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This is the athletic football show.

Welcome everyone to the Football GM podcast, Mike Sando here from The Athletic, along with the GM, Randy Mueller. How are you, Randy?

Doing great, Mike, fired up, got a great playoff slate in front of us. I don't know why. Maybe I'm just a dork, but I get excited about these things, right? I love to talk about it, especially this time of year. We'll see where it goes. If you're a dork, I don't know what that makes a media guy like me, but probably several levels of that. But I love the, I love, I love all the

transitions to the different seasons, offseason, training camp, all of it. But after, you know, 18 weeks of regular season, I can't wait to have a condensed slate of games and really be able to watch all of them, you know, and really get into all of them. So we will talk about that today. Of course, we'll have our picks because I don't think we missed one all year. We're not going to start now. But first off the top, Randy, the DeMarne Hamlin news is so great that he's been released from a hospital. I mean, God, for as scary as that was, and we delayed or took off a show when that happened.

And then, you know, last week we were heartened with the news, and we were still a little uncertain if we'd be talking about.

But that's probably the best news of the day, huh?

Yeah, without a doubt.

I mean, for him to be completely free and released to his own, you know, to his own care is incredible. And I think

you can even parlay that into where the bills are right now. And I think we talked a little bit

about this last week, what it could do for them emotionally, spiritually, just coming together as a

team. I think this team's on, I think, on a role already. They've won a bunch of games in a row. So this is only going to help, I think, produce their best efforts, not having this burden to carry now. So I think it's good for everybody. Oh, the AFC is amazing. I mean, the Bengals have a chip on their shoulder because they kind of got the raw end of that seating thing. The bill's got to be on an emotional mission. And then the chief, don't forget about them. They're just the best team in the league most of years. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. By the way, I forgot about them already. Yeah. So I can't wait to see how that all plays out. We've got tons of news on the hiring, firing front. So we thought we'd start off with kind of the head coach hiring process underway. Nothing's going too fast at this stage, which is probably a good thing, isn't it, Randy? That sometimes people rush into these deals to win the press conference almost. It's a process't it yeah it's definitely a process there's a long

haul for a lot of these teams and anytime you rebuild or redirect pivot however you want to call it

these things happened but like i remember when i got the saints job in 2000 out of seattle we were still

talking around super bowl time and that was three weeks from now. So it is a long process.

Everybody's different.

I do think teams seem to act sooner than later nowadays.

They seem to have more of their ducks lined up.

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