Two hours and fifty minutes, transcribed from the ESPN simulcast, which runs on delay. Where the audio
is censored it is printed censored. Pat McAfee, AJ Hawk, Boston Connor Campbell, Ty Schmit, Tone Digz
DiGuilio and Darius Butler; the Toxic Table is off to Pat’s left and audible throughout. Cut for length.
The Cleveland block ran about thirty-one minutes and the middle four of them are printed whole.
12:01 p.m. · Open
McAFEE: Good morning beautiful people.. how are we, we are LIVE from the DraftKings Thunderdome in Lawrence, Indiana, it is Wednesday, we got a full show, and I want to start with Cleveland because I have not been able to stop thinking about Cleveland for about seven months and I think I’m allowed to talk about it now because the games are coming.
HAWK: You brought it up yesterday.
McAFEE: I bring it up every day, AJ! Every single day! Because I don’t think people have processed what happened. This dude — this dude, twenty-eight, never played, never coached, never worked in a building, made videos in an apartment — walks into an interview to be a SCOUT. A SCOUT! Not the head job. Not the GM job. He’s in there to talk about being one of the guys who drives around the SEC in a rental car eating gas station food, which by the way is a real f***ing job that real people do —
SCHMIT: The applicant.
McAFEE: — he applied for a DIFFERENT JOB and they gave him THE WHOLE THING. What’d you say?
SCHMIT: The applicant.
McAFEE: THE APPLICANT. That’s it. That’s what we’re calling him. Ty Schmit, undefeated. The Applicant is running the Cleveland Browns.
TOXIC TABLE: THE APPLICANT!!
BOSTON CONNOR: They love it.
McAFEE: They LOVE it. And listen — everybody wants to laugh at this, and I get it, I understand why the football people are losing their minds, I do. But I need everybody to remember something about me personally. I was a seventh-round punter. A punter! From West Virginia! And I got cut, and I got told a bunch of times by a bunch of people in nice suits that there was a way things are done and I was not it, and then I did a podcast in a barn and now I’m on ESPN.
HAWK: Here we go.
McAFEE: AJ, I’m serious! When I hear that a guy got told no at twenty-four because he’d never played, and instead of quitting he just kept posting for four more years, that’s — that’s the greatest s*** I’ve ever heard. That’s the whole thing. I know exactly what those four years were. Everybody in that guy’s life was asking him when he was gonna get a real job.
BUTLER: Nine years in the league, I never once met a scout who was nice to me.
McAFEE: [laughing] Darius Butler with the update.
BUTLER: I’m just saying. Man weighed me in college and wrote something down and never spoke.
TONE DIGZ: They’re not there to be your friend, D.
BUTLER: He could’ve said hello!
12:14 p.m. · The actual football, briefly
McAFEE: Now. The football is a disaster and I’m gonna be honest about that too, because I’m not just gonna sit here and be a fan boy. Three quarterbacks. THREE. Shedeur, Dillon Gabriel, and the rookie from Arkansas who ran a 4.3 at six-foot-six, which is not a real person, that’s a create-a-player —
BOSTON CONNOR: Taylen Green.
McAFEE: Taylen Green, thank you, Boston Connor. And none of them have taken it! Nobody’s taken it! It’s the nineteenth of August! And The Applicant will not name one and every single reporter out there is losing their mind about it and he keeps saying, in a very calm voice, that he’s not gonna name one because he hasn’t decided, which — I don’t know, that seems fine? That seems like a normal thing to say?
HAWK: It’s only weird because nobody does it. Coaches name a guy in week two of camp so the questions stop. It’s got nothing to do with the quarterback.
McAFEE: RIGHT! It’s a media management thing!
HAWK: It’s entirely a media management thing.
McAFEE: And then the defensive line. Oh my God. They had six guys out of a practice on one Wednesday, they traded Myles Garrett — the single best defensive player in that franchise’s history, a man who had twenty-three sacks in a season, which is INSANE, that’s an insane number — they trade him to the Rams in June and the whole thing now sits on Jared Verse, who I love, who is one of my favorite dudes in this league, and who is going to get double-teamed on every single snap from here until January.
BUTLER: Every snap.
McAFEE: And Denzel Ward got the richest corner contract in football from a general manager who got fired three days later, which is one of the funniest sentences I have ever read out loud, and everyone thinks he’s getting traded by November.
BUTLER: That’s the part I feel for. That’s a Cleveland guy. Grew up there, went to Ohio State, never played anywhere else, gets the biggest corner contract twice, and now every week somebody’s asking him if he’s getting shipped out. He hasn’t said one word about it either, by the way. Not one. That’s hard.
McAFEE: That is hard.
BUTLER: He’s twenty-nine. Nobody tells you where you’re going.
12:26 p.m. · The gear change
Printed complete. The room goes quiet at 12:26:40 and the crosstalk stops for four minutes.
McAFEE: All right. I want to talk about the other thing, and I’m gonna slow down, and I wrote some of this down last night, which I don’t normally do, and I’m gonna say why in a second.
McAFEE: On January 29th of this year the Cleveland Browns released Deshaun Watson. Two dozen women filed civil suits against him starting in 2021. Most of those were settled. Two grand juries declined to bring charges. The league did its own investigation and its own disciplinary officer wrote a decision, and the suspension ended up at eleven games and a fine. That’s the record. I’m reading you the record. I’m not giving you my opinion on it and I’m not gonna, because that’s not what I’m good at and I don’t think anybody needs it from me.
McAFEE: Here’s the reason I’m being careful. This show got something very wrong a couple of years ago about a young lady who did nothing to anybody, and we amplified it, and it took me way too long to say so, and I’ve thought about that family a lot. So when this stuff comes up now I read what the reporters wrote and I stay in my lane. That’s the whole policy.
McAFEE: What I will say — and this I’ll say all day — is what a twenty-eight-year-old did on his second day of employment. He stood at a podium in front of the entire country, on a Thursday, before he had hired an offensive line coach, and he said what he believed out loud without one single lawyer word in it. And every single person in that room knew what it was going to cost him. Every reporter in there knew. He knew. There is a version of that press conference where you say “we felt it was in the best interest of the organization to move on” and every person in football nods and you never hear about it again and your life is much, much easier.
McAFEE: He didn’t do that one. He did it on day two.
McAFEE: I don’t know if he’s gonna be a good football coach. I have no idea. Nobody does. But that took something, and I’m gonna say it took something, and then we’re gonna move on and we are not doing bits about this on this show. Not today, not in December, not ever. That’s it. That’s all I got on it.
HAWK: Yeah.
McAFEE: AJ, you got the other half of this and I want you to do it.
12:31 p.m. · Hawk, on what day two does to a room
HAWK: So the thing nobody talks about with that release is what it does inside a locker room, and I don’t mean morally. I mean logistically. Everybody talks about that room like it’s one guy with one opinion. It’s not. It’s sixty-something dudes who all want completely different things, and about forty of them are worried about making the team, so their opinion about anything is basically weather.
McAFEE: Sure.
HAWK: But here’s what happened in that building on the thirtieth. Everybody who works there — players, equipment guys, the people in the cafeteria, the video kids — found out on day two exactly what the new guy will do. Not what he says at the introductory thing. What he’ll do. And what he did was take the biggest financial hit anybody has ever taken on one player rather than have a guy in the building.
HAWK: That travels. That travels faster than anything a coach says in a meeting. I played for guys who told us in April what they stood for and then in November you watched what they did and it was a different list, and everybody clocked it, and nobody ever said anything, and that’s how you lose a team — quietly, nobody yelling about it, everybody just knowing.
McAFEE: And on the flip side — is there a guy in there who thinks, hold on, that was our quarterback?
HAWK: A hundred percent, and that’s the honest part. There’s definitely a vet in there who looked at that and went, well, there goes my season, because now I’m thirty-one years old on a team with three quarterbacks who’ve barely played? A guy with two years left can absolutely think that. That’s not him being a bad person, that’s a guy doing math on his own career.
HAWK: And also — I know a couple guys who were in that room in ’22 and ’23, and it was strange in there. It was strange the whole time. Guys had wives and sisters asking them about it. Nobody wanted to be the one to say anything so nobody said anything, and it just sat there for four years.
McAFEE: Yeah.
HAWK: So my guess — and it’s a guess, I wasn’t there — is that on the thirtieth a lot of people in that place were relieved and not one of them said so to a reporter, because what are you gonna say? There’s no good way to say it.
McAFEE: That’s a good point.
HAWK: That’s why nobody on that roster has said anything about it in seven months and everybody keeps writing that they’re being cagey. They’re not being cagey. There’s just nothing to say that doesn’t sound terrible.
12:38 p.m. · Back up
McAFEE: Okay. Buffalo’s in Berea today. Joint practices, two days, then they play Saturday, and I would like to formally request that somebody sends me every single clip from those two practices because Buffalo’s offensive line versus that Cleveland front is going to be a bloodbath and I want to see it.
BOSTON CONNOR: There’ll be a fight.
McAFEE: There’s ALWAYS a fight! Two days of joint practices in August, ninety degrees, everybody’s got a job to keep — somebody’s throwing hands by the second period on day two, it’s the most reliable thing in this sport.
TONE DIGZ: Put a line on it.
McAFEE: We are not putting a line on a fight, Tone. [BLEEP] me. Legal’s gonna call.
TOXIC TABLE: LINE ON THE FIGHT!
McAFEE: They’re degenerates and I love them. Hey — one more thing on Cleveland and then we’re doing the Aaron Rodgers stuff. If The Applicant is listening, and I have been told he watches this show, which is either the greatest thing I’ve ever heard or a serious problem for the Cleveland Browns —
HAWK: It’s both.
McAFEE: — come on the show. Any Thursday. We’ll talk about anything you want, I’ll ask you zero questions you’ve already been asked eleven hundred times, and Hawk will ask you about being twenty-eight and telling a thirty-four-year-old fullback what to do.
HAWK: I do want to know about that.
McAFEE: Everybody wants to know about that!
— 2:52:14 · the close —
McAFEE: That’s the show. Big one tomorrow, we got a guest I can’t announce yet and Ty is doing the thing with the chair again. Cheers, beautiful people. AJ Hawk, take us out.
HAWK: Real quick — the thing I said earlier about guys doing math on their own career, I don’t want that to sound like I’m saying anybody in Cleveland was upset about the release. I have no idea. I’m just saying there’s forty different things going on in a room like that at once and people forget it. All right. That’s our show. Buffalo in Berea, cuts are coming, be nice to somebody who’s on the bubble. Have a great day, everybody.
