Philadelphia, Dallas, Washington and the New York Giants are all dealing with varying degrees of drama, controversy and injuries. From blood clots to shoddy defensive play to clock fiascos to one break-glass-in-case-of-emergency “Nine” decision. Nobody has won a game the last two weeks… and two of ‘em even played each other. It’s rough in the division Parcells and Gibbs built.

On this week’s episode of Real Football, we try to make sense of a nonsensical division.

We also discuss Jordan Love going bombs away in Green Bay, the Rams and Jim Leonhard’s (very) rocky start as Buffalo Bills defensive coordinator. Buffalo is giving off strong 2011 Packers vibes.

Video and audio are above.

Thanks, all.

Ty & Bob Pod S5 E6: Did the real Green Bay Packers just stand up?

Tyler Dunne — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:48:23 GMT

Subscribers can access the full two-hour show in full. Thank you for supporting independent journalism.

Make it three in a row. These Green Bay Packers are suddenly crushing opponents.

Back when boos were reverberating through Lambeau Field — and rancor spiked to rare extremes — sources told Go Long that head coach Matt LaFleur stayed calm. He didn’t ask assistants to pull all-nighters, didn’t lose his mind. A measured tone that was very welcomed. Green Bay then squeaked out a win in Tampa Bay, dominated the Bears and then embarrassed a loaded Dallas Cowboys offense.

Momentum is building. Are we starting to see the real 2026 Packers? Here’s your weekly two-hour dose of NFC North talk/film dissection with co-host Bob McGinn.

I hit record live from Badger State Brewing on Tony Canadeo Run in the shadows of Lambeau. We’ve got much to discuss on this team.

The 5-0 Minnesota Vikings and 3-2 Detroit Lions had a bye week, but the Chicago Bears welcomed back their quarterback. Caleb Williams was nearly perfect in Atlanta, while Kyler Gordon supplied a knockout punch. As always, McGinn guides us through the performance of everyone in this division.

Heading into a North showdown vs. Dan Campbell’s Lions, LaFleur has an interesting decision to make on the offensive line.

And perhaps what’s most encouraging on the field for this team is that it’ll be infused with a difference-maker on each side of the ball soon: running back Josh Jacobs and edge Micah Parsons.

Video and audio is accessible above to paid subscribers.

You’ll never hear one ad on our podcasts. We only grow via word of mouth.

Appreciate all for sharing Go Long with a friend.

Refer a friend

The Los Angeles Rams are a mirage

Tyler Dunne — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:24:24 GMT

Getty Images/Go Long

All NFL head coaches are pissed after losses. But few change character quite like Sean McVay. After his Los Angeles Rams lost to the lowly Arizona Cardinals, the 40-year-old adjusted the microphone, threw up one hand and wasted no time getting to his thesis.

“We won’t win a game unless we figure out how not to beat ourselves,” McVay said. “So many unforced errors. So many things that are not in alignment with what we want to do, specifically on the offensive side of the ball.”

If this was the sole reason his team lost, honestly, McVay could sleep easier. That’d be easier to digest. That’d make more sense given their offseason coronation. Talent would prove inevitable and overwhelm.

Sadly for McVay, this 18-16 defeat was more than a self-inflicted wound.

These 13.5-point favorites were thoroughly outplayed and outcoached by one of the worst teams in the NFL. No storyline in Week 6 of the NFL is more stunning than what occurred at SoFi Stadium.

A team universally crowned following a slew of splash moves is now fighting for its life at 2-4.

Why did the Arizona Cardinals give up on Marvin Harrison Jr?

Tyler Dunne — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 10:32:34 GMT

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The Marvin Harrison Jr. era is over in Arizona.

Starting this weekend, he’ll try to revive his career in Houston.

After some funky real-time reporting, he was shipped off to the Texans for a second-round pick — a steep price for a player who’s struggled to catch on in the pros.

In our two-parter over the summer, “The Kyler Murray Project,” we reported on the real concern scouts had in the Ohio State prospect. Subscribers can read Part I in full here.

Figured it was worth extracting the Harrison stuff here in a separate post for those wondering what went wrong. It is pasted below.

From our August series…

Ascending homegrown players that Arizona Cardinals GM Monte Ossenfort inherited slipped away — Zach Allen to Denver, Byron Murphy to Minnesota — and his drafts have been hideous. In 2023, Ossenfort traded out of the No. 3 overall slot that netted the Houston Texans defensive end Will Anderson Jr., a move praised to the high heavens by talking heads at the time. This offseason, Anderson, the “Terminator,” signed the richest non-QB contract in NFL history. Suggest to one Cardinals coach on staff that his front office passed on one of the best defensive players in the sport and he chuckles. (“We heard otherwise before the draft. This could go on and on and on.”)

As Anderson makes opposing offensive tackles piss themselves, the collection of players Arizona acquired in the deal haven’t done anything of note.

Somehow, it got worse in 2024 when Ossenfort chose Ohio State’s Marvin Harrison Jr. at No. 4 overall over LSU’s Malik Nabers.

The move was supposed to unlock greatness in Kyler Murray. Instead, it drove one final nail in his Cardinals coffin.

Even worse? It was all predictable, all avoidable. In NFL circles — one wide receivers coach explains — Nabers was widely deemed the superior prospect. “You talk to 99 percent of the league,” says this coach, “everyone knew that Nabers was a Hall of Fame player.” The variable was his supposed baggage. Nabers was obviously the more volatile personality. Harrison was the safer choice and Arizona opted for safe. (Our Wide Receiver Matrix debate most certainly applies here.)

“We knew coming out that Harrison doesn’t have that dog,” this coach explains. “He doesn’t have that fire.”

One Midwest scout whose livelihood is making sense of all prospects in Columbus, Ohio, told the team that Harrison struggled with the stress of being the son of Hall of Fame wideout Marvin Harrison Sr. — a major presence in his life.

Even after big games, Dad ripped him. Told him it wasn’t enough.

“His father is a very big influence on him,” the coach continued. “His father would text him and call him like, ‘Hey man, you need to do this, you need to do that,’ while he was at Ohio State. So he feels the pressure. Any time he comes off the field — practice, games — his Dad is always there. So, he’s not a very confident guy.”

Coaches and scouts alike in the other three NFC West draft rooms were thrilled to see Arizona pass on Nabers. San Francisco’s Kyle Shanahan watched 10 or so clips of Harrison and said aloud that he thought the Buckeye would be better. Hard to blame him. At that point, the prospect was being compared to Julio Jones and AJ Green as the world’s next can’t-miss wideout. The closer NFL people looked, the more they didn’t understand the hype.

Especially when it was time to turn on the Nabers film.

Goodness.

This wideout was a dog in every sense of the term.

He caught slants in stride and toasted defenders. He dunked on cornerbacks in the end zone.

“It was clearly night and day,” one NFC coach recalls.

Perhaps Arizona didn’t believe it had the veteran infrastructure to take on a big personality. Gambles can backfire. But even this excuse is an indictment of Bidwill because, remember, vets should be dying to play in this market. However you slice it, the Cardinals missed on elite talents in back-to-back drafts.

Any GM petrified of selecting receivers with attitude should probably post their home on Zillow. There’s no guarantee the “safe” pick won’t give you a headache, either. One source labels Harrison one of the hardest players to coach on the entire roster and one of the hardest he’s experienced in his career. “And usually when somebody says that,” an ex-Cardinals coach adds, “it’s like, ‘Oh, that guy’s an asshole. You’ve got to get him going.’ That type of shit.” In Arizona, Harrison was difficult “for all the opposite reasons.” He lacked fire.

Production equals tolerance.

Nabers has already flashed that Canton potential.

One NFC wide receivers coach says he always prefers the WR1s with “some shit to them” like Nabers. He’ll handle baggage. He’ll tell guys to simply make sure they roast Patrick Surtain and Jalen Ramsey when the game’s on the line. “That’s why those guys get 30, 40 million dollars,” he adds. The goal is to land on the Ja’Marr Chase end of this spectrum and avoid Brandon Aiyuk-level disasters. To him, it’s obvious Harrison Jr. lacks the confidence required at this position. The 6-foot-3 wide receiver who refused to run a 40-yard dash at his pro day runs slow and plays small. In 42 percent of his games, he caught two or fewer passes.

This coach points out that the soft-spoken Harrison Jr. doesn’t seem very confident when he speaks. But it’s bigger than that. Some receivers bring a palpable presence to the field. They plant a feeling of play-to-play dread inside a cornerback across the line of scrimmage. Like Nabers. Like Chase.

Others, like Harrison, do not.

“His game’s not very powerful,” this coach says. “He’s a big guy, but he’s not. If you’re ever on the sideline while he’s playing, you don’t feel him out there. You can feel Malik Nabers. You can feel Justin Jefferson. The best players, you can feel the presence. You don’t feel him out there. He’s just kind of out there. You can easily take him out of the gameplan.”

Murray tried to fuel his young receiver with confidence. Pull up Arizona’s gut-wrenching 23-20 loss to the eventual Super Bowl champs in Week 3. Harrison quits on one route that leads to an interception. Later in the game, on a slant, he bobbles the ball right to linebacker Ernest Jones IV for another interception. Murray refuses to ice him out, as if knowing that would be the worst thing for a young player’s mental state. The QB gives Harrison a chance to high-point a touchdown and the two later connect on a crucial third and 5 that helped knot this game up at 20-20.

It took Seattle all of 28 seconds to move into field goal range. Seattle won.

Murray played all of one more game for Arizona.

October Mailbag: Drake Maye’s revival, Bills D, Vikings O, Packers’ line dance and which QBs could time-travel to any era?

Tyler Dunne — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:04:27 GMT

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Excellent submissions by all.

Let’s get to it.

Hi Tyler,

The NFL talks about player safety being so important to the NFL. This year seems that there has been a ton of injuries, or maybe bigger names injured. The NFL schedule doesn’t seem to support their claim of player safety. Look at the Packers schedule (sorry it’s the one I know by heart) They play a Thursday night game in September, a Thursday night game in October, a Wednesday night game in November, and a Friday day game in December. Possible Saturday game in January. The only weekday they don’t play is on a Tuesday. The Rams and Packers play on a Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. So the NFL gave both teams their bye week beforehand, but they only get a mini bye. Both teams will practice mid-week during their bye so it’s not a full week. They will get a mini bye after their game but neither team gets a full week off. I understand it’s all about the money but it comes with a big price to their players.

Thank you for your hard work. Appreciate all you do for us.

Steve Livermore
De Pere, Wisc.

You’ve beautifully laid out the league’s hypocrisy. It’s maddening. Why should we take anything the NFL says about “player safety” seriously when the league’s trying to Pac-Man every day of the week and add an 18th regular-season game? Neuroscientist Chris Nowinski, recently pointed out to the ridiculous virtue-signaling of the guardian caps, too. Extra padding around a helmet does not change the reality that a brain is jiggling inside the skull. Chapter 1 of “The League of Denial” sticks with me forever. As the authors write, a woodpecker evolved to allow its head to bang against a tree. Humans were not.

You all know how I feel about football. The good this sport gives you, in my opinion, far outweighs the bad. If our two boys want to lace ‘em up one day, I’ll be ecstatic.

It’d simply be nice if the league — for once! — was transparent. Honest. Sign up to play pro football and, yes, brain damage is a potential consequence. If the 32 owners could agree to live in this reality, it’d serve as a compass toward morally sound decisions… such as a schedule that makes a lick of sense.

Injuries are a guarantee. New rules won’t make much of a difference, no matter how many “football is safe”-themed infomercials spam our screens.

Until blocking and tackling is outlawed, we’ll see players go down every week.

Blocking and tackling will not be outlawed any time soon because — despite the league’s dalliance with flag football — owners know America is drawn toward these car crashes, these modern-day gladiators doing something most only dream of. So, everyone continues to engage in this silly song and dance. We’d all take the NFL a lot more seriously if they eliminated the preseason, quit adding regular-season games and quit trying to own every holiday and every day of the week.

Money rules.

This will move one direction.

Good evening, Tyler. I am really enjoying your analysis and, especially, your conversations each week with Jim Monos and Bob McGinn. Having grown up in Viking country I am fascinated by your discussions about the NFC North, player by player.

Other than the Vikings’ special and apparently unique defense, most of the attention goes to the offensive capabilities of the teams, and of special QBs — Stafford, Mahomes, Allen, etc. With the possible exception of the Chiefs, the defenses of those teams leave a great deal to be desired.

Coaches and others often quote Paul Bear Bryant’s statement that “Offenses sell tickets, but defenses win championships.” Is there reason to believe that the Bills, and Rams, in particular, can be sufficiently competitive defensively to have any chance at the end of the year?

Thanks,

George from Maine

Pleasure to have you, George! Your question is a good one, and a concerning one for the 2026 Buffalo Bills. I don’t think we’ve written about a player more than Josh Allen at Go Long, from our initial skepticism/questions in 2020 to our 1 on 1 this summer.

For my money, he’s the single-most dominant player in the sport.

Yet, even Josh Allen unequivocally needs a defense to reach the Super Bowl.

‘He reminds me of my journey:’ Tiki Barber on James Cook’s fumblitis

Tyler Dunne — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:15:07 GMT

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At this point, James Cook may be wondering if he’s been sucked into the vortex of a paranormal horror movie this Halloween season. Another game, another fumble. And this overtime giveaway vs. the Los Angeles Rams nearly cost his Buffalo Bills the game.

He’s the reigning NFL rushing champ. He’s an exceptional talent. It’s hard to keep this player on the sideline. Yet even first-year head coach Joe Brady — a man who’s made his pro-player stance abundantly clear — said this week there will be “consequences” for further turnovers.

A conundrum that got me thinking of another running back this week.

Tiki Barber.

He, too, was one of the best in the NFL.

He, too, struggled with fumbles. (Thirty-five in a four-year span to be exact.)

Tom Coughlin was then hired in 2004 and was quite blunt with arguably his most talented player. Unless Barber fixed this issue, he was finished.

With that, Barber spent the offseason changing the way he carried the football.

Making such fixes on the fly may be difficult for Cook, but the New York Giants’ all-time leading rusher has answers. We discussed in full.

Also, Barber offers his analysis of these 3-1-1 Jameis Winston-led Giants and the running back he loves watching above all else: Bijan Robinson. Be sure to catch Barber today on WFAN Sports Radio in New York. We’ve caught up with Barber before. First, in ‘23, to detail his own unique rise in the sport. Then again in ‘25.

Here’s our Q&A below.

Let’s start with your Giants. First place, lost their quarterback. Myself, most people are thinking, “Oh, they’re done. There’s no reason to really care about the New York Giants.” Why should we? What’s still in front of this team this season?

Barber: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is Jameis Winston is playing unbelievably when he has to. He’s not challenging for the MVP. He’s not going to lead the league in passing. None of that stuff. But when he’s been put behind the eight ball — some of it his own doing — he doesn’t flinch. He’s like a really good golfer who duffs a tee shot and then hits a three wood five inches from the hole. These second halves these last two games, against Arizona and Washington, it’s been elite football. Last weekend, every drive, he put them in scoring position and the only reason they didn’t win it in overtime is because we missed a kick or Cam Skattebo fumbled. So I think we all panicked. I didn’t. Because it was too early in the season. But most Giant fans panicked when Jaxson Dart tore his MCL and meniscus against the Rams thinking, “What do we have to look forward to?” But I think Jameis can be a bridge. It’s what he was brought here to do. Not play this many games, but he’s a good bridge for you. That’s why they signed him to an extension and he’s a fantastic leader. Everybody loves him.

That game had all the highs and lows where — at one point — you’re thinking, “Holy hell, how can they start this guy. It’s the same old shit.” And then lo and behold, you look up and Jameis Winston has thrown for 300 yards and three touchdowns and you’re in position to win.

Barber: I know. It’s the Jameis Winston Experience and, as crazy as it is, he’s been this way his entire career. His entire professional career, this is who he is. Sometimes you’re like, “This is the best quarterback on the field.” Other times you’re like, “Dude, who’s the backup?” So you’ve got to live with it. And this is where coaching matters. I think it’s been one of the narratives of this Giant season. Coaching has been unbelievably good, both from time management decisions, playcalling. Defensively, Denard Wilson has been so variable. Sometimes he’ll sit back and play a lot of zone. Other times he’ll bring the house over and over and over again and force you into mistakes like we saw against Arizona when ‘Te Banks took the pick-six to the house. So they have a really well-coached team and some players that are stepping up and becoming playmakers.

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Coaching does matter. We’ve talked so much about Brian Daboll and all the good that came with him and teaching the quarterback position, his offensive mind, all of that. But they’re swinging toward somebody who’s done it for 18 years and has a Super Bowl ring and is bringing stability and knows how he wants things done.

Barber: We always cliche how a team “takes on the personality of their coach.” So now think about Dabes. He was super emotional. He wore it on his sleeve. He was screaming and yelling. That was his M.O. and the team was up and down with that emotion. John Harbaugh is perfectly cerebral the whole time. Yeah, maybe he’ll express facially some displeasure, but he’s always calm. So no matter what the circumstances are, he’s thinking rationally. And similarly, the team plays that way. When things go really bad, they don’t panic. They don’t get pissed off. They just say: “Let’s get back to doing our job.”

That’s a real thing too, isn’t it? Players are a direct reflection of their coach and all that, but you played at the highest level, you’re one of the best to ever do. How else does it manifest itself for good and for bad?

Barber: The good is that these guys always know what to do. And the perfect example is a guy like Arvell Reese, who early in the season as a rookie, he was struggling in zone coverage. He knew where he was kind of supposed to be, but he was cheating with his eyes and so he’s reading the quarterback. And quarterbacks are going to manipulate you. So if you’re trying to follow what the quarterback’s going to do, you’re going to get taken advantage of. And a couple of running back swings out of the backfield resulted in touchdowns in those first couple of games. Since then, he hasn’t made that mistake. And so I think this growth and learning and cerebral nature while still playing with aggression is who he is.

I think the bad is that (Harbaugh) also wants to be forgiving. Like, “I got you. I got your back.” And so the biggest damning stat for the Giants in the first five games of the season is that the running backs have fumbled six times. Now, Tyrone Tracy, he fumbled and then he basically has had five touches since then. Najee Harris, he’s not a fumbler. That was just a good defensive play. But Cam Skattebo’s getting the majority of the carries and he’s had a fumble in each of the last four games. And so they’re going to keep riding him because they want him to be that grinding, “I want to get every extra yard I can,” but sometimes it could be detrimental.

I wanted to get into James Cook here in Buffalo because you lived it. Where is that line? You don’t want to immediately throw a talented player into the doghouse, keep him stuffed in there for an eternity and kill his confidence. You’ve got to trust a talent like James Cook. But at the same time, he’s fumbling too much. It is a problem.

Barber: It’s interesting with the Giants because they’re doing it by committee. There are options. If Cam Skattebo has another fumble, you know what? Tyrone, it’s now your opportunity. Or “Motor” Singletary, you’ve been inactive for the last three games. It’s your turn. They’re doing it by committee. The Bills have paid James Cook. James Cook is The Man. He is a top-five running back in the league. And in some ways, he reminds me of my journey with Jim Fassel because when I was going through my fumbling issues, I was one of the best players, one of the best offensive players on the team, and there wasn’t an option. So Jim Fassel was like, “All right, you got us where we’re going. I’m going to depend on you. I’m going to trust you to figure it out.” And I think James is going to get that leeway with Buffalo.

But what he needs to do is mechanical. It’s how he carries the football. Because that second fumble in overtime last weekend, he had the ball wrapped up. He just had it wrapped up incorrectly. Nate Landman punched it out. It was the same play basically as the first fumble. Nate Landman — getting blocked — just sticks his hand in there and knocks the ball out. And it’s the challenge as a runner when you’re going through traffic. Because look at Nate. He is blocked by a lineman, right? He’s blocked. You’re not worried about him tackling you, but you know that he’s going to contact you. And so when you start to go through those contact points, the ball’s got to be vertical to your body, so high and tight with your elbows in and your off ball hand across your on-ball wrist. And even if he punches it, it’s not going to go anywhere.

So it’s a mechanical, physical learning thing that he needs to spend time on. It’s just hard to do it in-season.

How can you really fix this on the fly and what was your fundamental change? Was that really what you were able to switch up?

Barber: Think about when you were a kid and you played football. Remember how they taught you how to carry the ball? You get the handoff in a pocket and the ball is perpendicular to your body, parallel to the ground, and you wrap one hand underneath and one hand on top and go through contact like that and it’ll protect you. But the problem is when you’re moving at such high paces, that bottom hand often slides to the front of the ball as opposed to underneath the ball. And as soon as someone hits it, it’s going to go straight to the ground because you don’t have firm control over it — even though it feels and looks like it’s safe.

So you need to have the ball perpendicular to the ground. Straight up and down, across your body, centered to your chest with your elbows tucked in so that protects the ball from going down. And most of those fumbles happen when you’re getting tackled because you start to lean and your body naturally wants to brace itself. So if you fell without a football — you just fell walking down the street — you’re putting your hands out. The same thing happens when you start to get tackled. You want to put your arms down and away from yourself and it’s getting used to falling with your arms at your body and not bracing yourself. So it takes reps. It takes a lot of mental reminding of yourself: “I’ve got to go to the ground with the ball centered and protected. Centered and protected. Centered and protected.” And if you don’t do it enough, you’re still going to just naturally react how your body wants to.

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What’s interesting, too, is I’m watching this game and I’m like, “Man, that’s a hell of a punch-out. Nate Landman is basically someone getting into a fist fight. The guy throwing the punches is going to hurt his hand, too. He’s punching and punching all game.

Barber: No doubt. But you know what? The reason he can do that is because he can see the ball. When you center the ball and you put your elbows down to your sides, he can’t really hit the ball. And so if you give him somewhere to hit? He’s going to hit it. He’s going to strike it. It’s like he’s a boxer.

So, there is a skill there for the oppposition. What I’m getting at with James Cook, there’s a tendency to think it could be mental. Does he have the yips?

Barber: It’s not mental at all. It’s all physical. It’s all mechanical. It’s physics. It’s basic physics. So he needs to figure that out. And as soon as he does, it won’t be a problem anymore.

Your fumbles never really got to your head? You’re not worrying about the next one… and the next one… and the next one?

Barber: No, I didn’t know how to carry the ball correctly. You have to be taught. Coaching is teaching and the best coaches are great teachers. And I had a really great teacher in (RBs coach) Jerald Ingram. The X’s and O’s of the game are notwithstanding because I became such a good player understanding what was happening in front of me. But he taught me how to carry the ball correctly. And I had my best three years because of it.

When did you make these fixes exactly?

Barber: It was ’04. Tom Coughlin’s first year. And the other thing was Coach Coughlin challenged me. He basically said to me, “I don’t care how good of a player you are for us. If you’re going to be a liability, you’re not playing.” I was a consistent 1,000-yard rusher. I was doing what I needed to do to help the team win — at least I thought. He said, “It doesn’t matter. If you’re a liability, you’re not playing.” And so I was forced to fix it because I was told by a new head coach that my past didn’t matter. My past actions were inaccessible to him and he only knew that I needed to be better in the future.

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I’ve sat down with Joe Brady at length and his big thing is empowering players, believing in players, speaking positivity. And all of that…

Barber: But you also got to teach it. Because if you don’t teach it, it’s not going to happen. Rutgers isn’t really worth watching because they stink, but Coach Schiano has been teaching this since he left Rutgers the first time. So everywhere he goes — if you watch a Rutgers game — every ball-carrier has the ball awkwardly high and tight like I used to carry it. So it’s taught.

Seeing you carrying it, it did look radically different when you made the changes.

Barber: But I didn’t fumble anymore.

And you didn’t lose any of your athleticism, agility, speed, none of that?

Barber: No, no. It made me actually tighter, more compact, so that I was more explosive because I was never extended. Sometimes if you’re running and you get your legs too far spread apart or your arms are away from your body, it’s hard to get yourself back on track. I actually became more powerful and more explosive by being more compact.

Before Coughlin got there, Fassel never pulled you into the office and said, “Hey, one more and your ass is on the bench?”

Barber: No, no. In fact, against the Eagles in ’02 or so, we had to win the game to make the playoffs, and I fumbled three times in the regular time. Three fumbles! I rushed for 200 yards in the game, but I fumbled three times in the game. And it was the only reason the Eagles had a chance to win it. And it goes into overtime because their kicker misses a field goal. And in overtime, I got the ball five out of six plays. And Coach Fassel was asked afterwards, “Why’d you keep going to Tiki?” He was like, “He’s our best player. He got us to where we’re going. I had to give it to him.”

Adrian Peterson had fumbling issues, too. Think of the NFC Championship Game. He kept putting it down.

Barber: 100%. It’s hard not to go to your best player.

And Joe Brady is trying to straddle that line. He has emphasized how important it is to believe in his guys many times. Then, yesterday, he said there will be “consequences.” So he’s threatening to bench him. But he also knows they won that game because of James Cook. The difference here is you worked on your stuff during the offseason. He can’t make these changes right now, can he?

Barber: You still got to teach it. You’ve got to constantly teach it. Teach it, drill it, drill it, drill it, drill it, drill it.

Is there another running back you’ve watched this first month of the season that has you hitting rewind repeatedly?

Barber: Oh, Bijan. Bijan Robinson is fucking unbelievable. One of those primetime games, they were running an outside zone and the safety had him dead to rights at the line of scrimmage. Basically about to kiss him. And he just shit on him so badly. And I was like, “Oh my God!” He didn’t even touch him. I’m like, “How the hell did he make that guy miss?” So watching his explosiveness? There’s no dead play. He’s the new-vogue Barry Sanders because of how shifty he is and how quickly he accelerates. His acceleration is so much superior to Barry Sanders. Barry, you just couldn’t touch him ever. But he has this shiftiness and acceleration. He’s a marvel.

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He gets 0-to-60 faster than anybody and it’s not even close.

Barber: No doubt.

How does a running back get to that point? What’s the key?

Barber: I think it’s training. I think it’s his build, his physical structure, his musculature. And he’s not afraid of contact. He goes into contact expecting you to bounce off of him: “You’re not going to wrap me up enough that you’re going to stalemate me. So I’m going to see the contact. I’m going to acknowledge it, but I know I’m running through it.” He’s just so good. And he’s a great receiver out of the backfield. He’s my favorite back in the league right now.

So do you just catch yourself going back and watching his highlights, watching his games?

Barber: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. They’re not doing anything special. The first year that I had a breakout season with Sean Payton as offensive coordinator in 2000, we were doing special shit. It was like bunch right, Y motion, Y rewind, toss right scissors. So we’re tossing the ball out, but the guard is actually pulling back the other side. Coach Pope used to call him “dick ‘em plays.”

He’s like, “We’re going to fuck with their heads thinking this is going here, but the ball is going somewhere completely different.” Every indication is going to go one way, but we’re going someplace else. And so I was able to make hay by just popping out of nowhere and they’re like, “Dude, what the hell? How’d he get over here?” That’s not what Atlanta’s doing. Atlanta’s just running straight outside zone, inside zone, a couple of gap plays here, and he’s just really patient and explosive.

There’s really no defense for it then. If they stay healthy with that offensive line and obviously you want Penix to stay in there.

Barber: They need Penix because Tua is Tua.

ICYMI:

Ty & Bob Pod S5 E5: State of the Packers with Tom Silverstein

Tyler Dunne — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 11:05:28 GMT

There’s been some good, some bad and a touch of ugly. But here are the Green Bay Packers, at 3-2, with hope renewed off a 31-7 clubbing of the Chicago Bears.

With co-host Bob McGinn on vacation, Tom Silverstein joins me this week.

Thirty-eight years on the beat strong, “Spoon” continues to analyze and cover this team with the sharpest eye. Follow all of his work at PackersNews.com.

We examine what went right at Lambeau Field vs. Chicago and try to figure out where the season goes from here for Matt LaFleur’s team.

Is Silverstein confident what we saw in this game is sustainable? Instead of getting granular with the NFCN X’s and O’s, as we do with Bob, let’s take an episode to zoom out.

Video and audio is above.

Miss our series on LaFleur? Here’s Part I & Part II examining this coach in Year 8.

The legend, Mike Ditka, also passed away. Here’s a piece from “Blood and Guts” on the legacy he leaves.

Thanks, all.

Be sure to submit any mailbag questions to golongtd@substack.com as well.

Calling all Mailbag questions!

Tyler Dunne — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 23:41:35 GMT

Good evening, readers.

Hitting the road bright ‘n early in the AM for our next reporting trip and it just hit me: we are overdue for a good ‘ol fashioned mailbag.

Email any and all questions to golongtd@substack.com or drop ‘em in the comments below. This will be a quicker turnaround. Expect answers live Friday AM.

One month into this NFL season, there is certainly much to digest.

Fire away with anything on your mind. I’ll get to ‘em all.

Peter King, ‘The Game’ and a life at the eye of the pro football storm

ICYMI:

Monos Report, Week 5: Players win games, coaches lose them

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:18:30 GMT

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A note for new readers: Jim Monos scouted for the Philadelphia Eagles, New Orleans Saints and served as the director of personnel for the Buffalo Bills. Today, he runs personnel for the UFL. He also co-hosts the “Real Football” podcast with me and riffs on all games each week with the Monos Report.

ICYMI, two new pods posted…

Sicko mode, engaged: On Josh Allen’s fight, Tyler Bass, James Cook & a stammering Bills D in 37-34 OT thriller

By Jim Monos

Jacksonville 19, Philadelphia 17

Criminal! Field goals and punts are last-resort or game-winning options only. Games are never won or lost by one play but this truly is a game-changing wrong decision by a head coach who is paid to choose directly. I believe in the quote: “Players win games, coaches lose them.” This London fiasco is a perfect example. Parker Washington is a complete player in terms of route running, hands, body control, strength and athleticism.

Houston 26, Tennessee 3

I thought Cam Ward showed signs of life the last half of 2025 season but clearly that was the height of his film. Dominant win for Houston and the Texans season is far from over. CJ Stroud continues to show he is a good starting quarterback. When he gets consistent with decision-making and timing, he will take the Texans to the next level. A running game and that Top 5 defense showing up would help out, too. Titans are depressing. Robert Saleh is a very successful defensive coordinator. Leave it there.

Minnesota 23, New Orleans 13

Best showing for Kyler Murray and a Vikings offense basically building the plane while in the air. Brian Flores and the defense are the talk of the league. Absolutely shut down a Saints offense that has shown the ability to light it up. Not even close. The talent on this Vikings team is evident and if Murray becomes more comfortable and turnover-free this team can contend for a Super Bowl. Saints are not good on defense, look developmental on offense and can still win the NFC South. That’s week-to-week life in the NFL.

New England 45, Las Vegas 17

Patriots defense has been consistently very good each week. They currently rank sixth in points per play giving this team time to get healthy and consistent on offense. Vegas was due for a game like this. No running game against the Patriots is a recipe for disaster. No. 1 overall pick Fernando Mendoza made his debut and, as good as Cousins has played for Vegas, they can go ahead do the right thing and turn this team over to Mendoza. Neither Cousins or Mendoza are good enough to beat the big boys in the AFC so why delay the inevitable. Mendoza time in Sin City.

Pittsburgh 34, Indianapolis 22

Nice to see new names as the stars of the show in Pittsburgh with running back Jaylon Warren and wide receiver Germie Bernard making plays for Aaron Rodgers. Mammoth Darnell Washington is must-watch as a blocker and receiver. Pure bully. Is it time for Anthony Richardson in Indy? Neither Jones or Richardson are the answer so have some fun with Richardson and Taylor in the backfield. Steelers are intriguing to me with their style of offense and are showing up on defense as well.

Green Bay 31, Chicago 7

Quick reminder of what an NFL MVP-level quarterback looks like against a fringe NFL backup. The Packers showed up around a standout performance from Love. Long season in Wisconsin waiting for Josh Jacobs and Micah Parsons but wins like this are like getting a birdie on 18. Your walk to the golf-course bar is just a little more brisk with your head held high. It does not mean you do not have plenty of issues to fix in your game but that birdie makes you excited to play the next time. Time for the Caleb/Ben Johnson show to resume.

New York Giants 27, Washington 27

Players win games, coaches lose them. Or tie them in this case. Unacceptable stuff from Dan Quinn and Jayden Daniels. It is always the head coach’s fault but the quarterback should be aware. Nobody had a clue what to do — just watch the replay. Strange. Daniels is so fun to watch but how accountable and professional he becomes will ultimately decide his future. Giants are tough, but not good enough. I’m ready for McCarthy/Skattebo backfield. The Jameis Show is always fun but seen it so many times.

New York Jets 17, Cleveland 12

This score matches the weather. Ugly northeast, rainy game made for Geno Smith and running back Braelon Allen to use their toughness to get the win. Allen brings 235 pounds of power in the mud, which is a quarterback’s best friend. Deshaun Watson looks fine and competitive enough. A better running game (currently 21^st yards per game) and the Browns offense would be a threat.

Cincinnati 31, Miami 24

Score looks better than this game was actually played. Joe Burrow and this offense are so tough and not even fully clicking yet. Miami hung around and fought for some late scores… that some people gambling found interesting. But in terms of football talent, Miami is along for the ride at this point and evaluating their roster. Cincy gearing up for big things on offense as we progress.

Denver 23, Los Angeles Chargers 17

Shocker: Justin Herbert was a turnover-meltdown machine in the biggest moments of a very winnable game. It is a clunky offense and I’m hard on Herbert but in reality they are not overly talented on offense to overcome average QB play. Herbert needs to actually produce like a Top-10 talent instead of live off his reputation. Denver steals a win. The Broncos offense is not looking like I had envisioned. Not really sure how Bo Nix and company won when you only throw for 123 yards? Answer is Justin Herbert.

San Francisco 32, Seattle 29

Championship-quality game in terms of talent and coaching. Can give you more filler or I can sum this up by saying one name: Mike Evans. Truly an all-time talent. He makes my all-time Top-10 talented receivers to ever play. Jerry Rice is not on that list but that is for the pod. Darnold is so good and so scary. His turnovers show up every game. If Darnold plays turnover-free, they are so tough but the running game has suffered.

Detroit 45, Arizona 21

The Lions needed a get-right game. Enter: good ‘ol Jacoby Brissett and the Cardinals. The Cardinals have some young talent but games like this show you the gap in a new team with a first-year head coach against a veteran group in Detroit. All the Lions toys were on display and shining. Jahmyr Gibbs a rare talent.

Baltimore 30, Atlana 23

Nice for a quality backup quarterback like Snoop Huntley to have a monster running back and an overall rushing attack to help you in your first start this season. Falcons and Michael Penix Jr. are like a high-scoring NBA team. The fastballs are distributed to multiple players and Atlanta is fun to watch, and then Penix gets injured. Same old story. Tua Tagovailoa does his thing delivering an interception to seal the Baltimore victory. Any win with a backup is huge and Baltimore is primed for their championship run.

Buffalo 37, Los Angeles Rams 34

Best for last. Allen vs. Stafford felt like watching LeBron James vs Kevin Durant. Unstoppable. No defense for Matthew Stafford and two all-time route-runners in Davante Adams and Puka Nacua. Absolute mismatch with Buffalo secondary. And the Rams had no answer for Allen running over (and away) from everyone. Both quarterbacks are special. Sign me up for this Super Bowl. Love how Joe Brady kept giving James Cook the ball through the fumbles. Those punchouts are real. Cook has had this issue for two seasons now but his talent and production allow for some tolerance. Players win games, coaches lose them.

And, again, purchase THE GAME today.

Peter King, ‘The Game’ and a life at the eye of the pro football storm

Tyler Dunne — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:40:43 GMT

All of us, in some form or fashion, grew up on Peter King.

His coverage has been synonymous with pro football itself.

Now, he’s got a new book hitting the shelves: “The Game” is available for purchase everywhere you get hardcover, Kindle or audiobooks. Peter became the standard for taking fans places they could not go. “The Game” is far more than a collection of old stories, too. It’s packed with fresh reporting and stories you’ve never heard before.

Loved welcoming a friend onto the Go Long Podcast here.

He’s insightful, entertaining, a timeless true titan in the industry.

We get into plenty…

Bill Walsh’s season on the brink.
A car ride with Boomer Esiason he’ll never forget.
Ron Wolf’s epic turnaround in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Why the Green Bay Packers are different, QB to QB to QB.
How genuine curiosity became central to his journalism.
What has changed for the better and what has changed for the worst since Peter first started covering the NFL in the mid-80s?
Over the offseason, we examined the league’s fragile long-term future with Chuck Klosterman — that episode is here — and a growing bubble that could burst. What does Peter think the NFL will look like 40 years from now? Is he equally concerned?

Full video and audio are embedded above.

Also be sure to subscribe to our Apple, Spotify and YouTube channels.

Thanks, all.

I want longform.

Refer a friend

ICYMI:

‘Monster:’ The Impossible Deone Walker

RIP, Mike Ditka

Sicko mode, engaged: On Josh Allen’s fight, Tyler Bass, James Cook & a stammering Bills D in 37-34 OT thriller

Tyler Dunne — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:15:03 GMT

Pour a fifth cup of coffee, all.

This hair-raiser was worth the midnight adrenaline rush.

Josh Allen and Matthew Stafford are the two most recent MVP winners. So I suppose there was never any doubt they’d eventually swap TD for TD for TD in a Monday Night Football classic. Buffalo prevailed in overtime, 37-34, thanks to Greg Rousseau’s blocked kick and Allen’s legs.

The Bills are 4-1. As Allen told Go Long: “I’m going to play football how I know how to play it until I can’t.” He brought those words to life in this one.

The Bills, of course, also have some major issues. Stafford (383 yards, 3 TD) and Puka Nacua (17 catches) carved up this secondary. James Cook fumbled again. Troubling themes.

Here’s your weekly dose of Bills talk with the team’s former director of personnel, Jim Monos. We analyze it all.

Video and audio is available above. Also be sure to subscribe to our Apple, Spotify and YouTube channels.

Miss the feature on Deone Walker? Here’s the story of the “unicorn,” icymi.

Go Long is powered by you. Thank you for sharing the word.

‘Monster:’ The Impossible Deone Walker

Tyler Dunne — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:47:39 GMT

Illustration by Brave Buffalo

ORCHARD PARK, NY — He is a goliath of a human. Officially listed at 6 feet, 7 3/8 inches tall and 330 pounds, he plays triple his size, engulfing players whole. His ankles are skinny — like those of an Olympic sprinter — and his cleats are designed for players at skill positions.

Every so often, a physical specimen appears to reside from a different planet in this sport.

A cheat code we all created back on Madden 64 as kids. Fictitious.

That’s Deone Walker.

Yet, there’s always been one unknown: What’s burning inside? People in Kentucky questioned his desire. Even people here with the Buffalo Bills weren’t quite sure initially if Walker possessed the required Hulk-smash switch in such a violent profession. He’s a “bumbling giant” through these hallways at One Bills Drive, one coach begins. “Smile on his face, daps you up,” senior defensive assistant Jason Rebrovich continues. “He doesn’t have that visual like, ‘I’m going to break your damn jaw!’ But when he plays and you see it?”

Rebrovich pauses.

“I feel it every day because I’m usually his blocking dummy.”

One day last season, Rebrovich had a “heart-to-heart” conversation with Walker. Coachspeak for blunt rhetoric required with most rookies. He was on him. Into practice, players dispersed into individual drills. Rebrovich lined up to absorb Walker’s blow.

“And he let me know,” Rebrovich says, “that ‘If I want to break your damn neck, I’m going to break your damn neck.’ I went airborne.”

Indeed, Walker quite literally uprooted his coach, launching him skyward.

The father of three crashed… hard.

To this day, his shoulder aches.

“All part of worker’s comp,” he jokes.

Walker? Bring this story up and he only smiles. The perpetrator doesn’t remember exactly what his coach said. Only that it pissed him off. Only that he can be moody and let anger course through his veins. Rebrovich is certain there’s video footage of the incident hidden in an office somewhere. He’s lucky. NFL offensive linemen have their posterization plastered across social media weekly. One by one, they’re humiliated.

These highlight reels have become football crack. Walker makes a mockery of grown men.

Take this mash-up with north of a million views. He karate-chops a helpless Alijah Vera-Tucker right into Drake Maye’s face on one rep and head-fakes past him on another. He trashes 330-pound Aireontae Ersery into a dumpster and slams a Houston running back into the turf. He rips past Detroit’s Juice Scruggs to two-hand launch Jared Goff. Swallows poor TreVeyon Henderson. Swim-moves multiple linemen with such ease you’d think they’re stationary blocking pads. Punks arguably the best lineman in the sport: Penei Sewell.

Through four weeks, his 19 pressures ranked second amongst defensive tackles and his 15 hurries were first. He has four batted balls, a sack and three TFLs.

His performance leaves viewers a combination of aghast, bewildered and, perhaps, a little scared because nothing about this 22-year-old makes any sense.

Everyone tries. Back when he was the associate head coach at Kentucky, Vince Marrow recruited Walker out of Cass Tech in Detroit, Mich. The kid already had an 84-inch wingspan. The word he used then is the same word he uses now: “Deone is a monster,” Marrow says. “I’m telling you — he’s a monster. He hasn’t even been all the way unleashed yet.”

Bills general manager Brandon Beane is understandably excited about this ceiling.

“Very few guys walking on the planet look like him,” Beane says. “The sky’s the limit.”

Up front — on this Bills D-Line — teammates witness stunts they’ve never seen before. Mention Deone Walker and their eyes widen.

From DeWayne Carter…

“The unicorn. In this sport, a lot of things add up. That one does not. One plus one equals five. The dude’s a beast.”

To Greg Rousseau…

“It’s like watching a Hall of Famer. This is an All Pro, Hall of Fame level. It’s crazy.”

None of this is bluster. Walker has the attention of the entire football world.

One month into this season, he is one of the league’s greatest mysteries.

So, let’s catch a unicorn. How is this possible? Where is this going? If we are to believe our eyes, four games in, Buffalo has a supernatural talent blooming on defense. Granted, this reconfigured unit is off to a rocky start. Slowing down the Los Angeles Rams on Monday Night Football is a steep task for this struggling secondary. Walker, however, may be the wrecking ball Buffalo has been missing to finally close its championship gap.

Fresh off a lively game of cornhole in the locker room, Walker takes a seat.

Initially, the unicorn cannot explain unicorn. Genetics are not much of a factor. Both of his parents are short. Walker has an uncle who’s 6-5, but that’s about it. Nor is Walker ever stricken with an overwhelming desire to personally take over.

“I just play football,” Walker says. “That’s literally it. I feel like basketball helped me a lot with me being nimble, being able to move, but I don’t really think I’m doing anything too crazy until we get into the film room. It’s just football in the moment.

“It’s ‘we need to stop.’ The Bills do such a great job shifting our mentality to where I don’t care about what I do. I’m only doing what I’ve got to do on the field because I don’t want to mess things up for you, mess things up for my brother. That camaraderie, that brotherhood. It’s not even about me no more. It’s about us.”

Walker distills the mystery to its simplest explanation.

He’s long. He can move. He’s dumbfounded himself.

Walker admits he laughs at the destruction during Monday film sessions.

He most certainly was not laughing on April 24-26, 2025.

To solve this mystery, the best place to start is with his nonsensical fall in the NFL Draft.

After first claiming that he doesn’t think about falling into the fourth round, Walker alerts our attention to a tattoo on his shoulder. Right there in ink is one number.

109.

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Question No. 1: How did this guy fall to Pick No. 109?

He left a trail of aching bodies in his wake. When Deone Walker thinks back to his 2023 season in Lexington, two plays from two contours of the field spring to mind. First, the play vs. Florida when he dropped into zone coverage. Walker demolished tight end Arlis Boardingham and the ball popped into the sky for an interception. Next, the play vs. Louisville. As Jack Plummer released the ball, Walker drilled the quarterback into the turf.

Plummer reacted as if he was hit by a bus.

Says Walker: “I had them rolling around.”

This is what’s most perplexing.

Discovering Walker did not require an ATV trip into seasonal logging trails or ferry rides to remote islands. His dominance was broadcast at the highest level of college football. He owned SEC linemen with regularity throughout this sophomore season, totaling 55 tackles (12.5 for loss) with 7.5 sacks in all. Once that season was complete, Marrow viewed his D-Tackle as a surefire top-5 pick. “The dude,” he adds, “was a terror.”

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He was firmly on the Bills’ radar, too. On the cusp of each college season, Beane asks his scouts to rank the top players in their area. Walker’s name was near the top of the list. And when he took a look at Walker’s film for the first time, he couldn’t help but utter: “Holy shit.” The Bills gave him a first-round grade into the fall of 2024. Beane saw Walker play in-person for the first time when the Wildcats faced Ole Miss on Sept. 28.

His size, again, was stunning. Holy cow, Beane told himself, that dude’s fucking huge.

Between the whistles, however, all disruption waned. He wasn’t nearly as productive as a junior.

His sack total plummeted to 1.5. All GMs and scouts had no choice but to question everything that drew them to Walker in the first place.

“Is he coasting? Is he taking a year off?” Beane recalls asking. “Is he just trying to get to the NFL without hurting himself? All that stuff. And then you find out at the end of the season he was playing with a back injury. So it was like, ‘All right, we’ll give him some credit.’ But then it’s still like: ‘Was somebody covering for him?’”

Teams closely examined Walker’s medical testing at the NFL Combine and his story checked out.

So, something’s still fishy. The demand for giants half as quick is immense. Back or no back, it’s bonkers that Walker would free-fall into the fourth round. Look closer and it’s clear this scouting process was a bit more convoluted. In truth, you can’t even blame NFL GMs, scouts and college directors. Too many jobs are at stake. It’s the duty of scouts to investigate, to relentlessly uncover the good, bad and ugly. Not easy when many college coaches go full Dabo Swinney and wax poetic about every player going pro.

Marrow, now at Louisville, served as an NFL liaison in Kentucky. He doesn’t want to throw specific coaches under the bus but notes that many of the visiting personnel men told him that people inside Kentucky’s building were ripping Walker as “lazy.”

He bites his tongue.

“Deone knows the truth,” Marrow says. “I know the truth. His family knows the truth. It’s just a bunch of bullshit, to be quite honest.”

Walker doesn’t flinch. Head coach Mark Stoops was a strong advocate and the defensive tackle was cool with the entire ’23 staff. Liam Coen, the current Jaguars head coach, was the Wildcats’ OC that season. They had a strong bond.

The ’24 offensive staff, coordinated by Bush Hamdan, was a different story.

“Some people on our staff didn’t really like me,” Walker says. “They didn’t like me because of my back problem. It hurt to see me not play to what I could be. So they were mad. ‘Oh, why?’ They don’t know. What offensive coach asks trainers about a defensive player?”

Of note: Hamdan is now the Miami Dolphins quarterbacks coach. Walker gets to see him twice this season.

Nor was this some nebulous back issue. Walker suffered a pars defect, a crack in the thin strip of bone connecting lower and upper joints of a vertebrae. It’s most common in teens and heals on its own. Walker simply experienced his fracture at the worst time.

“People didn’t really know,” Walker adds. “It was hard, but I still wanted to go out and do what I could for the team at UK. Will I take anything back? No.”

Marrow tried to spread the gospel. Told everyone who’d listen that Walker was going to be a star.

Once this kid could focus on football — and football only — there was hell to pay, he’d say.

These Bills heard all opinions from all sides and decided to investigate further by bringing Walker in as one of their 30 in-person visits ahead of the draft. The medical staff told Beane they wouldn’t clear him until training camp to be safe. He’d need a lot of physical therapy. And on this visit, the Bills were extremely impressed with Walker’s football IQ. He was more soft-spoken than expected. “He doesn’t come across as a gritty guy,” Beane says. “And so sometimes you go: ‘Is this guy gritty enough to play? This is a grown man’s game.’”

Point blank, the Bills grilled him: Do you love ball? What does this mean to you? What do you want to do this for?

“We challenged him,” Beane says. “You want to see how he’s going to respond. And it’s not just sitting in a room for 20 minutes. It’s in different ways all day and watching film and pressing him: ‘What do you want to be?’”

The Bills talked to the ex-Kentucky running back on their roster. Ray Davis, a man who knows grit, offered a strong vote of support. They also liked that Walker actively chose to play in the Senior Bowl down in Mobile, Ala. Prospects hunt for excuses all the time to skip all-star games. If Walker was willing to compete when an NFL doctor would not have cleared him, he must love the sport.

Coaches did their own research. Rebrovich started with the ’24 tape, wondered “What does he do well?” and reverse-engineered back to that ’23 tape. It was like watching a completely different player. Right then, he knew the talent was inside of Walker. The fight. The hunger. He looked forward to somehow pulling it back out of him.

As late April closed in, Walker earned a prime spot on the team’s board.

Buffalo selected South Carolina defensive tackle TJ Sanders 41st overall in the second round and Marrow texted one Bills scout: “Deone’s better than him. This kid will be a monster.” Day 2 of the draft ended and, upon seeing that Walker was still available, the Bills phoned the Chicago Bears to climb from No. 132 to No. 109.

All weekend, Walker held a draft party in Lexington with plenty of family in from Detroit. The mood was a blend of confusion and excitement. Everyone expected Walker to go earlier. Hearing 108 names called before his own absolutely stung.

But as his name finally flashed across the screen, Walker tried to keep perspective.

“It doesn’t define who you are,” Walker says. “It doesn’t define what you’ve got to do.”

Shortly after, Marrow pulled him aside. “The knock on you was, ‘You were lazy,’” he told Walker. “Enjoy this. But get your ass in shape and prove everybody wrong.’” When Walker reported to work with the Bills, coaches did not detect any animosity over his plunge. Rather, they saw a player determined to do exactly what Marrow instructed.

There’s no massive chip on his shoulder — only that tattoo.

Question No. 2: How does a man standing 6-foot 7 3/8 inches, 330 pounds move like this?

The simplest explanation is basketball. He played his junior and senior years of high school.

Basketball, not football, was his first love.

As a fan, Walker was into Kevin Durant and LeBron James and especially “Prime D-Rose.” He was drawn to the ridiculous explosion of this Chicago Bulls point guard before all his knee issues. And as a player, Walker grew up on the post before evolving into more of a Jokic-like “facilitator” at the top of the key.

Quick feet were a necessity.

Quick feet stood out to everyone when Walker first took the practice field as a rookie for the Bills at St. John Fisher University. During 1 on 1’s, Beane watched his footwork. The largest player on the field was also one of the nimblest. This was no stiff. “He’s got basketball feet,” Beane adds. As that first camp wound down, two vets on the Bills’ offensive line — David Edwards and Connor McGovern — made a point to tell the GM that when “96” figures it out, he’s going to be a major problem.

“And that’s where you’re just like, ‘All right, he’s got it. Now we just got to keep him motivated, keep him going, get him some confidence,’” Beane says. “I think he lost some confidence in being pumped up (in college) and then the next year didn’t go well and you fall. You see all these guys picked ahead of you.”

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Rousseau, a physical marvel in his own right, was immediately entranced by Walker’s stature. “The way he moves? It’s crazy,” he says. “Somebody his size shouldn’t move like that.” Carter can’t get over one freaky blend of gifts. “Skinny ankles, he says, “but strong as an ox.” Marrow, after calling Walker “twitchy like a damn linebacker,” directs our attention to his 10 5/8-inch hands. (“He strikes you. He can maneuver you. He can bull rush you. He can give you a 1-2 punch and go around you.”) Those hands are the reason why he believes Walker could’ve excelled at tight end or offensive tackle, too.

During this first pro season, Rebrovich conducted those blunt conversations with Walker.

Walker assured his coach he wanted to chase greatness. OK, great. Are you OK being coached hard? Walker nodded and proceeded to change both his body and mentality. Buffalo’s strength and conditioning staff crafted a detailed regimen that first year together.

“We just had to have a heart-to-heart and say, ‘Hey, what are your goals? What do you want to do? Let me help you to help us,’” Rebrovich says. “And he really took that to heart.”

Year 1 was full of ups and downs. This dancing bear leapt into a big play occasionally.

Then, came the test: the offseason.

When the Bills reported back to work in April, Walker had clearly utilized the previous 2 ½ months.

“He didn’t just go to an island and chill out,” Beane says. “You could tell he worked.”

When OTAs/minicamp wrapped up, Walker didn’t lag. He kept the intensity cranked to a 10. Specifically, he targeted his kryptonite: a tendency to play too high. When Go Long sat down with Aaron Brewer last summer, the Miami Dolphins All-Pro said at one point that he enjoys blocking players like Walker who stand straight up. An extension of how scouts described him to our Bob McGinn in his draft series. Too often, Walker allowed offensive linemen to get underneath him.

Here, Walker doesn’t disagree. He admits he played too high.

While a low center of gravity is literally impossible for the 6-7 Walker, he’s now playing to his advantage. Rebrovich likes to use a visual analogy. Imagine a “big brother” keeping a “little brother” at bay with his arms down and away, he’ll say. Walker can keep linemen away with his inherent length.

“The most sacred thing is your jersey number,” Rebrovich says. “You don’t want anybody to impede it. Some of these guys have these big, huge chains with their numbers on it. So why do you have it? It’s obviously sacred to you. When you’re on the field, you’ve got to protect it. He does a great job of making sure people are not impeding his inner circle.”

He’s not losing his joy for the sport, either.

This fuels all on-field carnage as much as anything.

Walker cites a recent conversation with Bills rookie TJ Parker. The two agreed that they must pour everything into football for as long as they possibly can. Walker doesn’t want to live with any regrets down the road. To this end, it’s crucial to maintain a genuine zest for the sport. Never will he treat this as a 9-to-5 obligation. Morphing from good to great, to him, is rooted in preserving this passion.

“I just love football. It’s weird. I love playing football,” Walker says. “The main thing that gives rookies the Rookie Wall is thinking, ‘Football is my job. Ugh. It’s Year 1, but I’m a rookie. It’s my job. It’s not a game no more.’ Football is still fun!”

Sneaking in an hour of video games can help. A quick escape.

He’ll veer his mind away from the sport and — by the time he returns? — he feels totally re-energized.

“Because football takes a lot out of you,” Walker adds. It takes everything out of you.”

A voice in the background of the locker room echoes: “I agree with that!”

Year 2 has been quite a payoff.

He’s huge. He’s disruptive. But it’s everything we don’t see that triggers this all into action.

Question No. 3: What is his superpower?

Home opener. Detroit Lions in town. Bruce Smith offering the hey-ey-ey prayer into a mic.

The Buffalo Bills’ first game at new Highmark Stadium offered three hours’ worth of wild sights and sounds.

Nothing, however, was crazier than seeing what Deone Walker did to Penei Sewell.

The same Samoan nightmare who once concussed a teammate so badly as a youth that the poor sap transferred to another school, the same 6-5, 335-pounder who told us he’d die on the field for his teammates was whisked away by No. 96 on Thursday Night Football. This was a “pull-slide” technique sharpened with Rebrovich. Walker got the left tackle to redistribute his weight and rocked him to sleep.

It can seem as if Walker operates as more of a deranged crocodile, if that croc crushed two cans of the original Four Loko. No plan, all terror. But as Walker details, none of this is an accident. He’s not guessing. Heading into Week 2, Walker knew the Lions did not communicate well on the offensive line.

“They’ve never really played together,” he explains. “They were all newly announced starters, so there were a lot of miscommunication problems. Their center — whenever it was a pass — he likes to point out the ‘Mike’ before he gets in the stance. So just trying to pick on that. It’s a little quick thing to see: ‘OK, he pointed that way. He pointed toward the three.’ Now, I can backdoor the guard because I’m thinking it’s a pass.

“Little stuff like that. Things you can only get by watching him.”

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Rebrovich’s description of effective defensive line play is dead-on.

He likens the job to deer leaping in front of you down a country road.

Am I hitting it? Am I swerving? Or am I slamming on the brakes?

“And you have to make that decision now,” Rebrovich explains. “He’s very, very reactive. When things flash, he’s got a great vision and a great feel for blocking schemes and protections within that scheme of what we’re trying to accomplish. You can see the product is growing and it’s going to continue to grow.”

Walker and Rebrovich are on a 24/7 hunt for solutions, engaging in lively discussion during meetings, talking/texting afterhours and, of course, communicating nonstop on gamedays. Walker’s ability to adapt belies his age.

Adds Walker: “Football isn’t about thinking about what you’ve got to do. It’s about reacting to what somebody did to you. That’s 95 percent of defense. The extra five percent is hard work.”

Walker could be eight feet tall, 500 pounds with the lightest feet imaginable. Nothing physical about him would mean a damn thing if he hesitated — if he was confused at all — when that proverbial 12-point buck jolts out of the brush. The defensive tackles who own this millisecond forever own the edge.

That’s why Walker cites another analogy.

Walker views his 50 snaps a game as a heavyweight boxing fight. Round to round, he gains a feel for his adversary. He’ll throw a jab… then a hook… then a cross… and catalog how a lineman blocks him, essentially setting the bait for those viral haymakers. He knows precisely when to shift a lineman’s weight the wrong direction.

“The mental part, for me, is what really helped me take off,” Walker says. “Within the film room, being able to break down players and break down teams, formations and being able to see what the offense is trying to do. Our coaches do a great job of making cut-ups for us to be able to jot down notes while we’re watching: ‘OK, 65, he’s a leaner, a two-hand puncher. OK, 90, he’s a wider puncher, low hands.’ It may seem so little — but fourth quarter, at the end of the game — people are going to go to their tendencies.”

And there’s our best answer to this Deone Walker mystery.

We’re all enamored by what freaks of nature can do physically.

“But” Walker adds, “it’s about who can think the clearest while going through physical pain.”

That’s why Rebrovich doesn’t hesitate when asked for a comparable in the NFL.

He points to the ageless Calais Campbell. The assistant coach had him in Jacksonville for four seasons. Campbell is also a mountain of a man at 6-8, 307 pounds, but Rebrovich cites the ultra-cerebral nature of both players. They win with their minds. He’s also starting to see Walker demand more out of teammates, too. Like Campbell.

All of the plays that don’t make the social-media rounds are equally impressive to Rebrovich.

Take his ability to sniff out screen plays. In Week 1, on second and 10 from the Texans’ 40-yard line, Walker had a notion. He told defensive tackle Ed Oliver in the huddle that he’d cover the screen pass so Oliver could rush freely. On cue, the Texans attempted a screen to running back Woody Marks and Walker blew it up. The fact that center Evan Brown was hanging all over him? Minor detail. Irrelevant.

Rousseau laughs out loud thinking of Brown hanging on for dear life.

“Treats the guy like a little kid. Deone’s just like, ‘Excuse me,’” Rousseau says. “Usually people call out like, ‘Watch the screen here!’ and nothing happens. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard somebody say, ‘Watch the screen here,’ and they make the play in the screen. Because you’ve got to think. Just because you know the screen’s coming, they’re still going to try to block you. It doesn’t mean you’re going to make the play. He said it. He made the play. We’re like, ‘Bro, you’re insane.’”

This was no outlier. His tape’s full of high-effort, high-energy footage.

The man whose job is to challenge Walker daily cannot help but dream of everything still to come.

“It’s fun to watch,” Rebrovich says, “believe me.”

Even when this same player’s delivering shoulder pain for life.

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Question No. 4: Is he nasty enough?

On the hunt for trained killers along the line of scrimmage, all teams must straddle a fine line. A clean rap sheet is ideal, but scouts are not recruiting librarians and veterinarians.

GMs need rabid competitors with bad intentions.

No team should realize this more than the Buffalo Bills. After each playoff loss since 2019, Brandon Beane and Sean McDermott were asked variations of the same question: How can you affect the quarterback in January?

After an AFC Championship defeat in Kansas City to close the 2024 season, Beane lamented the reality that it’s extremely hard to find A-level talents on the defensive line while picking at the end of the first round each year. “We’re not ever picking in the top five, 10,” said Beane, vowing to turn over every stone. In the same breath, the GM admitted the Shaq-like Chris Jones was a second-round pick. Thus, it was possible. It takes a special scouting eye and a touch of risk to find a player capable of destroying a playoff game.

In Walker, the Bills might’ve finally found their Patrick Mahomes antidote.

Of course, the best at his position morph into goblins. Aaron Donald’s career is littered with cheap shots. Jones trash-talks with the best of ‘em. Jalen Carter smacked Mahomes upside the head in the Super Bowl. To the extreme, of course, is Ndamukong Suh stomping a cleat into an opponent’s leg.

Good luck extracting any malice out of Walker whatsoever. We tried.

He’s downright friendly.

Those around Walker every day assure there’s venom to his game. Marrow calls him a “gentle giant” and a “gentleman” who transforms into that “monster.”

Rebrovich agrees.

“He does have that,” says Rebrovich, who’s been around some of A-level defensive linemen from the Bills’ 2014 unit that totaled 54 sacks to the Jaguars’ “Sacksonville” 2017 front that had 55 (and was robbed of a Super Bowl appearance). “He just might not personality-wise be like that around people because he’s a very people-oriented person. Confidence goes a long way in everything we do. He’s one of those players that you can coach him hard, be on him, but he understands where it’s coming from.”

Adds Rousseau: “He’s a normal dude. Kind of like me. You don’t have to be a mean person to be a baller. You just have to know how to play football. He knows how to play ball.”

Question No. 5: What is Deone Walker’s ceiling?

He’s got a “Deone shoulder” and he also has a “Marcell shoulder.”

As in, Marcell Dareus.

Jason Rebrovich coached the latter in both Buffalo and Jacksonville and, yes, suffered the painful consequences. The last defensive lineman to ragdoll opponents ‘round here with such silly dominance was Dareus. Size. Speed. Explosion. The NFL world was abuzz over this D-Tackle, too. Unfortunately, the fourth overall pick in the 2011 draft was never able to fully maximize his potential.

A rapid rise was followed with an equally rapid fall after inking a $96 million contract.

What should not get lost in time, however, is everything Dareus endured in his personal life. Football players are not humanoids, as Walker alluded to earlier. You need an escape. You also need structure. An emotional Dareus once opened up to me about his tumultuous life off the field — everyone close to him kept dying. He lacked the off-field foundation required to thrive in this cutthroat profession.

Rebrovich still talks to Dareus all the time. He’s doing well.

Rebrovich also cites Walker’s foundation as a strength.

To be sure, Walker does not sound the least bit complacent, insisting multiple times the only thing he cares about is Buffalo going 1-0 each week. Teammates may be talking Canton. As his star rises, Walker is making a conscious effort to avoid all hype around his name.

“I don’t care,” Walker says. “That’s all politics anyway. The same people that praise you on the Internet — when you get too engulfed in it and you have a bad game — now they’re the ones bashing you. So why would I put any energy into it?”

Sage life advice for all.

He doesn’t want to change anything that’d detour his current trajectory. The more mayhem he creates, the better this Bills defense will be when it matters most. It’s a unit working through growing pains. A defense that has embraced a bend-don’t-break life since 2017 now wants to attack offenses. Rousseau loves defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard’s scheme. No longer will the Bills sit back and invite 15-play drives. He calls it “boom or bust,” adding that it’s their job to supply the boom in the form of sacks and turnovers. Buffalo (correctly) wants the ball back in Josh Allen’s hands as much as possible.

The pressure’s on this defensive front to collapse the pocket.

Especially against elite quarterbacks like the reigning MVP they’ll face tonight.

Especially come playoff time.

From afar, Marrow is still telling everyone who’ll listen that Walker is on the cusp of greatness. He sees a 10+ year career, $200 million in earnings, endless big plays. He stayed in close contact with sharp Bills personnel man Pete Harris throughout the entire process, sending text after text after text. A few weeks ago, Harris offered a token of gratitude for his insistence — he was right. And, hey, Marrow himself was selected by the Bills in the 11^th round of the 1992 draft. The longtime coach knows the city’s dying for a championship.

“This,” Marrow promises, “is just the tip of the iceberg.”

True, as Beane notes, Walker is not even fully grown as a man yet.

They view him as an “arrow up” player with a limitless future at a premium position.

Era to era, Beane believes one NFL fact holds true: hell-raising pass rushers up front win games. Philadelphia emasculated Mahomes. Seattle harassed Maye. Neither game was a revelation. With the Carolina Panthers, Beane saw what a dangerous pass rush can do to offenses en route to Super Bowl appearances in 2003 and 2015. This summer, he was able to catch up with Julius Peppers in Canton. The GM took a picture with Peppers and joked that nobody can take him out of the Hall of Fame if he still had some snaps in him.

Peppers the freakiest athlete Beane has ever seen in this sport.

Walker is extraterrestrial in his own right.

“He has answered the bell,” the GM says. “He’s so football smart and understands how people are trying to block him. But he’s still young. There’s still a lot of room to grow. You don’t want to get overexcited because you want to take one day at a time and keep pushing him and see where we can go.”

Buffalo hopes this is only the beginning.

Wisconsin radio rounds: On Matt LaFleur’s Packers into a Week 5 showdown

Tyler Dunne — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 16:03:48 GMT

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What a scene it’ll be Sunday afternoon at Lambeau Field. This edition of Packers-Bears promises to be an emotional one with the death of NFL legend Mike Ditka.

Ditka created a position and defined the sport itself. This was an unforgettable conversation with “Iron Mike.” A legend in every sense.

As kickoff nears, I figured I’d share a few radio appearances from the week below.

In light of our two-parter on Matt LaFleur at Go Long, my pals Bill Michaels, Marques Eversoll and Steve “Sparky” Fifer asked me to pop on to discuss. Audio and video is below.

To our OG subscribers, thank you for spreading the word on our independent home for longform.

To the new readers, welcome! A pleasure to have you. Introduce yourself inside our Gameday Chat this Sunday.

Wisconsin Sports Daily, Friday

WDUZ The Fan Green Bay, Thursday

The Bill Michaels Show, Monday

Links from the week at Go Long…

RIP, Mike Ditka

Tyler Dunne — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:19:46 GMT

Football isn’t football as we know it without “Iron Mike.”

Very sad news today. Mike Ditka — the Chicago Bears icon — has passed away at the age 86.

Through the 60s, he essentially created the tight end position and defined the sport.

My goodness, what a pleasure it was traveling to Naples, Fla., to hang out with Ditka for “Blood and Guts: How Tight Ends Save Football” five years ago. Everyone throws around the word legend far too often. Ditka, in every sense, truly was a legend.

Here’s that chapter from my book for those who’d like to get to know Ditka the player and the man. He was exceptionally candid on some very raw subjects.

Thanks, all.

The Blueprint

Mike Ditka is exactly where he should be. A living legend in the heaven on earth he deserves. Enter the clubhouse of Olde Florida Golf Club in Naples, veer left, and of course Ditka’s relaxing with a cigar in his hand. He stares off at his course through the window. Back when he cofounded it in 1992, Ditka had one simple request: “No bullshit.” That is, no golfers can dillydally. Everyone must keep moving, hole to hole, because you’re here to golf, dammit. Not screw around. Fast greens on rolling terrain reflect this vision.

He sets the cigar in an ashtray, and his friends migrate to a nearby table for another game of gin.

The patriarch of pain in football is obviously hurting at age eighty- two. There’s a walker within arm’s reach and, when he tries to scoot in his chair over to chat, it’s a struggle. Forged in the steel town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, “Iron Mike” has been one of the sport’s most indestructible forces from player to coach to commentator, and now this room serves as the twilight of his extraordinary life. Ditka brushes off help from others, notes that he’s had “four or five” hip replacements and leaves it at that. “I can’t complain,” he says. No use listing all the permanent wounds this sport inflicted when these wounds, to him, were always part of the deal. Those legendary hands that caught 427 passes and mauled linebackers for twelve bruising pro seasons are weathered. Mounds have swollen over the knuckles on the index and middle fingers of his right hand.

This day, there’s a Band- Aid about six inches above his left knee. His voice crackles. His thoughts occasionally flicker.

Yet look closely and it’s abundantly clear Ditka is still Ditka. The intimidating jowls. The brow that weighs heavy over soft blue eyes. The wavy hair slicked back. The iconic mustache that’s so tightly groomed. This is still a man who can make a visitor sit up straight and half expect a whistle to be blown for a dozen up-downs. There’s no Rob Gronkowski, no George Kittle — no modern NFL tight end, period — without the man sitting here. Before Ditka, the tight end was a blocker attached to the hip of the offensive tackle. He changed that forever. Most important, this position taught Ditka about life. So, no, don’t interpret his tendency to repeat himself as a fading mind. It’s a default. His tendency to heap praise upon everyone else, over and over, is more so an everlasting effect of the turning point in his life a half century ago.

So many memories remain preserved in the corners of his mind, and he brings them to life here. The NFL existed for forty-one years before Ditka was drafted with the fifth overall pick by the Chicago Bears in 1961, but the league was more of a footnote then. A regional attraction your milkmen and shoemakers mentioned on occasion. Ditka drove the sport directly into America’s living room. It’s no coincidence that over the course of his career, 1961 to 1972, the number of Americans who cited pro football as their favorite sport increased by 15 percent while baseball slid from 34 to 21 percent. The sport’s inherent violence was intoxicating — ruthless, yet aesthetically beautiful. There was something special about football’s attrition, the fact that this game is not for everyone. Swinging a baseball bat was quite different than bashing into another human being at full speed. Football weeded out the mentally and physically weak.

No one grasped this reality better than Ditka through the ’60s. At tight end, he injected the sport with an unprecedented dose of toughness.

His sanctuary these days often resembles a nature exhibit. Deer tend to prance over those Olde Florida greens. Raccoons aren’t nocturnal around here, either. They’ll zigzag through the palm trees in the daytime. And watch out for the alligators strutting onto the fair-ways during mating season. They’re particularly bold. Maybe because they’re the ones lucky enough to be alive. As one employee here points out, birds love to swoop in and eat the babies. Which all makes this a fitting environment to relive Ditka’s rise. He operated at the very top of the food chain in his kingdom.

“You have to understand,” Ditka begins, “where I came from.” There isn’t a cloud in the sky this eighty-one degree day or one critter on the course as Ditka leans back.

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He starts in Aliquippa, the town that made him. More specifically, he starts with the man who made him: Mike Sr.

One of his dad’s beatings certainly stands out above the rest. Eyes fixated forward at nothing in particular, Mike Jr. relives that day. He was in third grade and wanted to give smoking a try, so he swiped a pack of his dad’s Lucky Strike cigarettes and headed off into a wooded area outside their home. Mike Jr. found a nice spot to relax, lit the cigarette, and took a puff. The inhalation made him extremely dizzy and he dropped the cigarette. Here, Ditka turns to make eye contact.

“I burned the goddamn woods down.”

When Dad came home from work, he looked out the back window, saw the damage, and asked his wife what happened. She said he should ask his son and, moments later, Mike Sr. retrieved his thick leather belt, which he’d kept from his time in the Marines.

“I got my ass beat so bad it was unbelievable. That’s OK. I learned. And, listen, he was old-school. He was raised that way. He raised me that way. His other kids didn’t get any hits. But I got ’em. I was the old-est, I was supposed to be the example, so I got them. When I got out of line, I got my ass whipped. I thank God I was raised the way I was.”

Ditka holds his thumb and index finger a half inch apart. That’s how thick his dad’s belt was, and it made contact with his ass more times than he can count. As the oldest of four kids, he was made out to be that example.

He was perfectly fine with it all, too. The relationship was based on “respect,” he adds. “Not fear. Respect.”

This was how Mike Sr. was raised by his father, who emigrated to the States from Ukraine, so Mike Jr. received the same upbringing. Simple as that. The family’s last name was actually “Dyczko,” and Mike Sr. changed it to what he thought the name sounded like: “Ditka.” He was in the Marines until Mike Jr. was four years old. Never overseas, he spent a good amount of time across the country at a base in San Diego. In Aliquippa, the family lived in a housing project. “It wasn’t a special life,” Ditka says, “but it was a good life.” When Dad came home for dinner, Mike knew to sit down immediately and wasn’t allowed to leave until he washed and dried the dishes. At age nine, he had a paper route and, initially, didn’t own a bike. That meant walking up and down the hills by foot. All money earned was given to his parents, who then gave him an allowance.

“We didn’t have anything,” Ditka says, “but we earned everything we had.”

Aliquippa was a booming steel town through those ’40s and ’50s. America was at war with communism and refineries like J&L Steel manufactured steel for battleships and planes. J&L employed about half of the entire town. The richest families lived up on the hill in mansions while most families, like the Ditkas, lived down in the valley. Mike Jr. never saw color. To him, fathers of Black kids in his school worked at the mill just like his, so what was the difference? His family didn’t own anything they lacked. Still, as Ditka wrote in his autobiography: “It was a very ethnic area, which was also very prejudiced. Whether you were a Polack or a Hunky or a Jew or a Dago or a Wop or a Cake-eater or Colored — we didn’t use the other slang word for Blacks — it was prejudiced.”

His dad worked on the railroad that serviced J&L Steel. He was also a welder and the president of a local union where, his son says, “he didn’t take any shit from the workers or the management.” When Mike Sr. returned home for dinner, his clothes were burnt and blackened, a daily reminder to all four kids of what a true work ethic entailed. Especially his oldest. “When he said, ‘Jump,’ I said, ‘How high?’ ” All the way to eighth grade, Mike Jr. needed to be home by 7 p.m. He was close to his younger brother, Ashton, and the two fought constantly. During one youth baseball game, Mike was the losing pitcher because Ash-ton dropped a fly ball. Mike chased him home and beat him up. Dad promptly whipped them both.

“There was no sparing the rod. If you did something wrong, you got your ass whipped. But I don’t regret it one bit. He raised me the right way, and because of that, I had a value system. I knew what was right and I knew what was wrong. And I tried to stay away from doing what was wrong.”

He’d occasionally take a BB gun into the woods to shoot frogs, but Ditka quickly realized it was best to play sports as much as possible. His youth was a nonstop loop of football, baseball, basketball. The weather never mattered much. He and his buddies would shoot hoops until their fingers cracked in the cold. His temper would still get him in trouble. Even if his dad missed a baseball game, he’d hear about a tantrum his son threw and make sure there were consequences. Press Maravich, the father of future NBA star Pete Maravich, was his high school basketball coach, while the hard- driving Carl Aschman was his football coach. Ditka played fullback, linebacker, end, pretty much any-where that allowed him to kick somebody’s ass. As a junior, he even caught a touchdown in the state championship game.

What Ditka remembers most this day is Aschman teaching him how to block. For a good twenty minutes after practice, he’d have Ditka at the blocking sled.

“I was a better baseball player. I thought I’d be a baseball player and ended up being a football player. It was all because of Carl Aschman. It wasn’t because of me. He took the time. He taught me how to block. He taught me how to receive. He took the time. He cared. I don’t know what he saw, but he saw something.”

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Colleges passed through and Aschman told them about Ditka. That was the extent of football scouting in the ’50s. With his choices down to the University of Pittsburgh or Penn State, Ditka chose Pitt . . . not that he envisioned pro football as a career. The thought never crossed his mind. Nor did Ditka have any desire to work in the steel mill.

His plan was to be a dentist. There was only one problem. “I had a little problem with chemistry,” he says, smiling. It’s not that Ditka didn’t like the class. The class, he points out, didn’t like him.

As it turned out, neither did anyone who got into his way on a foot-ball field. At Pitt, Ditka played end on both sides of the ball and didn’t merely enjoy contact. This tree trunk in a crew cut demanded it. One teammate, Foge Fazio, later recalled Ditka looking “like a prizefighter in the ring” between plays because he couldn’t wait to fight again. Ernie Hefferle, who coached the team’s ends, said Ditka would plead for the team to hit more in practice. “All he wanted to do was hit, hit, hit.” Teammates were on high alert in the locker room, too. After miss-ing a tackle on Michigan State’s Herb Adderley, Pitt’s Chuck Reinhold was a tick too upbeat for Ditka’s liking in saying, “We’re only down 7-0.” Ditka told Reinhold that he was the reason they were losing, then bounced him off a locker. Ditka always backed up his bark. In his last college game, he dislocated his shoulder trying to block a punt and still played the rest of the game.

Pitt hardly threw the ball — Ditka caught all of eleven passes for 229 yards as a senior— but his brutality on both sides of the ball was rare.

Opponents saw it. Future Pro Football Hall of Famer Dave Robinson faced Ditka in college (at Penn State) and the pros (with Green Bay) and remembers Ditka most as a menace of a defensive end. On film, Penn State noticed that every time a team tried to run a sweep to the left, Ditka sprinted right down the line to catch their halfback. Since the Penn State power sweep called for both guards to lead the way, they changed it up vs. Ditka. They had Robinson, the right guard, spin around to peel back on Ditka. Unfortunately, the left guard got confused and both guards blocked Ditka, thus nuking the play. Scouts saw it, too. As the Dallas Cowboys’ VP of personnel, Gil Brandt remembers watching Ditka catch balls in a workout and sprinting right into a cement mixer that was the size of an oversized barbecue pit. The mixer wasn’t even on the field of play, but when Ditka ran routes, he had a tendency to continue running. “If he caught the ball at the 20-yard line, he ran it into the end zone,” Brandt says. “If he caught the ball at the 40-yard line, he ran it into the end zone.” Ditka blasted into the mixer at the end of the field, put a large dent into it, yet hardly flinched. He acted like he casually bumped into a stranger at the grocery store.

A consensus All-American, Ditka was selected fifth overall by the Chicago Bears in the 1961 NFL Draft and given a deal worth $12,000 with a $6,000 signing bonus. Off to the big time he went. Mike Jr. showed the contract to Mike Sr., and his dad only grunted.

Most people, he told his son, work a long time to earn this amount of money.

To this day, Mike Ditka is dumbfounded. Pitt ran the ball nearly four times more than they passed it. He cannot fathom how his two hands would go on to catch 427 passes in professional football.

“I have no idea,” says Ditka, pausing.

“Luke Johnsos. Without him. I wouldn’t be talking to you today.” This isn’t a name celebrated alongside the greatest innovators in the sport’s history, but it should be. Johnsos played for the Bears from 1929 to 1936 before then coaching under founder- owner–head coach George Halas the next thirty-three seasons. As the team’s offensive coordinator in ’61, he recognized that Ditka owned a set of soft hands for his size and knew it’d be difficult for defensive backs to tackle him in open space. The birth of the tight end was rooted in simple strategy. Detached from the trenches, a large human could do serious damage against much smaller humans.

One vivid memory resurfaces. When Ditka was struggling to get off the line of scrimmage, Johnsos asked why and the rookie told him that the linebacker kept jamming him into the tackle. Johnsos instructed Ditka to line up about three yards wider at the line of scrimmage and, voila, the tight end now had a “two-way release.” He could go inside. He could go outside. The kid who lit the woods on fire then did the same thing to pro football with 56 receptions for 1,076 yards and 12 touchdowns as a rookie. Ditka credits Johnsos (“he revolutionized the position”) and quarterback Bill Wade (“he loved to throw the football to me— thank God”) and claims all he did was catch the ball and run (“I became an offensive weapon”), all while remaining baffled by his coach’s vision.

“He used the tight end how no one else had ever thought about using him. He was the reason I had success. What made him have the vision to throw me the football that much? I don’t know.”

There were clobbering fullbacks before, like Marion Motley. There were prolific receivers, like Raymond Berry. Yet never were these skills blended into one package. The closest comparison was Pete Pihos, whom Brandt describes as a tight end playing wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles from 1947 to 1955. Running eight- and nine- yard routes, Pihos was awkward to defend and could box out linebackers with a broad- shouldered frame. He caught sixty- plus passes in three straight seasons. Pihos, however, was also twenty- five pounds lighter than Ditka, a man with bad intentions. A man who ushered in a level of cruelty foreign to offensive football.

Mike Ditka treated the field as primitive, eat-or-be-eaten terrain that 1961 season.

In his first game ever, a 37–13 loss, the rookie told guard Ted Karras to get the lead out of his ass and Karras threw a punch at him. “Was I right?” Ditka asks here. “Probably not. But I wasn’t wrong, either.” Ahead of a game against the Baltimore Colts, the Bears were well aware that their linebacker, Bill Pellington, had knocked out Detroit Lions tight end Jim Gibbons. Halas even alerted the commissioner of Pellington’s dirty play and, the first play of the game, Pellington punched Ditka in the mouth. The next play, Ditka cocked an arm back and returned the favor. And that was that. Pellington didn’t bother him the rest of the game. When San Francisco 49ers defensive back David Baker hit one of his teammates with a cheap shot later that season, Ditka teed off on him.

His code wasn’t complicated. Accept getting bullied, you will be bullied. Stand up for yourself, you’ll command respect. Instantly, the NFL knew where Mike Ditka stood. When the ball was in his hands, his mentality was to simply do everything in his power to prevent people from tackling him. If that meant lowering his shoulder? Fine. A stiff arm? Perfect. Linebackers started to clothesline Ditka before he had a chance to get a head of steam but they soon learned that this came with a consequence.

“If they clotheslined me and I had a chance to blindside him,” Ditka says, “I was going to get him.”

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Most opponents retreated, never to test Ditka again. One, however, always came back for more.

Nobody pushed Ditka to his edge quite like linebacker Ray Nitschke. Ditka doesn’t even consider clotheslines from the snarling, balding, savage heartbeat of the Green Bay Packers’ defense dirty. Rather, Ditka insists Nitschke was “physically tough” and that he needed to match his toughness. The rivalry between the Packers and the Bears defined foot-ball through the 1960s, and central to it all were these two apex preda-tors fighting for dominion. After Nitschke knocked him unconscious in a preseason game, Ditka got revenge in a regular- season game. His crackback block sent the linebacker to the locker room and Nitschke, he says, never forgot. That point forward, Nitschke took a run at Ditka every chance he could. “He tried to knock the shit out of me,” says Ditka, “but I’d get him back.” Nitschke even confronted Ditka outside of a Milwaukee restaurant once. The two didn’t fight . . . but it was close. “I’m going to get you,” Nitschke promised. To which Ditka replied, “If you’re going to get me, you better get me good.”

Then, they continued to face each other three games a season. Ditka runs the math in his head and estimates they broke even.

“Nitschke tried to kill me. He didn’t take any prisoners. When you played the Packers, it was survival of the fittest. You had to play them a certain way if you wanted to survive. I played with the Cow-boys. I played with the Eagles. There was never a rivalry like the Bears and the Packers. That was the epitome of what a rivalry was in the National Football League. I mean, we kicked the hell out of each other.”

The Bears could lose every game, but beat Green Bay? Halas considered that a successful season. Robinson started alongside Nitschke for most of those battles. Whenever the two Hall of Famers shed other tight ends to the grass, he says, that’s where they stayed. Ditka pounced to his feet and drilled them in the back while making a tackle.

“You knew he was going to knock you off the ball,” Robinson says. “He was tougher than nails.”

Ditka and Nitschke gained a mutual respect, of course. The two became friends and kept in touch up to Nitschke’s death in 1998.

Football, to Ditka, was always a Me vs. You test of will. “You want to go head-to-head?” he says. “Fine. OK.” No play epitomized this mentality more than when he returned for his first pro game back in Western Pennsylvania. On November 24, 1963, two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the NFL decided to play on and the Bears visited the Steelers in Pittsburgh. Dad, Mom, and so many rela-tives made the short twenty- mile trip to see Mike Jr. play. Trailing 17–14 with five minutes left, the Bears faced a second- and-thirty-six and Wade told his tight end to run a corner route. Exhausted, Ditka asked if he could run a short hook route instead. The NFL would label what happened next the sixty- ninth- best play ever. Ditka caught the short pass, Clendon Thomas whisked by him, and Ditka stormed upfield into a trio of Steelers defenders. First, he flattened Glenn Glass with the crown of his helmet. Myron Pottios dove and could only grasp his right foot for a split second. And poor Willie Daniel. All Daniel could do was helplessly lunge for any cloth possible in embarrassing fashion before being flicked away like a fly.

Ditka rumbled ahead for sixty-three yards to set up a game-tying field goal that helped catapult Chicago into the NFL Championship, where they’d beat the New York Giants, 14– 10.

“He was the meanest, toughest rascal in the league, and I’ve got the dent in my head to prove it,” Thomas told the Pittsburgh Press. “Anytime you came near Ditka, you had to expect forearms and fists. You came away bruised. He was mean, but he was also as talented as anyone I ever lined up against.”

Practicing against an all-time defense helped, too. He shouldn’t only be associated with the “85 Bears.” The unit that won a title in 1963 was historic, too, in allowing a meager ten points per game. The best player Ditka ever faced might’ve been on his own team in the six-foot-eight, 285-pound Doug Atkins. Nobody — ever — gave Atkins shit in practice. He was big. He was mean. He was the nicest fella on the team until you pissed him off. As Ditka explains, Atkins was both lean and muscular, “so he just threw people around like rag dolls.”

This was one player Ditka would never piss off.

“No! I’m not dumb.”

Playing this violently meant doing serious damage to his own body, of course. Not that Ditka sat out. He couldn’t shake the thought of how much money his dad made at the mill. That was real work. This was a game. He injected his body with novocaine and cortisone all the time to play on. In 1964, Ditka even played all season with a dislocated shoulder. He initially separated it in an exhibition game against the College All- Stars, which seemed innocent enough. When the darn thing kept popping out, Ditka strapped it into place with a harness and didn’t miss a game. “Hey,” he says, “you learn to play with pain.” Here, he demonstrates how. His left arm was fine. He could stretch that all the way up, like so. His right arm? He couldn’t even bend it to shoulder height. That season, he figured out a way to knock a pass with his good arm down into his chest to catch seventy- five passes, the most in his career, for 897 yards with five touchdowns.

Decades later, it still hurts to lift that arm.

The worst injury of them all struck the following season. In 1965, the arch in his foot “cracked” and he then felt it pop once more in its cast while fooling around at practice. Ditka played that entire season with a dislocated foot by numbing it up once before the game, then again at halftime. Life sure was good for Mike Ditka . . . until it wasn’t. In 1966, he caught only 32 passes on a 5-7-2 Bears team, and his most memorable moment was decking a drunken fan on the field. The more he challenged authority and flirted with the AFL’s Houston Oilers, the more he agitated Halas. Finally, in 1967, the Bears boss traded his star tight end to the Philadelphia Eagles and Ditka’s life unraveled. He has since described his two seasons with the Eagles as “purgatory on earth.”

He was depressed. He hated football. He’d later admit he almost killed himself drinking. Toiling at rock bottom is burnt into Mike Ditka’s memory as much as any touchdown. That second year in Philly, he nearly self-destructed.

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Living by himself, in a downtown apartment, Ditka would go out every single night, and the alcohol had a way of whipping him into a strange haze. He’d often wake up in “strange places” with zero recollection how he got there or who he was with. The next day, his hangover would be more of a severe fog in which Ditka was unable to comprehend what was real and what wasn’t. He drank so much that the complexion of his skin started to change. His playing time decreased. The Eagles went 2-12. It all spiraled the five-time Pro Bowler deeper and deeper and deeper into depression. At work, he’d spar often with new head coach Joe Kuharich and, late in a 47– 13 loss in Cleveland, the mess Ditka created for himself clubbed him harder than any Nitschke clothesline. With his parents sitting in the stands— when he explicitly told them not to come — Ditka sat on the bench and wept.

Three weeks later, after a season- finale loss to the Vikings, he didn’t say goodbye to anyone. Ditka got into his car and drove straight through a blizzard back to his home in Chicago. He did not care that there was still one year left on his contract.

“I was going to quit,” Ditka says. “I lost my love of the game, but what else was I going to do? I wasn’t a rocket scientist.”

As the decades pass, this low point of Ditka’s life only vanishes from the minds of football fans but, here, it’s clear that Ditka has not forgotten.

“It seemed to be the thing to do. You think you’re a big-t ime foot-ball player—‘ I’m going to go get drunk.’ It could’ve been the end of it, really.”

He stares at the ground. “I was a mess.”

Ditka was the first tight end to lose himself, to enter such a dark-ness, and he wouldn’t be the last. This position tends to attract the wildest personalities in football, and those personalities tend to push themselves to the brink. It’s a fine line. When all hell- raising is funneled into stiff- arms and crackbacks, the tight end is one of the most entertaining athletes in all of sports. Yet it’s not easy to confine all belligerence to three hours on a Sunday. Years later, Tony Gonzalez would face the same moment of truth.

Tight ends find a way of digging themselves out of the abyss, too. Starting with Ditka.

Three days after deciding he was finished with football— devoid of any Plan B in life— Ditka received a phone call from Tom Landry. The Dallas Cowboys head coach told Ditka he had traded for him and, while he had no clue if Ditka could still play, he wanted to give this a try. Ditka had no clue why any team would want him. His best guess is that one of his only good games that wretched season came against Dallas.

That phone call, however, saved his career. And, honestly, his life. “The best thing that happened to me was when I met Tom Landry. He really made me. He made me understand what it was to be a team player. He was fantastic. He was just absolutely the best. I went there and cleaned up my act and became a pretty good football player. A team player.”

Granted, Ditka got off to a rocky start. After a night out, he got into a car accident with Walt Garrison that sent him through the wind-shield and knocked his teeth out. As Garrison later recalled, the dentist gave Ditka two options. He could wire his teeth shut (and not play the next day) or pull his teeth. Ditka told him to “pull the son of a bitches,” but soon learned he didn’t have a choice because, it turned out, his jaw was also broken. Said Garrison: “You could hear him out on the field breathing through his teeth. ‘Hiss- haw, hiss- haw, hiss- haw,’ ” Garrison recalled in Cowboys Have Always Been My Heroes. “Sounded like a rabid hound. And you could hear that mad dog Ditka cussin’ even with his mouth wired shut.” As legend has it, he didn’t even use an anesthetic.

Ditka soon cleaned up his act and supplied the Cowboys exactly what they needed: toughness. As a receiver, he couldn’t get separation anymore. But he was crafty enough to get open, he could still catch with his hands and, Brandt adds, he was still a competitor. In Dallas, Ditka worked out more than he ever did in Chicago, trimming down to 215 pounds.

“What happens is people get down on people too quickly,” Brandt says. “A guy might have a bad year. Mike played when he could hardly walk. You always hear that Mike played when other people would’ve sat. He played when other people did sit. He was tougher than heck.”

As a twenty- two- year- old rookie, Cliff Harris had no problems covering Ditka in practice. The tight end’s speed was obviously shot. But right when you’d be up on him as a DB, ready to break where he broke at the top of a route, he’d blast you with a forearm. “Boom!” Harris says. “I learned to stay a forearm distance away.” That’s how Ditka still man-aged to catch 72 balls for 924 yards with 5 touchdowns through four seasons as a Cowboy. Four seasons that helped define the tight end position as much as anything because Ditka overcame his demons. Ditka embraced the altruism of the profession. Landry was a man of faith who pulled no punches, and he loved it. Landry made it clear that Ditka was here to block and lead, a responsibility he took to heart.

At the time, the Cowboys were known as chokers. This was the team that lost two NFL Championships to the Green Bay Packers, including the “Ice Bowl” in 1967, and then Super Bowl V to the Baltimore Colts, 16– 13. Expectations were high into 1971. After a sluggish 4-3 start, Ditka was the one who spoke up. He told the team that when everyone works together “miracles happen.”

“All of a sudden,” quarterback Roger Staubach later said, “these same human beings won ten games in a row.”

In Super Bowl VI, Dallas romped the Miami Dolphins, 24–3. Ditka caught a touchdown pass for old time’s sake, too.

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The Cowboys would go on to make the playoffs in eleven of their next twelve seasons with one more Super Bowl title, and Staubach credited Ditka as the player who made this a team that refused to back down. To anybody. Of course, the long-t erm effect was greater for Ditka. He retired after the 1972 season and seamlessly transitioned into coach-ing on Landry’s staff as the special teams coordinator. Harris returned kicks then and, every week, Ditka coached like he played. His face was red. His voice was hoarse. He stormed around the practice field like a man ten coffees deep and warned everyone that this was the best special teams unit the Cowboys had faced yet, so “You guys really gotta get after ’em!” Harris would never object, lest he piss Ditka off, but he could not help but ask himself, “Didn’t he say that last week?” Either way, the enthusiasm was contagious.

In 1981, Ditka buried the hatchet with Halas by writing the Bears’ founder a letter. He said he wanted to renew their friendship and asked if Halas would one day consider him for the head coaching job.

Halas asked Landry if Ditka was ready. He was. And, in 1982, Ditka shuffled back to Chicago, where his name became synonymous with football itself. On a team loaded with characters, Ditka was larger than life in winning six division titles over ten years. The ’85 Bears remain one of the greatest teams of all time. All along, one principle guided Ditka. He played as hard as he could for as long as he could so, as a coach, demanded the same thing from every player.

Ron Rivera lived it. He spent his entire nine- year career as a line-backer playing for Ditka and, as the team’s union rep, says the two developed a “unique relationship.” They’d meet one-on-one every two weeks. Training camps under Ditka were as ruthless as one could imagine from a disciple of both Halas and Landry. The Bears were in pads twice a day for a good eight weeks.

After one merciless practice, Rivera felt compelled to speak up.

“He just ripped our ass,” Rivera says. “It was a hot, tough day and we were dragging ass. He had this thing: ‘Fatigue makes cowards out of all of us.’ That’s one of the things he’d always grind on us about. So afterwards, it was one of those days I had to go in and talk to him about some general stuff and I said to him, ‘Coach, I’ve got to ask you something. Why are you so hard on us? I mean goddamn. What the fuck, Coach? What’s that all about?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Ronnie, I would never ask you guys to do anything I couldn’t do as a player because I believe you guys can do it.’ ”

The words hit home. This was two years after Ditka was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Bears were playing an exhibition game in Canton. On the team bus, Ditka made a point to sign and hand one of his Hall of Fame portrait cards to Rivera. Three decades later, as an NFL coach himself, Rivera still hung onto that card, too.

“The whole point was the dude had a standard and he believed that if he could do it, we could do it.”

Ditka coached the New Orleans Saints for three disappointing sea-sons (1997–1 999), wearing a dreadlock wig in his press conference after trading his entire draft for Texas running back Ricky Williams. And, hey, why not pose in a bride- and- groom photoshoot with the Heisman Trophy winner for a magazine cover? Ditka was himself. Always. It didn’t matter if a reporter asked him why he was in a bad mood after a loss. “What do you care?” he once sniped back. “If you were 2-7, you’d be in a bad mood, too.” Or if he was starring in the 2005 movie Kicking and Screaming with Will Ferrell. Or if he was dishing unfiltered takes as an unofficial narrator of the sport for various TV networks.

This raw authenticity endeared the man to people of all ages from all backgrounds. If the NFL ever did create a silhouette logo for its league, like the NBA did with Jerry West, it’d sure be hard to top Ditka. Two syllables that ooze grit. And the tipping point for this all was ’68. Only by looking himself in the mirror— and admitting he had a problem— was Ditka able to rediscover his true self. Landry threw him a life raft, and Ditka was once again that yes- sir, no-sir kid from Aliquippa.

Those principles instilled by his father years ago would serve as the compass for the rest of his life.

“Hard work. Effort. Don’t be a complainer,” Ditka says. “Don’t be a whiner. That’s the way I tried to play the game and coach the game. If you were willing to work your ass off and do the right thing — even if you didn’t — then I would care about you. It was a great run. You don’t know why things happen. If I had to change something, I don’t know what I’d change. You have setbacks, so you can move forward again.

“It’s been a hell of a run. I have no complaints.”

His wife, Diana, leans in with a quick story to share. Back when they first started dating, in the early ’70s, she’d tell people her new boy-friend played football and when they asked what position he played, she was stumped. “I think he’s a ‘tight ass’ or something,” she’d reply. In fairness to her, a tight end really wasn’t a tight end until Ditka made it so. Not surprisingly, when he flips on the TV today, Ditka sees a sport that’s getting softer. All this showboating irritates him, too. “I think you respect your opponent. If you beat him, fine. Don’t try to make him look bad.” Even the coverage of the sport, the talk show fodder, can be too much to stomach. “All bullshit.”

Ditka does enjoy watching modern tight ends. All are a heck of a lot more athletic than he was at his peak.

“But,” he adds, “it doesn’t mean they were tougher or smarter or hit harder. They do things I could never do. But I know one thing: They couldn’t play any harder than I played.”

Good luck finding any tight ends post- Ditka that’d ever argue this. Now, Ditka is perfectly content watching the sun slowly set surrounded by the people he loves. At one point, his daughter arrives from out of town, gives her dad a kiss on the cheek and shows him a football card one of her coworkers’ husbands recently dug up. Right there, is the iconic mean mug — the cheeks, the crew cut, the eyes. “Handsome man!” she says. Ditka can credit Mike Sr. and Aschman and Johnsos and Landry all he wants, but he is the true godfather of the tight end position.

And, if history is any guide, there’s no need for Ditka to worry. The position he created will protect this sport’s bludgeoning violence forever.

Real Football: Jalen Hurts flops, Josh Allen YOLOs, Packers’ reckoning & requiem for Terry Fontenot’s Falcons build

Tyler Dunne — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 13:07:11 GMT

NFL Jalen Hurts is College Tim Tebow in the best and worst ways. (Allow Jim Monos to explain.)

Josh Allen’s late-game interception was a colossal fail, a rookie mistake… but no. Joe Brady should not send him to the chalkboard to write “I Will Not Throw Into Double Coverage” 100 times. As the Bills QB told Go Long, he isn’t going to change his play style. We examine the QB-HC dynamic.

Buffalo’s Defense. There are issues in the secondary. Maxwell Hairston wanted no smoke with the game on the line. Next up: the Los Angeles Rams.

Hey, what about those Atlanta Falcons? A year ago, I sat down in Terry Fontenot’s office. He was beaming. He was soon fired. The GM’s vision is finally being brought to life… albeit after Arthur Blank fired him.

All GMs for all teams know they’ve got to find a quarterback. But what’s the best path? Selecting one first overall doesn’t guarantee anything. Nor does staying patient apparently.

And, hey! It’s Packers-Bears Week. After sifting through the nitty-gritty matchups with Bob McGinn, let’s think big picture with Monos. This the most important regular-season game of Matt LaFleur’s eight-year tenure. Ben Johnson has morphed his Chicago offense into a soul-snatching machine up front. It’ll be must-see TV again.

Thanks for watching, listening, sharing.

You power everything at Go Long.

Two-part series on LaFleur is right here, icymi:

Ty & Bob Pod S5 E4: It’s Packers-Bears Week

Tyler Dunne — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:04:32 GMT

They meet again. A year ago, the Chicago Bears stunned the Green Bay Packers at Soldier Field. (Packers sources explain what happened here.)

Since then? Ben Johnson continues to build a machine of a rushing attack and win with both No. 2 (Tyson Bagent) and No. 3 (Case Keenum) quarterbacks. Matt LaFleur has the Packers at 2-2 after squeaking past winless Tampa Bay.

This may be the most important regular-season game of LaFleur’s eight-year tenure.

Green Bay’s season could realistically take a very hard turn either direction Sunday afternoon at Lambeau Field.

Here on the “Ty & Bob Pod,” we preview the matchup and — as always — Bob McGinn offers his insight on all NFCN games from a week ago: Packers-Bucs, Bears-Jets, Vikings-Dolphins and Lions-Panthers.

Subscribers can access the full one-hour, 55-minute episode.

If you prefer to listen on Apple or Overcast, bang it here to sync your subscription. Instructions on syncing on Spotify are also here.

Two-part series on Matt LaFleur, icymi:

Matt LaFleur Show, Part I: The Boss

Matt LaFleur Show, Part II: Identity Crisis

Monos Report, Week 4: NFL Jalen Hurts = College Tim Tebow

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 19:10:36 GMT

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A note for new readers: Jim Monos scouted for the Philadelphia Eagles, New Orleans Saints and served as the director of personnel for the Buffalo Bills. Today, he runs personnel for the UFL. He also co-hosts the “Real Football” podcast with me and will be writing weekly recaps each week, riffing on all games.

By Jim Monos

Indianapolis 30, Washington 13

Can we save Colts owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon from notetaking with this summary: Daniel Jones is not good enough to win a Super Bowl and your defense is ranked 23^rd in points per play. The No. 1 rule for the Core 4 franchise outline — Owner, GM, Head Coach, Quarterback— is the owner spends money and stays away. Huge fail going on in Indianapolis right now in terms of structure but they are competitive and tough. Washington was down to QB3, the “Baklava Bomber,” Athan Kaliakmanis, which means you have no chance. Good win for the Colts.

Green Bay 17, Tampa Bay 14

Remember when the Packers used to be good? Remember when Tucker Kraft could catch. Regardless, the Packers are in survival mode while they have superstars watching instead of playing. Tampa Bay rookie quarterback Jalon Daniels is fearless… but still an undrafted rookie who threw two picks. Green Bay is ranked 26^th offensively in PPP (points per play) and 21^st on defense in PPP. Those are not even close to being Super Bowl-worthy. Injuries and suspensions are real but not to be used as excuses. Jordan Love needs to be better with decision-making and accuracy. His teammates need to be mistake-free to assist. None of that is happening but the division is still wide open.

Inside look at the Green Bay Packers’ 2025 wild-card collapse... how did this happen?

Tyler Dunne — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:01:18 GMT

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Welcome to Packers-Bears Week.

This may be the most important regular-season game of the Matt LaFleur Era in Green Bay.

No, it wasn’t easy for this team down in Tampa, Fla., against an UDFA rookie quarterback but the Packers managed to win, 17-14, to even their record to 2-2.

Meanwhile, it hasn’t mattered who Ben Johnson has at quarterback. He was handpicked to save this franchise and has managed to keep this Bears offense rollin’ with Case Keenum and Tyson Bagent as Caleb Williams recovers from a hamstring injury.

Over the weekend, we published a two-parter on LaFleur. Subscribers can read in full.

Part I: The Boss
Part II: Identity Crisis
Subscribe now

A few days after the Packers inexplicably lost to the Chicago Bears in the 2025 Wild Card round — wounds still fresh, memories still sharp — I chatted with sources inside the building. One coach in particular broke everything down in painstaking detail.

Looking back, this game truly did pan a magnifying glass over LaFleur himself. This night highlighted everything that makes him a great coach and, of course, those shortcomings. Green Bay built a 21-3 lead and could not finish.

Thirteen Seconds ultimately doomed Sean McDermott in Western New York. This game, “21-3,” is currently hovering over LaFleur like a dark cloud. All parties involved will remember all moments for a very long time.

There are plays you know. But, as you’ll read below, there’s a few moments you probably missed.

LaFleur and the Packers have a chance to exact a measure of revenge Sunday at Lambeau Field.

The best way to understand the ludicrous nature of this playoff loss at Soldier Field is by gauging how comfortable coaches felt about Matt LaFleur’s job status before this 31-27 defeat versus after.

Up to kickoff? This felt like a done deal. Of course president Ed Policy would stick with both his head coach and GM. Continuity reigns supreme in Wisconsin. Upheaval is for everyone else. On the team website, Policy offered both individuals a strong vote of confidence by stating how “proud” he was of this team for persevering “through a litany of injuries and a very challenging schedule.”

But then the Packers suffered a heartbreaker nobody will ever forget.

Playoff losses this grisly get people fired all the time.

“Doubt,” one assistant admits, “obviously crept in.”

What happened on the shores of Lake Michigan? Let’s dive deep.

There are essentially three prisms in which you can view this disaster and we’ll take ‘em one by one: Player Error, Coaching Malpractice & No Killer Instinct.

Player Error.

The simplest fix.

If one of a dozen or so plays go their way, the Packers likely win.

So many forgotten moments will be lost in time.

Andrew Brandt on power of ‘serendipity,’ his rise, Barcelona, Packers life, Favre-to-Rodgers

Tyler Dunne — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:21:52 GMT

Villanova University

There’s an NFL presented at podiums and proliferated on social media.

Then, there’s the real NFL behind the scenes.

We’re always trying to bring the latter to life. So what a good time it was chatting with a former Green Bay Packers vice president who enjoys lifting up that curtain to educate the masses. You can watch the full Go Long Podcast episode with Andrew Brandt right here.

For those who prefer to read, our chat is transcribed below.

Be sure to read his new book — “Smarter About Sports: My Life Navigating Athletes, Agents, Media, and the Business of the NFL.” The Amazon link to hardcover, Kindle and Audible is here.

We get into Andrew’s rise in sports, orchestrating all contracts in Green Bay from 1999- ‘08, the Favre-to-Rodgers transition to his mission today.

New here? Go Long is fueled 100 percent by our readers. We’d love to have you as a subscriber today.

What a pleasure to welcome on a familiar face for not just us here at Go Long, but the entire sports world. Andrew, you’ve definitely been so generous with your time and sharing your experiences and your knowledge with everybody. It’s made everybody smarter about sports, which is why I love the title of your new book. “Smarter About Sports:” Andrew Brandt, of course, VP with the Green Bay Packers from 1999 to 2008. All of your amazing work at ESPN. And I love what you’re doing today. Now, you’re helping the next generation at Villanova as the executive director of the Sports Law Center.

Brandt: Great to be with you, Tyler. I’ve known you for a long time. I’ve enjoyed working with you. And it’s been, I think really since I left the Packers some 16 years ago, I’ve just tried to do this. And this meaning, make people smarter about sports through TV, radio, podcasts, all my writing first for National Football Post, then for ESPN, then for Sports Illustrated. Now I do the Sunday Seven newsletter and the podcast and all the appearances I do. And, of course, students. I’ve probably taught 1,000 students over the years. And when I started thinking about a title for the book, I’m like, yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to do that in 20 different ways in my life now. Let’s just sum it up there with “Smarter About Sports.”

And I’ll get right to it, Tyler. The one thing I thought I could do is (write a book) through stories that only I can tell. These are stories that only I can tell and there are hundreds of them, literally. There’s more than 100 stories in the book. That’s the way I teach in front of my classes. That’s the way I lecture when I talk to corporations. It’s stories. I’ve found in life that what resonates more than anything in terms of learning is a story. Not just standing up there and telling theory. Not just saying this is the way you should do something. It’s through stories. So that’s what the book is. Through my entire life. And as you’ve seen so many chapters — I know a lot of people want to talk about the Packers. That’s just part of it in the way I’ve sort of lived my life through these different angles in sports. And I hope it’s instructive and informative and certainly entertaining for anyone interested in the business of sports, the law of sports, the sociology of sports, sports policy, and of course working in sports. I hope it’s great for everyone.

I love that approach, Andrew, because it’s visual. We can picture you in these situations. It’s easy today when a contract goes down or somebody gets suspended or anything happens in pro football and you got ChatGPT, you have Google, AI and badabing, badadboom, we think we know everything in that 1.2 seconds it takes for something to get spit out. That’s not going to tell you anything. You lived it. You were at the negotiating table literally with some of the biggest names in sports. You had to roll up your sleeves at times. That’s where you learn how this stuff really goes down, isn’t it? It’s not just being a self-anointed expert on the subject, which there are plenty of those in NFL media today.

Brandt: When I started tweeting when I first left the Packers, all of a sudden people are like, “Wow.” And I’m thinking, “Everyone knows this.” And I’m finding out, no. No one knows this. And this is hard to explain right now, but things that really go on in the inner-workings of sports that I would decide to tweet about or write about when I first started doing media. And people are like, “I didn’t know that. I had no idea.” And I’m like, “You didn’t? You didn’t know that these NFL contracts aren’t guaranteed. You didn’t know that you can cut a player and never owe them any money, even a veteran after three years of a contract?” So these are little things.

And when I put this book out, I think I was talking to Trey Wingo or Jim Rome or somebody and they go, “Andrew, do you know that the magnitude of people you’ve been around your whole life, no one gets to be around this sort of panoply of football, basketball, all this and people in the business and Gary Vee. Spending two years with him. I’m like, “Yeah, I mean, I just do it.” And my editor’s like, “What are you thinking when you’re with David Falk and Michael Jordan? What are you thinking when you’re hanging out with Gary Vaynerchuk? What are you thinking with Brett and Aaron?” I’m like, “I’m not thinking. I’m just doing.” And my life advice at the end of the book is, just do. Don’t talk about it. Don’t ruminate about it. Just do. Mood follows action. And the people that get stuck end up in whatever — low levels of depression — because they just can’t move. So everything to me is onward and I talk about that throughout the book.

Where do you want to start, Andrew? What really inspired you to dive into this world? I know you’ve been all over the place. We got into it on the Happy Hour. Across the Atlantic as well. But where would you point to as Point A — “OK, I love sports. I want to be involved with sports and I want to go this different route?”

Brandt: Early on. I was a big sports fan growing up in DC, two teams that have different names right now. One was the Redskins in football and one was the Bullets in basketball. Season tickets. A huge sports fan. Went to Stanford, came back to law school in my hometown of Washington DC. And luckily for me, there was this firm down the road called ProServ. It’s no longer, but they represented athletes. And I always sort of went through life like — as a young kid even— would there be a way to sort of marry this love of sports, I’m never going to be a pro athlete, with a law degree or business, anything? And the agent world was not that established then. There were some agents, but it was like, maybe. So I go over to this firm and I was a tennis player and they ran tennis tournaments. And more importantly, I was a ball boy for the big Washington DC tennis tournament every summer that they ran and they’re like, “Yeah, OK kid. Come on in, do some stuff for us.” And that led to sort of an unpaid internship and here I go.

After law school, finally got the job. And I tell people that I chose a sports agent life over being a “real lawyer.” And even as a young kid, I’m like, “I’ve got to think about this.” Because everyone’s like, “Yeah, you want to hang out with athletes, not stuffy lawyers.” But for anyone thinking about it, I gave up a tremendous amount of money and a tremendous amount of security and a life that would be stable in a law firm. And I went the sports route and I did because of this passion for sports. But I learned quickly, as I tell throughout the book, the glamor of working with high-profile athletes, that wears off in about two weeks. And now you’re just working for clients and you’re being an agent, and that’s a theme of the book, first sort of chapters of my career beyond Barcelona, are all being agent work.

You think it’s the player, but it’s often the wife, the girlfriend, the wife and girlfriend, the father, the cousin, the AAU coach, the friend, the half-brother, the half-sister, the half-stepbrother. And you take on what I call “the herd.” Being an agent is a tough life because you’re not just beholden to the client. You’re beholden to all these people that are around him and want you to answer the questions. And many times I had to be the “no” guy. Usually, it’s about money. But sometimes about other things. And that’s what the client is paying you to do. So I learned working at the foot of David Falk, the NBA superagent with Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, all these great clients. And that was a learning experience for me. And I learned I’ve got to be my own person. I can’t do the style of David who was a very relentless negotiator and used the leverage of Michael in ways that I could never do. I don’t have the ego for that. But I learned what not to do and also what to do. Sort of the beginning of my career as an agent, I was very blessed to be around superstars in that world.

You glossed over two pivotal moments in your life, too, where you truly did bet on yourself. An unpaid internship. I imagine that was a pivotal moment to pour yourself into something and know you’re investing in yourself. And then get into that decision to go the sports route where, yeah, you can have a cushy job and make God knows how much money and see in the future clearly where you’re going to be, how much you’re going to make, a sense of security. But you bet on yourself at that point, too.

Brandt: And then you look for opportunity. I have this phrase in the book. A Stanford professor said it to me: “Allow in your life for serendipity.” And David Falk was so invested in the NBA and I was representing NBA players, including the first client I had — the only client I could ever look down upon — named Muggsy Bogues. He was 5 foot 3. He was my first client in basketball. Twelve pick overall with the Washington Bullets.

I saw these football players. I saw NFL players no one had ever heard of, but I’m like, “No one’s paying attention to them. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” Look at me. I never played football, but I’m like, “I love football. I’ll do it.” And that began my career as a football agent. Only because I saw opportunity at a young age. I’m like, “I could be in this NBA and learn from David, of course. But no one’s taking care of those guys.” So I went over there and in seven years I went from three to five to 10 to 15 NFL players. So there is a little serendipity.

Then I’m doing a contract with the Minnesota Vikings and the general manager at the time named Mike Lynn kind of looks me up and down after the negotiations says, “Hey Andrew, you speak Barcelonan?” I said, “What is that?” He said, “Spanish.” That led to him offering me the first general manager job of the Barcelona Dragons of the NFL World League. And I, again, young, single, allow for serendipity. I said, “Yeah.” And I left the agent side, the player side for the first time in my career. There would be another time going to the Packers. But I’m like, “Why not? Why not?” And now I’m in Barcelona where they’re cheering at the wrong times and they’re doing the wave the entire game long and they have no understanding. It’s the hardest thing I ever did, Ty. So at age 29, I’m a GM trying to sell tickets where no one understands the game. They do the Olé song the whole game long. Our first touchdown, they have polite golf applause. And then our kicker kicks the extra point and they go nuts. I’m like, “Where are we?” That steeled me for a life that was never as hard as that.

Working for the Green Bay Packers compared to that? That was a great experience. Then I’m back to the agent business. I’ve got a guy named Ricky Williams, the best client I ever had, Heisman Trophy. Three months later, he fires me for Master P and I’m like, “Who’s Master P?” He says, “A rapper.” I said, “What’s going on?” He goes, “I don’t like the company you’re with. I like you. You want to work for Master P?” I’m like, “P? Me?” He said, “Yeah.” And again, serendipity. The exact same time, Ty, the exact week — like a day later — the Green Bay Packers are calling me. I had some Packers over the years. No one great. I had third-string quarterback at the time: Matt Hasselbeck. And they’re like, “How’d you like to switch sides?” And I said, “What? You talked to 100 agents. Why me?” And you know what? Ron Wolf said, “Listen, Hasselbeck and these guys really like you. You have a nice way of dealing with people. You know your way around these contracts and we want to get more agent-friendly. What better way than to hire an agent?” And then it’s talking to my wife. We’re both east coast people. I decided to leave the agent business. Ricky was obviously a determining factor. But I think it was time. I had a young family. It was time to get off that train and it’s a little more secure life, albeit in a place we’d never, ever considered living. We moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin. And obviously of my 16 chapters in the book, I have four on my life in Green Bay. Which again, as I call it in the first words I talk about Green Bay, the best story in sports — 100,000 people, a city thriving, not just competing, but thriving in the NFL. If anyone out there can think about a city near them with 100,000 people. Can’t imagine having an NFL team, and I talk all about that.

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Like you said, it’s truly one of the best stories in sports. To live that up close, what does that look like? Because you hear how they’re publicly owned and there’s no owner to report to. But day to day, month to month. I was out there at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for five years and I’m seeing it to an extent, but I’m still on the outside. What makes it different than any professional sports team to you, Andrew?

Brandt: Well, I didn’t grow up with a history of it. So I get out there and, first of all, it was just the bowl before our renovation. It was like a high school stadium. I’m like, “This is where the Ice Bowl was? What?” And then everyone can talk about this where you’re driving down a residential neighborhood and there’s Lambeau Field out of nowhere. You realize, “Oh, this is a little different.” And then I’m looking out my window the first weeks and I’m like, wait a minute, these people are driving up and actually genuflecting to the building. There’s something different here. Like our GM, like our coach, I had tremendous autonomy. And if I did a $5 million contract or a $50 million contract, there’s no one up there somewhere saying, “Hey, great job. Bad job, Andrew.” I was trusted to do that, just like our personnel was trusted on the player side or coaching on the coaching side. No owner.

Now we had a board of directors, we had an executive committee, but they were pretty rubber-stamping most of what went on over on the football side. They got involved on the business side, pro shop, concessions, parking, et cetera. So I wasn’t awed by it. I appreciated the magnitude of it, the vast Packer Nation. I tried to operate: “What would the shareholders want?” I think working for the Packers is like working for a public trust. It really is. This is important to people and I never lost sight of that.

And then, of course, the unique things about living in Green Bay where I’m pumping gas and someone says: “Hey, how’s that Donald Driver contract going?” Or, I tell the story of trying to make a trade and my phone went out and I go to this ranger station. I’m in the middle of the park and I said, “Hey, I’ve got to make a trade. I’m with the Green Bay Packers.” He looks at me like, “Who the F are you?” So I finally go right up to him. I’m actually in my swim shorts and I look at him and I say, “Listen, we’re trading David Bowens to the Buffalo Bills, but I’ve got to do it right now.” And then I knew I had him, when he looks at me, he goes, “We’re trading Bowens?” And I said, “Yes, if you let me use your phone.” “Why are we trading Bowens? He’s good.” I said, “Listen, let me do it.” And then I come back the next day, he’s got the paper and I sign it about the trade, but this is Green Bay. It was truly unique. And what I detail in the book, I’m trying to be very vulnerable too, because I think the things that we sort of loved in our early time in Green Bay kind of pushed us out.

I couldn’t go out of my house after a while and not be asked about the Packers. Just socially. It’s so insular with that team. I’ve never seen a community wrap itself around a team — pro, college, high school, and nothing’s wrong with that. People are nice, but I want a little more diversity for my family, but also for my life. For my life. I wanted to do more. I had done all the contracts. I had done all the cap management. I’d done Brett’s $100-plus million dollar contract. I had done A.J. Hawk’s, one of the biggest rookie contracts. I’d done all the small contracts. The cap’s in good shape. I’m like, “Yeah, this is enough.” A lot of people I know in the NFL are lifers and then that’s fine. That’s for them. This was never going to be a life for me. It was a chapter, and actually four chapters of the book. But a special place. And obviously I talk about the highlights everyone wants to talk about with Brett and Aaron and everything else as well.

Win or lose, you can feel the community take on the result. I still remember when they lost to San Francisco — the 2013 season. It was frigid at Lambeau Field, the wild card game. And the next day it was even colder. I don’t know how they would’ve played a football game. It was negative-30, no wind chill. Negative-50 something with the wind chill. And a depression sets in when they lose in the playoffs and it’s cold and there’s nothing to distract you from that result. It can be extreme both ways. But like you alluded to, you were around for Brett Favre and some magical moments there. Then transitioning to Aaron Rodgers — and you write about this in the book — you were close to both. You’re in a really tough position there as they’re making this move to Aaron Rodgers. Start with Favre, what was that relationship like? How did you get to know him?

Brandt: This may disappoint readers, but I am extremely positive about both those men. I mean, Brett was the biggest thing in sports. Obviously this is pre-social media. But he was Mahomes, he was Brady, he was Michael Jordan when I got there. The lines when we pulled into hotels just to get a glimpse of him. And just a couple things to note that you never read about. Brett was a prisoner of the hotel when we traveled. He couldn’t go out. He was too big. But he loved the production meetings. So for people who don’t know, it’s CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN, the day before the game, they sit with the visiting team and they request the head coach, they request another player, and they always requested Brett. And Brett always wanted to go last because he just loved talking ball with Troy Aikman, with Cris Collinsworth, with Matt Millen, and especially John Madden.

And I remember so many times we’d get together for a 7:30 or 8 p.m. meeting on a Saturday night or a Sunday night and everyone’s like, “Where’s Brett? Where’s Brett?” And he’s still talking ball with Madden or Collinsworth or Phil Simms. He loved it. He was a coach’s kid. And speaking of coach’s kid, I’ll never forget that day. I’m in Oakland where, on Sunday, we get the day off. We have a Monday night game and his agent Bus, who I talk to all the time, he’s like, “Where’s Brett?” Bus is usually a jovial guy. He called in a panic, “Where’s Brett?” “I don’t know. It’s his day off.” He says, “Irv died.” And Irv was not only Brett’s dad, but well known around the team. Kind of a fixture in the locker room. And I’m like, “Oh.” So anyway, long story short, we finally found him. Where else? On the golf course. He doesn’t have his phone. He never had his phone, but we got Doug Pederson on the phone and Deanna told Doug. Doug passed the phone to Brett and he came back and, Ty, I’ll never forget it. We caught him right in the lobby and he said, “Listen” — he’s in tears — but he said, “Before you go on, I’m going to play. I’m going to play tomorrow night.” Those was his first words. Then we bring him in front of the team. He said that about his Dad. How his Dad wanted him to play and there wasn’t a dry eye in that house. And then of course, as everyone knows, the magical game against Oakland, that Monday night where the balls fell out of the sky.

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And then I went to Mississippi for the funeral, a few of us, and that was a different Brett. This was no superstar. He didn’t speak, but he was a friend. He was a neighbor. He was a son. He was a community member. He was just Brett in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. That taught me a lot. And then sort of getting to know him as things were going late in his career about, “I know it’s going to end,” and then being with him as he was retiring, but then he wanted to come back. I’ll say this. One thing I try to point out in the book is that these are people. Sometimes in sports, we just think they’re automatons. They’re people. Forget about drafting, I’ve told this story many times about drafting Aaron, and he was the only one on the board that we had a first-round grade on. And combustion in the room. Should we take him? Should we go to our second-round grades, et cetera. But everyone turned away.

And then it’s three years. Three years where it’s myself and John Schneider, Reggie McKenzie, we’re managing this. And this is Brett and Aaron. Nowhere in life would you put a country Mississippi guy in a room with Northern California cool for five hours a day. Nowhere. And Brett’s calling me and his agent’s calling me all the time like, “Hey, Andrew, do you know what it’s like sit in a room and sit with your replacement every day? It’s no fun.” And Aaron’s camp is calling: “Andrew. He’s never going to retire. What are we doing?”

And I just tried to be professional and patient and tactful and like, “Yes, I get it. This is hard, but listen, there’s going to be a change. We just don’t know when.” And that was the hardest part. See, again, the world turns away. Oh yeah, Brett’s got a backup and Aaron. And then all these people like, “Aaron’s never going to play.” Aren’t you going to get a Kerry Collins kind of a stopgap” Jeff Garcia? I said, “No, no, no. We’re going to Aaron.” And people couldn’t believe us. You’re going to a rookie? Or he wasn’t a rookie by then, but “Yes! Yes!” This was not like all the other Packer quarterbacks, including my former client, Matt Hasselbeck, where they were picked to be traded. This was a real guy. And the transition, of course, the messy divorce. Like you said, I was close to both sides and it was tough.

Back to Brett. Bus called me that June 20th, 2008. He had just gotten out of Mike McCarthy’s office and he was crying. And I said, “What’s up, Bus?” I was hiking on the mountain somewhere. And he said, “McCarthy just told us three words: ‘We’ve moved on.’” Imagine the face of a franchise for 16 years hearing that. So this is what you learn working in sports.

That’s phenomenal. I remember being an intern that summer in ‘08 for the Shawano Leader and the Packer Report as a sophomore in college just living out of a hotel. What a baptism by fire to cover the NFL. It was madness. And my naivety, I’m thinking how Brett was thinking. He wants to play, he should play. Look at the accomplishments. You were one throw from the Super Bowl. You’ve got a team that went 13-3. The conviction that the Packers showed in that moment…

Brandt: And we heard it. You should’ve heard my voicemail. It was nothing like Ted Thompson’s. It was 95 percent Brett. Everybody couldn’t believe it. And I told Aaron, to just keep his head down. Aaron became a favorite of ours pretty soon after he came in. He had a wry sense of humor, smart off the charts, physical skills, amazingly spinning the ball. We loved Brett and we loved Aaron. And that’s what happens in sports sometimes. It’s not an either-or. It’s how do we make this transition as gracefully as we can? And then they’re trying to get Brett to be an ambassador, but he wanted to play. So obviously we traded him to the Jets. And then again, I am positive about both those because I saw their impact. This is what sports can do. I called it the “afterglow.” When Brett or Aaron were brought over to children, especially developmentally disabled children or people who were disabled, it wasn’t perfunctory for either of them. Either of them. They spent time. I always called it the afterglow. So when Brett walked away or Aaron walked away, my eyes would focus on the family and that beaming — that beaming — I don’t know what else can do that. A sports superstar like those two, and they were both great at it, like great, never feeling like it was something they had to do. And you appreciate those things when you’re around people like that.

Both unbelievably charismatic in their own ways too, and both very demonstrative on the field in their own ways where Brett’s going to tackle you in the end zone and Aaron will let you know if you screw up. But they wear their emotions on their sleeves.

Brandt: A lot of people are like, “Well, see what they’re spewing out of their mouth this part of their careers and lives.” And I’m like, “Listen, I don’t know them the way I knew them then.” Yeah, I’ve stayed in touch with Brett. I’ve stayed in touch with Aaron, but I’m not here to talk about what they’re talking about politically or anything else. I’m here to talk about what I knew and saw in this developmental time in both my career, Aaron’s career, at the end of Brett’s career. And again, no one really can talk about that in the way that I can, and I try to be very honest.

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That’s what’s so great about your book, too. You do bring it full circle to where Aaron — toward the end of those Packer years — didn’t understand how good he had it. The grass isn’t always greener. He’s definitely living that reality. Lo and behold, he’s come full circle with Mike McCarthy in Pittsburgh, which I never would’ve foreseen.

Brandt: It’s great to see them back together.

But it is interesting the way he broke into the NFL is exactly how Jordan Love broke into the NFL. Waiting three years, developing. I don’t think it should have been a surprise when Brian Gutekunst was ready to move on, but he was surprised. He kind of wanted something on the other side where he’s more appreciated. Can you glean anything on what it’s like behind the scenes in Green Bay?

Brandt: Brian is a disciple of Ted and Ted is disciple of Ron. I think the one thing that people have to understand about the Packers, it’s football. And this is what makes it so different than any other team. And I detail why my job was so different than my colleagues at every other team. It’s all football. The money’s not going to some yacht. The money’s not going to some vacation spot, the kids’ houses. It’s all back into the team. And having said that, you get guys like Ted or Brian Gutekunst — it’s all scouting. They’re in their element in a dark room looking at players on the screen. And maybe they’re not the most warm and fuzzy. I mean, Ted relied on John Schneider, myself. Massage things with agents, massage things with players. That wasn’t his forte. And I think Brian’s a little more personable than Ted was, but yeah, I guess Aaron could say, “Hey, these guys aren’t warm and fuzzy.” Yes, they’re scouts. That’s what they do.

You’ve got to make those hard decisions. At his airing of grievances, that press conference, he’s rattling off those players that they let go. Tom Silverstein pointed it out to Aaron in the moment he’s like, “Aaron, Ted was right in a lot of those cases.” You’ve got to make the hard decision.

Brandt: What’s so amazing is obviously I was long gone by then, but I think it was 15 years to the day they chose Jordan Love. And I’ve said this. There’s no team in the NFL except the Packers that even has a quarterback sit for one year. I think Pat Mahomes sat one year behind, but he played at the end of the year. Three years! Imagine that. Three years is just an amazing stat. I put a stake in the ground. That’s never going to happen again — unless it’s the Packers.

When you don’t have an owner breathing down your neck forcing this to happen — that’s a real thing — you can make these prudent patient decisions.

Brandt: Yes, exactly. And I’m so proud to have been part of one of those because we were patient. Ted was in the face of all the things I talked about: How dare you do this? He just stood forthright. And of course, Aaron turned out pretty good. And Jordan, too.

Ted Thompson, Brian Gutekunst both to make that decision. It wasn’t easy. I remember the shareholders meeting that summer, too. Fans going right up to Ted with the petitions. Booing him relentlessly. It had to have taken such a toll on him. He’s so stoic and he would never bleed in public. You’d never know. And then just a few years ago, Aaron Rodgers puts it out there, I want the GM fired to return. But that’s why GMs are GMs, coaches are coaches, players play. And there’s all these variables and all these moving parts to put together a winning football team.

Brandt: Yeah. And since I’ve left, I’ve never really wanted to be back with a team. I talk about a couple when Al Davis called me. For me, it was a chapter of my life and it was enjoyable and unique. Especially working for the Packers. But I was on to other things. It was time for me to move on to other things. And when I went back to Green Bay for the first time, I remember seeing all my friends on the team and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re surprised you stayed as long as you did.”

Even Ron Wolf — my mentor — people think he was there a long time. He was there nine years. Nine. Mike Holmgren, seven years. All these great people have come through Green Bay, but they don’t stay that long because people are moving around. And as I said, truly unique. All of us were in this fishbowl. All of us came from somewhere else. And it was a truly unique place to live where I talk about being a fish out of water and my first banquet. I go to a team banquet — a supper club, not a restaurant. And there’s a huge glass in front of me of whole milk. And I’m like, milk? I take a sip. Here comes a guy filling up the milk. I’m like, “that’s different.” I’ve never been used to something like that. Ron takes me out to lunch at some sandwich place, puts down $5. I’m like, “Yeah, that’s nice. A decent tip.” She comes back with change for two sandwiches and a Coke. I’m like, OK, this is a little different, this place. But I have nothing but warm feelings about the people, the team, the city and the region. So great.

Can’t thank you enough for taking some time. Everybody out there listen and watching — “Smarter About Sports,” Andrew Brandt. I’m reading it now. It’s phenomenal. We are just scratching the surface on your stories. The Ricky Williams stuff, Master P, all of that, I could listen to those stories forever. So do yourself a favor out there and make sure you buy a copy today. Amazon, Barnes & Noble. Do you want send folks anywhere?

Brandt: Well, obviously Amazon’s the easiest. There is a website, smarteraboutsports.com. And I know a lot of people listen to me on your pod that are in and around the Green Bay area. So I’m coming out. So I just did a couple signings. I’m coming out to do it Cowboys weekend. So the game is Sunday night. Saturday in Appleton (Oct. 17) at Barnes & Noble. Saturday afternoon in Green Bay — Lion’s Mouth Bookstore. And then Sunday (Oct. 18), Barnes & Noble Green Bay. So you’re going to have three chances if you’re around the Packers area on Cowboys weekend, October 16, 17, 18. So I want to get that out there. I’ll be there within a month for three signings.

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