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Learn more at vertexinck.com. This is the athletic football show.

Welcome to the athletic football show.

I'm Robert Mays.

Join me today.

It's my good friend Nate Tyson.

How you doing, buddy?

Doing well. Mailbag. I feel like I have the same intro every time, even though it's rambly in a different way, and a different light. It's a different seasoning on each ramble. But I am excited for all these mailback questions because we've talked about this. I love it because it gets me thinking about stuff I don't think about or jogging parts of my brain. It's like working out a muscle. Like we're like, oh, oh, like a stabilizer muscle where it's like, oh, I haven't done that in a while. And so it's fun. So I really appreciate the questions everyone sends in. I'm always excited to do these. So really excited for this next hour. Yeah. Thank you to everyone again that sent them in. Thank you for helping us kind of populate the feed in the offseason with interesting stuff. And, you know, continuing to supply us with topics that get the juices flowing and make us think about certain things. And I've said this a million times. We do this because the questions are worth answering, worth responding to, and because how engaged you guys are with the stuff that we're doing over here. So thank you again. Let's roll right into it. Our first one here, Antonio Vias says, the NFL has become a more analytically driven and smarter league. And it seems, with the exception of a few teams, most GMs make decisions in line with that mindset. This inevitably leads to decisions

fans may be upset about, e.g. not resigning a player at a high-end deal because the player

plays a less valuable position, but GMs and coaches constantly talk about creating a good

culture. I struggle with understanding how a team can create a good culture, but also be somewhat

heartless in decision-making. How do teams balance these ideas, establishing culture versus making sound decisions,

or are they mutually exclusive?

Tyler D.

asked a somewhat similar question just about how you balance locker room dynamics and whether

players are looking at who's getting extended, who's getting cut, all that kind of stuff.

This is a great question because I think this is underrated and overlooked in a lot of decisions that fans and outside people make because we don't have to take these things into consideration.

But I do think that they matter.

I do think that they're important.

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