The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, I'm Josh Levine, Slate's national editor and the author of The Queen.

This is Slate's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen for the week of December 9th, 2019.

On this week's show, Banner Society Spencer Hall will join us to discuss college football's anti-climactic championship weekend in the hopefully climactic college football playoff.

The athletics Wazni Lambray will also be here to talk about the surging Los Angeles Lakers.

And finally, the Wall Street Journal's Louise Radnowski will be here to explore figure skating's strange obsession with the music from Schindler's List. Joining me in Slate's Washington, D.C. studio, Stefan Fatsis, author of the book's Word Freak, and a few seconds of panic. Hello, Stefan. Hey, Josh. We had a good live show. We're going to now back promote the live show. That was good.

It was going to be good, and then it, in fact, was good. You cannot buy tickets to the live show at slate.com. You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts. You can do that. Good afterballs. Good afterballs. Guest was great. Don Harper Nelson. We're big Don Harper Nelson fans now. going to hope to bring her back on the show in the spring as she is mounting her comeback.

And this show is going to be good, too. You can't buy tickets to it, though. Just continue listening. Stefan, we do actually have one thing to announce, which is that we're going to do a call-in show, year-end thing. We're at least going to get calling questions. It'll be updates. Our discretion, whether to do the call-in show. We'll probably do a call-in show. Yeah. But, you know, we should probably give people what the phone number is. 7-7-Hang-Up 10 is the phone number. Ask us about sports conundrums, sports dilemmas. Quandries. Ooh, I love a quandry. Get a few quandries in there. And yeah, we'd like to hear from

folks out in the listening audience. It's been a minute since we did one of these, but they're

always a good time. I guess we did do that parenting question one, but that wasn't with

voicemails. We haven't done this in a while. I'm going to stick to that. 7-7, hang up 10,

give us a call. We'd love to answer your questions. Over the weekend, the college football

playoff committee gathered together and decided in its infinite wisdom that the only four major

conference teams that finished with less than two losses would make it into college football's

four-team playoff, that Oklahoma, which had one loss, would get the number four seed, and that the three undefeated teams, LSU, Ohio State, and Clemson, would be seated in that order, which corresponds to their strength of schedule. Controversy! Seems pretty straightforward, and yet the sport of college football is all about controversy.

Controversy. And disrespect. So let's get mad anyway. Joining us now is the angriest man on Skype, Banner Society, Spencer. What's up, Spencer?

So angry. Infuriated. Like, how dare you give us four good teams? That's not what I've expected.

What I expect is one amazing team, one complete crap team that

played an easy schedule, one team that squeaked in on reputation, and Alabama.

It's a bad week for the eight team playoff crowd. I saw some people, you know, I guess respect

to the people who are like eight team playoff or bus, no matter

the facts on the ground, people throwing their brackets around. Like, we could be just a few

...