Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. I'm Robert Mays. Our buy or sell series on NFL

off-season continues today. Derek Classen joined me to chat about the teams that we're

bucketing as the playoff hopefuls. These are teams with over-unders from like eight and a half to

nine and a half-ish teams that are going to be on the cusp of

wildcard births, a lot of really good conversations here.

We had some back and forth about the chargers and whether or not we're actually into how

measured they were in their approach about the Vikings, the Bengals, a lot of really interesting

teams in this group.

Very much enjoyed this conversation with Derek. So let's get to it right now.

Buy or sell rolls on today. We are getting into the really good teams. We're getting into the

teams that are supposed to make the playoffs by virtue of betting odds and expectations and all of that good stuff. So this is our third of these four shows. We will be hitting the contenders in this exercise next week. I don't know about you, Derek. When I was prepping for this this morning, I was really enjoying it. This is one of those shows I was very excited to do. We did the lingering questions. We started that yesterday and I'm feeling the juice of like actually watching NFL games again. So I think I'm just still riding that high 24 hours later. I think it is partly that. And I think this is also the range where you start to be like, you have to tell yourself a bit of a fairy tale with some of them. But like these are teams that reasonably could go to the Super Bowl if a couple of things break, right? For some of them, that's probably not true, but there are like one or two where it's like you could start to talk yourself into it. So the fact that we are finally approaching the part of this process where you can start to see some of the conference contenders and stuff like that, I'm, I'm, I'm into it.

I'll also say this was a collection of teams where I really had to go back and forth. I'm going to make a joke about it later, but a couple of these are like the Larry David gift where it's just like, I don't know. That's how I felt with several of these. Just a heads up when it comes to timelines here. I want to be transparent with you guys because of the next thing that we're going to talk about.

We're recording this on Thursday, May 15th. It is running

on Tuesday, May 20th because I'm going on vacation. So we're banking a bunch of different shows

here over the last couple of weeks. And so some of the shows we've already recorded are going to be

running before we run this one slash after. The reason I'm talking about this is we're about to talk

about the Caleb Williams, Seth Wickersham situation that came to light on Thursday after the

excerpt from Seth's book was published. I wanted to talk about it in some capacity, and this is the best outlet and the

quickest outlet for me to talk about it, even though this show is running five days later.

So we didn't forget to do this for five days. We're just doing it now, and you guys were hearing

about it a few days later because of what our recording schedule looks like, and because we're

banking a bunch of shows for when I'm gone. Just throwing that out there and to be clear before we dig into this. It's June. That's the way that those things are going to go. I don't even want to spill my thoughts on the Caleb William things yet. You're the Chicago guy. I kind of want to see where this is going to go first. It's the only reason I felt compelled to respond to it is because

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