This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Great show for you guys today.

A little bit later, Jeff Howell from the Athletic, is going to be joining us to talk about maybe the end of an era for the New England Patriots. I feel like they're the most worthy team in the league to be talking about this week. Before we do that, though, we've essentially hit the halfway mark in the NFL. It's hard to pinpoint the halfway mark in football because 17 is not an even number. But I usually go with week eight. It's one of the majority of the teams in the league have played half of their games. I think it's a great time to step back, take stock. And to do that with me today to hand out some midseason awards, some midseason superlatives for the first eight weeks of the season is my buddy, Stephen Rubin, Rubiois, for the win. Stephen, how you doing, man? I'm doing good. See, this is how I decide the midpoint of the season. It's the week that I don't have any ideas to write things, so I could just do an awards. I love awards. It's a great content machine. I've always appreciated that Barnwell leans into awards. I know if Barnwell's doing it, that means it's an idea worth doing. So I don't feel as if it's a gimmick that I'm going to too often. Steven, I talk about you on the show all the time. Me and Nate Bulldo, you do incredible work. I cite it consistently. You're one of my favorite football writers. I learned stuff from you all the time. So it almost feels like a waste of your perspective to have you on to talk about awards. But I know you would have some very ardent takes here. So that's what I really appreciate. See, now I have to live up to that. Now I have to live up to it. I'm concerned. So one of my favorite things about you is I learn stuff from the things you write.

I'm consistently finding just little observations and little nuggets to help me understand football better.

But at the same time, you're not too good for the bits.

You will consistently go back to them.

So the balance is something that we appreciate here on the athletic football show. Some might say I'm only good for the pits, but I'll take that. No, false. False. Some of my favorite ones, though, people that don't follow Stephen on Twitter absolutely should. The one where he has the Kyle Shanahan with the microscope is definitely my favorite, which is a, you know, if you can keep going back to it keeps working you have to it's it's a rule so

we're just going to run through these some of these are real words some of them are not i think that

it was a good chance to make some up to give us a more well-rounded kind of understanding of the

season it's been so far and let's start by playing the hits here so eight games into the season

who is your MVP of the NFL?

I have a feeling we're going to have the same answer. I'm going to go with chalk pick,

Russell Wilson, but I'm going to throw something at you. I think that this is like a Steph

Curry situation. I know everyone tries to like find the Steph Curry of the NFL but i think the way he throws the

deep ball the moon balls i think is what people have been calling them might change the way that

quarterbacks younger quarterbacks throw the deep ball i really think it's the best way to throw a

deep ball and like they're so hard to throw and like accuracy percentages are so low but russ is

he's just consistently good at it and he's the only one that's consistently good at it. People need to study how he throws the default. Do you think it's replicable though? Or do you think it's just a skill that is going to be hard for other quarterbacks to try to steal from? I think it'd be easy to say everyone should be doing this, but everyone should be playing like Russell Wilson is a lot easier said than done.

Right, especially Russell Wilson because he makes no sense as a quarterback. Like everything he does,

it just, it works though. But I feel like if you have arm talent, it's replicable. You just throw the ball high.

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