Welcome to the Giants are world champions.

Welcome to the Giants Insider podcast on NBCSports Bay Area.com.

Introducing your host, San Francisco Giants Insider, Alex Pavlovich.

Hey, everybody, a little bit different podcast today.

I talked to Jeff Samarja, who is going to be part of the

Coaching Corps Game Changer Awards. They air Tuesday night, January 30th at 9 p.m. on NBC Sports Bay Area,

Jeff is going to honor his college football coach, Tyrone Willingham, who obviously had a huge impact on him.

And we got into that here, had a long discussion and talked about why he chose Willingham and then talked about his college

football career and being a two-sport star. It's something that he doesn't discuss a whole lot these

days. He does behind the scenes a little bit, but not publicly. I think he did that a lot when he was

younger, but it was fun to talk to him about Notre Dame and in that experience there. He was

really, really good as a college college player somebody who could have gone

pro in either direction chose baseball it obviously has worked out pretty well for him and and then

again because of what's happened lately we've had a lot of talk lately on this podcast about

wangoria mccutcheon jackson what comes next so i had to ask jeff about all that. And he is down there in Scottsdale.

He lives there. He's training down there. So ask him, what's the vibe down there? What's he

hearing from teammates? How are they feeling about the offseason? And I thought he had some

interesting things to say about what this team needs to do, especially in April and May and what

they need to do from the beginning of the season to make sure that it's not a repeat of last year.

So we talk some football, we talk some baseball.

Jeff is always a good conversation.

He won our good guy award last year for the media.

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