Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Mailbag Mondays are back.

Me and Derek, Doug, through your questions.

As always, sincerely appreciate everyone who spent the time to send some of these in.

I love doing these shows.

There's a reason we do them throughout the offseason.

It's fun to be back with them.

Let's get to it with me and Derek right now.

All right.

We are back to Mailbag Mondays here on the Athletic Football Show now that we're on the other

side of free agency.

Obviously free agency is presenting tons of stuff to respond to at all times for like two

straight weeks.

But now that has quieted down, we're back to doing mailbags every single Monday, which I'm

very much looking forward to.

We love doing them in part because the questions are always worthwhile.

So thank you to everyone who sent in a set of questions. We're going to hit some of them from Discord, some of them from email. Beller is out today and our other producer, Katie, is not set up with a microphone right now to help us out. So I am going to read the questions. I think I can still do it, Derek. I think I can still get us by through the end of the show. It's been a while. You sure about that? You know, Belers've been taking over. I'm sure I'll be a little bit rusty, but hopefully we can swing through these. All right, the best part about the Discord questions is all the names are so funny. I'm sure I'll get some of these wrong, but I'll do my best as we get through the Discord questions first. We as a rule are going to prioritize the

Discord questions for a while here. So if you want to make sure that your mailbag question gets

into the mailbag, now is the time to join the Discord. We're going to be doing a set of AMAs next week.

I know Derek is doing one. I'm in a circle doing one. So I know not the season anymore,

maybe not the ripest time to join the Discord. But we're going to try to make that thing as lively as possible over the course of the offseason. And the mailbag is one of those avenues. So let's start here with lubes with a Z. Are rookie contracts too important to team building, says Loubs? It's a very simple question, but I think it's one that's absolutely worth chewing out.

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