Half-baked takes for the 2025 NFL season
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2025
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Some takes are meticulously crafted, with each ingredient perfectly balanced to create a rational, thought-out, deeply held belief. Others are slapped together, thrown in the oven for, you know, whatever length of time feels right, and dropped down on the table to consume at your own risk. These are the latter. Robert Mays, Derrik Klassen and Dave Helman offer up their half-baked takes for the 2025 season on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.
Rundown
7:00 Micah Parsons isn't getting traded and Jerry Jones isn't serious about winning football games (this is a fully baked take)
10:43 The Niners will win 12+ games
17:02 The Vikings will finish last in the NFC North
24:45 This is the year the Steelers crash out
35:42 The NFC will have massive playoff turnover this season
41:50 This is the season the Packers go nuclear
48:14 Abolish the draft so players like Myles Garrett don't get stuck on teams like the Browns forever
55:57 The NFL needs a leaguewide standardized bye week
1:05:40 Bo Nix was just kinda getting away with it last year, and that's not gonna happen this year
1:15:56 Zac Robinson is this year's Liam Coen
Host: Robert Mays
Co-Hosts: Derrik Klassen and Dave Helman
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Producer: Michael Beller
Subscribe to The Athletic Football Show
Follow Robert on Bluesky: @robertmays.bsky.social
Follow Derrik on Bluesky: @qbklass.bsky.social
Follow Dave on Bluesky: @davehelman.bsky.social
Follow Robert on X: @robertmays
Follow Derrik on X: @QBKlass
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 | Two Titans of Silicon Valley, one prize, dominance in the world of artificial intelligence. |
| 0:07.0 | Supremacy is the real story behind the struggle to own our digital future and potentially the very nature of human experience. |
| 0:16.0 | Supremacy by Parmy Olson, described as a riveting tale by the new scientist, winner of the Financial |
| 0:22.6 | Times Business Book of the Year, and now the Waterstone's nonfiction book of the month. |
| 0:27.5 | Listen to the audiobook of Supremacy Now. |
| 0:35.5 | Welcome to The Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays, one of my favorite shows of the year today. |
| 0:41.0 | It's our half-baked takes for the 2025 NFL season. These are things that we're marinating on. |
| 0:46.3 | You know, takes that maybe aren't fully formed, but we're slowly getting there. We've been sitting there ruminating on them. |
| 0:51.3 | I've had a lot of time in the car over the last couple weeks, and so I've just been sitting here, like, workshopping all of these. Me, Dave Hellman, Derek |
| 0:58.8 | Classen, the stuff that we're not all the way there on, and we can't be held to, but these are |
| 1:04.2 | some stray thoughts that we have about the 2025 NFL season. Really enjoy this conversation. Hope you guys |
| 1:10.4 | do as well. |
| 1:16.8 | Very excited to be back on the athletic football show today with my good friends, Dave |
| 1:22.0 | Hellman and Derek Klesson. I'll be honest with you guys, Dave. When I was listening to the DNA |
| 1:25.8 | Changer show, I can't remember where I was driving. It's all running together at this point. But I was listening to it in the car. I think I was going from Philly to New Jersey. And I very deeply had that feeling of Squidward looking out the window, looking at SpongeBob and Patrick playing, where I just felt very left out as you guys were having a good time. |
| 1:44.6 | I really appreciate you helping us out as I'm on the road, but there was some real |
| 1:49.3 | fomo going on as I was listening to you guys do the show. |
| 1:52.5 | That actually brings me full circle because that's how I used to digest the athletic football |
| 1:57.3 | show. |
| 1:57.8 | Like I used to listen in my car and want to chime in and be part of the fun. |
| 2:02.3 | So that's, that's, it's gratifying to hear. And yeah, that's, I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to contribute. And yeah, it'll, it'll be fun to have all three of us on a show. I tried my best to like spiritually get you in there. You know, there was a Will Fry's mentioned. You were kind of big on the Andrew Cisco signing when that happened. So I was trying my best to like make it feel like |
| 2:00.7 | you were kind of in there. |
... |
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.