Welcome to the athletic football show. I'm Robert Mays. We had a really fun show today. We had a really good time. We do the show every year now. The final four lessons, teams that made the conference championship games. What can we learn from the way that they were built? What can we take forward from that? What should other teams pick up on?

We've done the show since I've started doing the podcast. So it's been, I think, five or six years,

five or six different iterations. Most of the time, the guest that we've had on that show is some

combination of me, Nate Tice, and Bill Barnwell. So we just decided to do that again. Our old buddies,

Barnwell from ESPN,

Nate from Yahoo, joined us today to just walk through about a dozen lessons we can learn from

the teams that were left on conference championship weekend. Patriots, Broncos, Seahawks,

Rams. What should teams take from that? Are there any things that maybe are a little bit misleading?

What does it tell us about the NFL in general? This was an incredibly fun, wide-ranging conversation. Let's get to it

with both of those guys right now. It has become an annual tradition at this point. I feel like

we've done this show probably the last four or five years. And some combination of the two of you have been on most of the times that we've done it. I figured this was the chance for us to get the band back together. It is time to run through some lessons from the final four teams left in the NFL here to help me do that are two of my old and wonderful friends. First of all, from ESPN. It's my good friend Bill Barnwell. Barmore, how are you doing, Ben? Um, looks like I dressed for a different podcast. So, uh, did not get the, you're so fixated on this. You don't look that much nice. You're great. Wow. Okay. So in between, uh, I don't look that nice. I look great. I'm going to take Nate's side of this. Thank you for complimenting me, my friend. Of course. That's not what I meant. I meant that you're not dressed, like, you're not dressed for that much of a different occasion than we are, but you look great. I'm not disagreeing with him. Also joining us today, it's our whole friend from Yahoo. Nate Tyson, Nate, how you doing,

buddy? I'm doing great. Like I said before the show, I didn't wear a hat on our Sunday show because I finally got a haircut after two months. And I thought some of our listeners, they acted like I was wearing a suit or a tucks. Like they were just in shock that they just saw my hair for the first time in about two years. So yeah, no, I'm doing wonderful. Very happy to be here. I was glad when you sent that text. Like, hey, Final four teams. Hey, it's time. Let's do it. So very excited to be here. I love the show. There are like five or six shows we do every single year where like no matter what the staffing on the show looks like, no matter how many times a week

we do the show, no matter what any of the other structural things are, we're going to do this podcast.

And so this is one of them. Every year we're doing this because I think it's such a fun way to use

this collection of teams, these four teams, as a way to point to larger themes about the NFL. I think it's a really good exercise. It's useful and it's fun. And so we're going to continue going back to it. This is a very simple kind of deal here. We each came with, I said four-ish to you guys, right? It was four-ish. Was that the during? I think I have like 12. So I didn't get a number. I said four-ish.

Four-ish lessons you think you can pull from the final four teams left in the NFL.

For those of you guys that are wondering, that means the Patriots, the Broncos, the Rams, and the Seahawks.

So what kind of through lines can we find from those teams that we can maybe attach ourselves to

and use as directives for how teams should think about

how to get to this weekend moving forward.

Barnwell, you have 12, so we're going to start with you.

What is your first lesson that you took away

...