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Hello and welcome to my podcast. Do me a favor, subscribe with the John Comre report,

wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching on YouTube, hit that like button, hit that

subscribe button. You can find us there as part of Empire Media, AMPIRE. Always much appreciated when you tune in. Don't forget, you can read my work on ESPN.com. I have a story up the other day on Tara McLaurin and why they're in this situation they are as far as why it's hard to get an extension done. I'll explain more of that in a minute. But first, don't forget that the John Com Report is presented by AAA. And for you gold members, I will be doing a private Zoom next week. So there'll be about two-week gap between the other one. So get that going again next week. I'm not sure yet which day. It'll be Wednesday or Thursday because those are the options, right? Pretty much. But I'll let you know by Monday or so for sure when that is going to take place. So stay tuned for that. If you want to become a club member, go to the Empire Media YouTube page. See the word join. Do it on your laptop because I think that's where you can see the word join.

Click on that, go from there. And as a reminder for the club members, I will be doing like a little private chat for the club members every Sunday or every game day morning when I get to the stadium.

So anyway, there you go. Now, let's get on to today's practice report and get a couple things out of the way before I play an interview

that I had with defensive tackle Johnny Newton. It is an audio interview. If you want to skip right to that, it's the last five minutes. So if you want to go right to that, do that. If you don't want to hear the notes and all that stuff, then you can skip right ahead, be my guest. Johnny Newton was pretty good. talked a lot about like play recognition why he made certain plays the other night where he

feels better. And then before I get to that conversation, I got a couple little things that I picked up from some offensive linemen about him that I think you might want to hear. By the way, real quick on the McLaren story. So I boil it down to four sections. One was age. they clearly see them like they don't want to pay someone who's going to be 31, 32, 33, a mid 30s per year extension. They don't want to get into the 30s. So they see that differently than McCorran. They see the fall of the decline of guys who are in their 30s, hit that 31-year point, and they go down.

Julio Jones went down by a decent amount, you know, Andre Johnson, DeAndre Hopkins,

guys who are at a higher, higher level, and they all took a dive around that stage.

So now, but from McCorn, he can say, listen, this is only a seventh year.

All those other guys were going into the eighth year or more when they hit that stage. This is only a seventh year when they hit 30. There's only a seventh year. So he doesn't have the same wear and tear on his legs. That's his retort. And then he looks at D.K. Metcalf in that deal, similar, very similar stats. And he can say, this guy got it, I'm just as good or better than him. Give me a little bit more. They're going to look at it and say two things. And this goes back to leverage. But one is, DK's two years younger. He's also like guy, people I talk to the leagues, like they also point out, dude, six with four. And he got to have speed. Like, that's why they're going to give him more because of what they think he can do as he ages. Also, he was traded for by Pittsburgh. They needed to give him a good deal to make sure he signed. Otherwise, it's not a good trade. So those are some differences in the leverage part for Washington. And you can look at the leverage and say, hey, they need him on the field. We all know that. They're better with him on the field, period. But Washington say, like, yeah, there's no doubt with that, but he's under contract. So if you don't play when you're in a contract, you lose game checks. And if you lose game checks, nobody likes that. And it doesn't help you going into your free agency year if you miss a lot of games because you want to prove what you can still

do at this age and going down the road. The other thing is they're not paying for what happened.

They're paying for what they think will happen. They don't want to pay a tax for what happened

under Dan Snyder. They want to pay for what they think you're going to do moving forward.

And it's very possible that they see if they get to the $28 million, which some people have told me they think that Washington would get to, don't know for sure yet, but that's one thing they, that there's some sentiment out there. If that's the case, it could be that Washington feels like even that's at the very high end of what they want to pay. But the other, this goes back to now precedent. They don't want to set a precedent of going way, you know, too high for, for a lot of players, because they have guys like Laranie Tunsell up next year, Frankie Louvre, possibly Marshall and Latimore if they want to retain him. Debo Samuel is a free agent. They'll have other contracts down the road. They don't want to set the precedent of going far above where they believe the player should be paid, whether it's right or wrong fair or not. That's how they're seeing it. That's why we're in this spot. They just see things differently. Anyway, it's up on ESPN.com. Go give it a read. Let's get to today. And I'm going to again, play the conversation with Johnny Newton in just a few minutes. The one thing we learned today, no joint practice against the Ravens. That is a blow, I think, to this team. They set up their

preseason based on playing, having that joint practice in part on knowing they'd have a joint

practice with the Ravens, but also, of course, with the Patriots last week. The starters weren't

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