Bill Barnwell returns to discuss lessons learned from the 2020 NFL season, and Jeff Zriebec joins for a Baltimore Ravens Team Visit
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2021
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Robert welcomes ESPN’s Bill Barnwell to the show to take a look back at the 2020 NFL season and discuss the lessons we’ve learned along the way, and what we should take with us into the future.
Plus, The Athletic’s Jeff Zriebec stops by for a Baltimore Ravens Team Visit to discuss how the current version of the team differs from the version they were during the first half of the season, Lamar Jackson settling in after returning from injury, playoff expectations, needs heading into next season, and more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the athletic football show. |
| 0:14.4 | Welcome to the athletic football show. |
| 0:16.5 | Fun show for you guys today. |
| 0:17.7 | Jeff Zerebeck is going to be joining us a little bit later, |
| 0:19.9 | our Ravens Ritter to do our Baltimore team visit heading into the. It feels like a team we haven't talked a lot about because they've just been beating up on really bad teams. I feel like it was a good time to kind of revisit the Ravens as they prepare to play the Titans. Before we do that, though, I wanted to do a wrap-up podcast for the 2020 season. When I was at The Ringer, I used to do a piece each year that was the lessons we'd learned from the season. I'm not doing that in a written form this year. So I wanted to do it on a podcast. And I felt like the person who could help give us the best perspective on what the 2020 season was and the takeaways we should have from it is my good buddy, Bill Barnwell. Bill, how are you? Always excited to teach some lessons, maize. Thank you for... You've taught me many, many lessons in my time. So I felt like it would be good to kind of give back and allow you to teach everyone else those lessons because... I think I'm going to teach you another lesson today. I'm sure you will. |
| 1:11.2 | So we each picked three. I'm sure we'll get into some smaller ones as we have this discussion. |
| 1:17.6 | But why don't you just start us off? If you were just kind of listening off, the first thing |
| 1:21.2 | you're going to take away and learn from this football season, what would it be? |
| 1:24.6 | My first lesson for 2020 is that we don't know anywhere near as much about quarterbacks |
| 1:32.5 | as we think we do. |
| 1:35.1 | And I think that's totally fair because mine is very similar to that. |
| 1:38.7 | So continue. |
| 1:39.6 | Well, what's yours? |
| 1:40.9 | Mine is that we have to reevaluate the way we think about, talk about project raw quarterback prospects. Okay. You start. I'm going to build off that, I think. You go first. Okay. Well, that's, so that's mine. And I think that if you look at, obviously, the person who's at the center of that is Josh Allen and what he has been this year. |
| 2:01.3 | And he hasn't just worked out. |
| 2:03.5 | He's turned into one of the most dangerous, efficient quarterbacks in the entire NFL |
| 2:07.2 | and turn the bills into a legitimate Super Bowl contender. |
| 2:10.3 | I mean, this is not a sneak into the playoffs. |
| 2:12.5 | Let's see what happens sort of team. |
| 2:14.7 | And I'll admit that I was wrong about Josh Allen coming into the draft. I'll admit |
| 2:19.1 | that I made the same amount of jokes that everyone else was making about Josh Allen because we had |
| 2:24.2 | seen versions of Josh Allen fail so many times before. And we had seen teams and organizations |
... |
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