Hey guys, this is Albert. We're going to kick things off of my takeaways, not just on

Divisional Playoff weekend, but also on the NFL's hiring cycle, wrapping up over the course

of the last couple of days. We'll get to our special guest. We'll be breaking down the

divisional games with him to in addition to talking about what happened on Monday night

in the college football championship and as always we wrap things up with your

questions in the mailbag. Let's go.

All right, welcome in. It's the MMQB podcast with Albert Breyer. Divisional Playoff Weekend is in the books. The AFC championship, the Chiefs and the Titans, is set as is the NFC championship between the Packers and the Niners.

All that's coming this weekend. We're going to talk about all of that. We'll talk about the college football championship with our special guest as well as everything that's going on in the NFL.

We start with my takeaways, takeaway number one from this week.

The San Francisco 49ers are back in the NFC championship game.

After a six year hiatus and what they've been able to do there over the last three years under John Lynch Kyle Kyle Shanahan, Adam Peters is absolutely outstanding.

And I'll tell you what, I'm going to give credit to the guy in charge here, Jed York, who was smart enough to recognize three years ago,

I need to get out of the way. They have gotten close to the mountaintop with Jim Harbaw and Trent Balke.

There are internal issues between Balke and Harbaw.

And through that, Jed York tried to hang on to what they'd built and so he tried to pair

Balke with Jim Tom Sewell who just wasn't a head coach tried to pair

Balke with Chip Kelly and through iteration after iteration it was sort of like this

implicit message to everyone. This isn't about us. It's about single people. Our program still works. And I'll give them all the credit in the world for in 2017 sitting there and saying to himself, saying to himself, I got to blow this

thing up. I got to blow this M.F. thing up. And I got to start over and I got to empower people.

And I got to bring in a coach who I believe we can build around and who I believe

deeply enough that we can build around that I'm going to let him help build around

him. And so what they do? They brought in John Lynch, who played for Kyle's dad, Mike, in Denver. They brought in another guy with Denver Connections and Adam Peters to run the personnel department. And since then, what you've seen is every player who's come in has come in with a purpose,

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