TAFS Goes Camping: Conversations with The Athletic's Bills and Steelers beat writers
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2025
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Robert Mays is coming off his busiest week of training camp yet, having spent the previous seven days with eight different teams (gotta love joint practices). In this edition of the Beat Writer Notebook, Robert talks with Joe Buscaglia, The Athletic's Bills beat writer, and Mike DeFabo, The Athletic's Steelers beat writer. How do the Bills finally get over the hump? Can Aaron Rodgers find enough of the fountain of youth to push the Steelers to another level? Learn the answers to those questions, and a whole lot more, on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.
Plus, Robert and Derrik Klassen cover the injuries to Rashawn Slater and C.J. Gardner-Johnson.
Rundown (timestamps are approximate)
3:10 Rashawn Slater and C.J. Gardner-Johnson injuries
17:25 Robert and Joe Buscaglia at Bills camp
45:36 Robert and Mike DeFabo at Steelers camp
Host: Robert Mays
Co-Host: Derrik Klassen
With: Joe Buscaglia, Mike DeFabo
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Producer: Michael Beller
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Two Titans of Silicon Valley, one prize, dominance in the world of artificial intelligence. |
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| 0:27.5 | Listen to the audiobook of Supremacy Now. |
| 0:35.2 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:39.4 | Got something a little bit different for you guys today. It's our next iteration of the training camp notebook. We're going to be chatting with our |
| 0:43.7 | Bill's writer at the athletic Joe Boscalia and our Steelers writer at the athletic. |
| 0:48.0 | Mike DeFabo visited both of those training camps during my, I don't know what area of the country |
| 0:53.2 | that would be. Rust Belt swing going from Buffalo to Cleveland down to Pittsburgh. |
| 0:58.0 | And joined by chats with both of those guys. |
| 0:59.8 | But we have to address some of the news that's happened over the last couple days. |
| 1:03.8 | So me and Derek Klasson took some time to chat about the Rishan Slater injury and the injury to CJ Gardner Johnson. |
| 1:10.1 | I was actually at Texan's |
| 1:11.3 | practice when CJ Gardner Johnson got hurt. We're just going to discuss what both of those injuries |
| 1:15.9 | mean for 2024 playoff teams. I mean, team guys that both of those teams were relying on in big |
| 1:21.1 | ways. And obviously, the Slater injury is devastating for the chargers and what they were hoping |
| 1:25.7 | for with that offense this year. So |
| 1:28.0 | dug into that injury news with Derek and then did some deep dive conversations about both |
| 1:33.3 | the bills and Steelers with our beatwriters at the athletic. Let's get to those conversations right now. |
| 1:42.2 | All right, Derek, a little special, unfortunate weekend programming that we're having to dig into here. |
| 1:49.1 | We're going to be getting to our conversations with a couple beatwriters later on this show. |
... |
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