Buy or sell their offseasons: The Middle Class
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2026
⏱️ 84 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our Buy or Sell Their Offseasons series moves on to The Middle Class, which features a couple of playoff teams from last season. Those teams, the Panthers and Steelers, are outside of the top two groups of teams for understandable reasons. They're joined here by the Saints, Commanders, Colts, Vikings, Buccaneers and Bengals. Did those eight teams do well for themselves during the player-acquisition period over the last three months? Robert Mays and Dave Helman make buy-or-sell calls on all eight of them on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.
Host: Robert Mays
Co-Hosts: Derrik Klassen and Dave Helman
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Senior Producer: Katy Duffy
Social Producer: Scott Krinch
Follow Robert on Bluesky: @robertmays.bsky.social
Follow Dave on Bluesky: @davehelman.bsky.social
Follow Robert on X: @RobertMays
Follow Dave on X: @DaveHelman_
Theme song: Haunted
Written by Dylan Slocum, Trevor Dietrich, Ruben Duarte, Kyle McAulay, and Meredith VanWoert / Performed by Spanish Love Songs
Courtesy of Pure Noise / By arrangement with Bank Robber Music, LLC
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:01.8 | I'm Robert Mays. |
| 0:03.1 | Keeping it going with our buying or selling off-season series today. |
| 0:07.8 | Last week, we did the rebuilding teams. |
| 0:09.7 | Today, it is the middle class. |
| 0:11.8 | Panthers, Saints, commanders, Colts, Vikings, Bucks, Steelers, Engels. |
| 0:18.4 | Today on our show, we're just running through like we did last week. |
| 0:22.1 | All eight of their off seasons, the moves that they made, are we buying or selling the |
| 0:26.4 | approach that these teams took in 2026? |
| 0:29.3 | That's me and Dave Hellman breaking it down right now. It is the second installments today of our buying or selling off-season show. |
| 0:47.5 | We're going to hit all 32 teams over the course of these four shows. |
| 0:50.9 | Last week, it was the Rebuilders, right? |
| 0:53.5 | The teams that are in transition, to say the very least, teams that are probably near the bottom when it comes to Super Bowl odds. Today, we move to the group that we are calling the middle class. This is going to be the first one where there might be some arguments about which teams should be in this group, but I think we do have a decent amount of plausible deniability |
| 1:12.2 | as to why we landed on these eight. |
| 1:13.5 | I would guess we're going to hear some things. |
| 1:15.2 | I mean, by my count, there's two 2025 playoff teams in this group |
| 1:19.7 | and at least another handful of teams that had high expectations |
| 1:24.3 | at one point during the season, whether it was the beginning or the middle. |
| 1:28.0 | So, yeah. |
| 1:29.3 | One of those playoff teams was below 500. |
| 1:31.7 | I didn't say they were great playoff teams. |
| 1:35.0 | I feel okay about that one. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Athletic, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Athletic and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.