AVOID RAMS

“Goodell's hugs. This has been weird the entire time he's been doing it and there's been a million comments and a million videos. The hugs have gotten longer. I think he's tried to figure out how he can. I I'd love for somebody to break this down the hugs from ten, twelve years ago to the hugs in 2026, because I think he's holding on longer. I think he's trying to make them more meaningful and they're starting to take on the vibes of somebody who's reuniting with their son, who just did a five year tour in Vietnam in the early seventies and came home. And they never thought they'd see their son again, and they see them and they're just hugging for ten, twelve seconds.”

“I had my left wrist one time, injury. I dove on a match point against Illinois in a long match there, and I landed on my wrist. And so I played the semifinal there against Schutler with basically a chip backhand, and I couldn't I I didn't really do much. It it came back. It wasn't anything that cost me any amount of time, but I think I had to pull out of maybe one event, missed three or four weeks, but it certainly wasn't on the right wrist, and it wasn't because of there there's a difference between, like, if you land on a wrist and you bruise it versus, like, your stroke production is grinding your wrist in a certain way that you can't get away from, which is which is very different. Mine was I landed. There was an injury. It wasn't based on the way I was hitting the ball like a team or maybe a one more team where, you know, your body just couldn't take that extreme stroke production.”

“The Halliburton shot, I really think is a sliding doors for this Knicks era because I I just think they probably win that series. I think that was such a bizarre basketball event. That's the weirdest collapse and that shot going up 30 feet and coming down and going in, and then the Knicks almost winning an OT. Just that whole game. I just feel like if we play that game 30 times, the Knicks probably win 29 of them. And maybe they make the finals last year instead of the Pacers. And then this is you're just thinking about this and talking about it completely differently.”

“I remember this is, like, the the shady shit that my mom Mhmm. She's like, if you ever have to vomit if you ever like, it's junior tennis. It's like, you know, you you're playing in, like, San Antonio where it's a thousand degrees and you happen to play 17 matches in a day as a junior. So if you ever have to vomit, go go in the middle of court. It's gonna take at least twenty minutes to clean it up. Your mom your mom said that? Yeah. My mom said that. That's next level. Yep. 100%. That's our upset of the day.”

“Vrabel is the coach of my favorite team. So this hap the whole story happens. And I was debating whether to talk about it on the pod, and it's just like, they're both married, both have kids. And then this week, it goes to a whole other level to the point that he really did become a football story this week. Because for one thing, he's missing the third day of the draft where the patriots had Apex. At some point This became one of the craziest Boston stories I think ever. I can't tell you how many texts I've gotten about it.”

“This is a Knicks team that has felt like they are one bad day away all season from never speaking to each other ever again. And maybe that is a little bit of projection on our part. Maybe that's a little body language doctoring here and there. But I don't know. They just don't feel connected in terms of the way that they play. And you can tell that when they really do run into walls, guys like Bridges feel completely iced out. They don't know how to contribute.”

“I would love Arkansas to tell us why other sports are losing more money and tennis gets cut. That's a very, very, very, like... we've made it a free market. We've made made it basically, we've made it acting inside of the bounds of of capitalism where if you have someone generating money and your sport's not... It's simply if we vote for this thing where people get paid, you can't act shocked when capitalism happens. Like, that's not we're not like, oh my god. How do how could we ever have figured this out? Well, when something's profitable, and I call these universities companies now because that's basically what they are.”

“I can safely say that we have the most intense testing in all of sports. Mhmm. I love being able to say that. Like, I like it. Is that worth an hour of my day when I was on tour? Yes. Do I do I think, and I don't know this, do I think that most of players want that peace of mind even if it's a complete and total invasion of privacy, pain in the ass? I was fine being inconvenienced to have the feeling of a cleaner sport. So we got a new poll question this week coming off the news of Alcaraz.”

“Economists make this distinction between stated preferences and revealed preferences. Stated preferences are what people say they want, and then revealed preferences are what people actually choose when they go out and buy something. And spirit hits both of those things. When you ask people on a poll or whatever what's most important to them when they pick an airline, they say, above all else, a low fare. That's a stated preference. And then more and more people are actually going out and buying tickets on Spirit Airlines.”

“Corey Goff got into the Good. Got into the replies, which I think it's since been deleted. But he wrote, I got time today. I guess you didn't see throwing up in the garbage with your egg head. It's so stupid. Like I love that he's defending his daughter. Go feed the trolls, man. Great dad. Like, what but also but also, like, online idiocy is sometimes Yeah. Undefeated. Like, there's a lot of great like, memes are great. There's there's a lot of value. Right? But, also, what has Coco done to ever make us think that she's gonna, like, grandstand on, like, an injury?”

“Literally three hours later, there is a Spanish player beating top 10 Alex Dimonor, like, in in an hour. Rafael Jodar is a teenager, mind you. A 19 year old from Madrid. I'll I'll I'll tell you this. Like, you look for certain score lines against certain types of players. The demon win was his first career top 10 win, and then currently, he has 17 wins in his first 25 career ATP matches. That's that's silly. That's a better start than Nadal, Federer, Novak, Alcaraz, Sinner, and Fonseca.”

“A little bit of a legacy series for our guy, Rudy. So he's made a second team on BA and two third teams. He's been defensive player of the year four times. Career is basically thirteen and twelve with two blocks. He's played eight to nine playoff games, two conference finals, twelve and eleven in the playoffs. With the declining line for hall of fame players in the NBA, as as we've continued to make it pretty blurry what a hall of fame player is. I actually think there's a chance he gets in.”

“I guarantee you they'll be back. They'll be back. Why are our flights all full? Because those people come back. They're getting mad because they have to, you know, get their credit card out or whatever and think that they're gonna get everything for free. Trust me, I I I know enough to know that people complain, they get off. I I remember faces. They come back on.”

“Budget airlines historically appeal to customers with limited income. And in our research, we have seen travelers who earn up to a $150,000 a year saying they've cut back on their leisure travel. They are traveling less often. They are, in some cases, foregoing air travel.”

“Loyalty programs play a huge role in allowing airlines like Delta and American and United to leverage their network size in ways that have nothing to do with actually offering higher quality service. In many cases, it was not changing the total offering at all, but simply giving one customer priority over another.”

“Well, if we were a retailer, we would, you know, some maybe some high service airlines in the world would think of themselves as a Nordstroms or something. And maybe, I bet if you were gonna talk to the guys at JetBlue, they'd say maybe we're Target or maybe even trying to become a little better than Target. We're Dollar General. That's where we are. We're not even Walmart. Right? We're Dollar General, and we like being Dollar General because we save people lots of money.”

“So the legacy airlines, they look at Spirit and other budget airlines, and clearly, they're eating their lunch. They're charging lower ticket prices upfront, and that seems to be working. So Delta and American and United, they also start throwing creature comforts out the window for passengers not willing to pay for them. And this way, they could also charge a lower upfront ticket price and compete for budget travelers.”

“They're elitist, and I will tell you why. That survey never asks customers about the price of their ticket. And since they don't ask about the price, it's absolute bunk. If you wanna tell me that an airline that has more legroom and serves you more on board and has nicer lighting on the airplane, is a better airline than ours, but forget to say they charge $400 and we charge $99? Why doesn't Consumer Reports put out a survey saying that a Mercedes s class is better than a Ford Focus?”

“The pit. I did two straight seasons in about five days, and now I just have a hole in my heart. It's so funny that they just unlock the strategy of, hey. It's gonna be a doctor series like everything else, except it's gonna be every hour, and it's gonna be grosser than a k than a network show.”

“Aaron Gordon, this is his twelfth year. He's played 756 games, 68 games. This is the first time I started thinking about a finish line with this nuggets run. Where Borden, who I think has just had a lot of nothing like a catastrophic injury, but some mileage and some, some dings and some banks on his body. And we might've seen the best version of him. So you have that you have joker. Who's been dominated in the 2020s. You have Murray with some miles on him. He had a knee surgery. Like I, I am a little worried about the long term with this team if they can't get out of this series.”

“It's expensive to carry bags. You hire people to load the bags. You you pay for bag belts in the airports and the rental space to do that. Every once in a while, you lose a bag or you break a bag, and so you have to have insurance to cover that. It is not free to carry bags, so you either charge the people who use it or you charge everybody whether they use it or don't. And we think it's fairer to charge customers for what they use and not charge them for what they don't use.”

“How many teams do you think are kicking themselves that they didn't go from a column anytime from November to February? At least a half dozen. And I think top of that list, it has to be the Houston Rockets. This is one that we flagged on group chat early in the season as far as, like, what should they do post Fred VanVleet's injury. CJ has just been sitting there on the shelf waiting for someone to trade for him. And I think a lot of teams overthought it.”

“He's the onion rings. It's like I don't even know if I should get these. You're glad you have three, and then you're like, I don't wanna keep eating these. This is just 900 calories. Why do and then you're having you're, like, half heartedly eating the fifth one.”

“I hate to say we can predict the future, but if you go back to last week's episode, what did I say the stadium looked like? Oh. What did I say it looked like? You said it looked like a Chipotle. It the stadium, Kahamajika looks like the inside of a Chipotle restaurant. People getting sick from tacos. I don't know. Get your get your hats. Get your tinfoil hats out. Just saying.”