This is the Athletic Football Show.

Welcome to the Athletic Football Show.

Today's Thursday, March 31st.

I'm Robert Mays. Join me today.

My good friend, Lindsay Jones. How are you doing? I'm great. I am freshly back from the owner's

meetings. It was a really productive couple days, but now we've got more crazy news because the NFL

cannot go more than about, I don't know, 17 minutes without shocking breaking news developments.

So I promised you guys that me and Nate

were going to break down the quarterbacks today. Unfortunately, Bruce Ariens had other plans

last night. I got a message from Marissa. She was like, all right, what are we going to do about

this? I was like, oh, God, what happened now? And the timing of it is just crazy. I mean,

obviously, the details here, Bruce Ariens is retiring. He is stepping into the Bucks front office. Todd Bowles is taking over as the Bucks head coach. A lot of things that we can dig into here. But when you heard the news, I mean, what do you make of this? What was your first reaction? Well, so it literally popped up the second that my flight landed home from Palm Beach.

I had the Wi-Fi going. And so I would have seen it, I guess, while I was in the air. But it was

literally like as our plane touched down. And there were a bunch of Broncos personnel folks on my flight

home. And a couple of them were sitting near me in the Economy Plus section, George Payton, I believe, was up in first class.

But we kind of like we're all standing up to get our bags and we're kind of all looking at each other like, whoa, wow, you know? And I think it's one of those moves that's like, it's surprising but not shocking. It's another one of those like, yeah, I mean, he's one of the oldest coaches in the league. He's accomplished a lot. He's gone through a lot of health issues. He left the owner's meetings early this week. He was there Sunday and through Monday morning and then he left. They said this is not health related. But, you know, you do have to say, okay, you know, he's, you know, he's, I don't know if any of us thought he would how long he would coach in Tampa after he already had taken kind of a brief retirement after leaving Arizona. So it was like surprising in the timing of it all. And I think there's a lot of stuff that will go that goes into that and questions that come after that because of, you know, it's really rare for a guy to leave a team on March 30th. right? And I think a lot of that is going to get answered, hopefully, by Bruce Ariens and Todd Bowles and Jason Light. Today, they are going to be doing kind of a joint news conference in Tampa later after we're done recording. But yeah, so I guess it was just like, you know, wow, here's another, here's another huge move. And this is a franchise that has kept us on our toes for months from Tom Brady retiring to not retiring to them bring, you know, who are they bringing back?

And now all of a sudden a major coaching change.

If you told me the broad strokes of this that Bruce Ariens was retiring after three years in Tampa, that they had won a Super Bowl

and that one of his coordinators was taking over for him. I wouldn't blink an eye. I assume that's always what the plan was. Initially, I thought it would be Byron Lefich. I thought that that was part of the reason that Bruce wanted to come back was to give Byron a chance to call plays and kind of set him on this path. it makes sense that it's Todd Bulls, we can get into some of the details of that later.

The broad strokes, I totally understand.

The timing is strange.

We don't often see this.

...