It’s my own fault, I know that. Nobody forced me to do it, I brought it on myself. For some reason, I keep listening to the Bill Simmons podcasts when he has Mike Francesa on to talk NFL playoffs and make their laughably bad picks.
If you haven’t listened to any of them, and I assume that the only people who do listen to them are me, Simmons and prisoners being tortured at Guantanamo Bay. I’m sure Francesa doesn’t listen. He wouldn’t know where to plug in his Philco to get a podcast, and, even if he did, he wouldn’t bother. In his own mind he drops pearls of profound wisdom for us all to scurry after to educate ourselves thanks to his big, throbbing football brain.
Francesa goes on these long, rambling and absurd explanations of how each game will go. Simmons does what he always does when he has a podcast guest. He fills any rare bout of silence with, “yeah.”
In the podcast that posted on Friday they had a long discussion about how when gambling is legal someday all across this country of ours, that there would be a riot if another situation came about when a point spread on a playoff game hinged on kicking an extra point after walk-off touchdown.
Francesa insists that the reason the NFL has the rule that teams have to attempt the point after touchdown even if a game ending score has already provided the winning margin is to avoid any appearance of purposely impacting a point spread.
That’s great. It’s also bullshit. The reason the NFL created a rule that teams have to line up and try the point after on a game ending touchdown is because point differential is a key tiebreaker in determining playoff qualification and seeding. The idea was not to cost a team an additional point that they might end up wishing they had because they scored to win a game as time expired.
Why the rule exists in the playoffs is just dumb, but the idea that it had anything to do with gambling is moronic.
Sure, anybody who had Minnesota -5.5 got screwed when Case Keenum took a knee on the PAT. But anybody who took the other side threw a parade. That’s how this works. People bet on both sides of a point spread. How would the nefarious NFL know which side to screw over?
When they kneel for the deciding point lol pic.twitter.com/UXD9sMevmJ
— Dan Steinberg (@dcsportsbog) January 15, 2018
I’ve never understood what attracts listeners to Francesa. He’s like (if this is possible) and even more condescending Dan Bernstein, only instead of throwing his Duke education at people he just name drops Bill Parcells. He became famous as part of a torturous duo Mike and Maddog, and now Maddog, Chris Russo kills an hour of MLB Network TV and radio every weekday. It’s not just that I don’t know anybody who enjoys Russo’s screaming hot takes on baseball1, I don’t know anybody who actually watches or listens to show.
As for Simmons, he’s somehow convinced two groups of people with cash to allow him to build masturbatory boutique websites that nobody reads. He fancies himself to be a expert on the NBA, which on the surface seems like it’s a thing, unless you actually know a lot about the NBA and then you realize he’s a mile wide and an inch deep.
Anyway, like I said it’s my own fault. Nobody forced me to listen to these podcasts. In fact, having Francesa and Simmons together in one place should make it easier to avoid both of them.
Then again, if I didn’t listen I wouldn’t have known that Simmons went 0-4 on his picks in the first round of the playoffs, and I wouldn’t have heard him absurdly say the next week, “And I wouldn’t change any of those picks.”
