Hello, everybody, and welcome to Zach Jackson and friends. It's a new podcast for my friends,

for my enemies, mostly for my mom and my cousins who are listening right down the road, but for

everybody here across Northeast Ohio, Akron, Cleveland, Canton, Youngstown, and beyond. So thank

you guys for coming. Hope you come back. This is a brand new project. Shout out to Blue Wire for helping it. The Athletic Civilized Barking Podcast is going to be no more. It's going to be Zach Jackson and friends, and we're going to talk Cleveland Browns. Now, that's not all we're going to talk. We're going to talk NFL. We're going to talk Ohio State, college football, basketball, going to talk life. But if you're new here,

if you don't know me, I cover the Browns I have for a long time for the athletic. And we're

launching this podcast right here in an audio format. Ideally, we will eventually add a video format.

Ideally, we will have two to three episodes a week. Ideally, we'll get in all of your feeds. And so I will ask

you now and later to come back to review, subscribe, spread the word on your own social media,

in your friend groups, and your group messages, all of those things that's necessary in this

business. And it is a business, but this is episode one. So thank you for coming.

What is Zach Jackson and friends? Who are Zach Jackson's friends? Well, you're going to find out. I'm going to kind of find that out too. We're going to have a rotating cast. We're going to talk everything. We're going to talk Brown's News of the Day. We're going to talk Brown's big picture. we're going to talk football in general.

But one of my friends who's going to be here,

at least on a semi-regular basis,

is here now.

He's the first friend, I guess. His name is Mike Fuline. You might have heard the name. He is the head basketball coach at Mount Union. He and I go way, way, way, way, way back. Our families do, too. So he's got some opinions. He's got a lot of knowledge and he's brave enough to come on here. Michael, so we start with this. What makes you more nervous? Coaching in a national championship game, they're coming on here wondering if I'm going to say some shit to get you in trouble. Oh, definitely too, buddy. I mean, it's been in my thoughts a lot, but, you know, I look forward to this. I listen to you all the time. You're very good at what you do.

Hopefully here just to help guide you and to fight with you a little bit as just a Browns fan. There's times when I hear you, I want to knock you out like many of us. So, you know, great back and forth and enjoy it. And hopefully people will

listen. Yeah. So that's right. Hopefully people will listen. This is something we've cooked up for a while.

And again, we got the green light where the athletic is just going to concentrate on some other pods.

You know, if you know me, if you know us from A to Z, that's great. Andre might be back in one of the friends' rotations. We'll see. Andre and I are friends still. So all is all is well there. But it is football season, Michael. I know it's a little different for you. Let's start out with a human element of this. Last year, you were a high school football dad, right? So you were a nervous friggin' wreck at this time of the year. We grew up the same. We grew up two miles from each other. We grew up in sports families and football families. And, you know, especially these last few days, right, where it's suddenly not 95 degrees and 95% humidity every day. It feels a little like football.

And I think if you're listening to this podcast, you relate to us in it, you know,

you get a little tingle out of that.

Oh, man.

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