Teams stuck in the middle with Bill Barnwell & a Chargers team visit with Daniel Popper
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2021
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Robert Mays sits down with ESPN’s Bill Barnwell to discuss the teams stuck in the middle of the NFL power rankings. They present six teams, how they got in this position and why it’s difficult to see their path to the top. Plus, The Athletic’s Chargers reporter Daniel Popper joins the show to talk Brandon Staley’s first year on the job, expectations for the team in Justin Herbert’s second season and much more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the athletic football show. |
| 0:15.5 | Welcome to the athletic football show. |
| 0:18.7 | I'm Robert Mays. Really excited about today's show. |
| 0:20.4 | Our Chargers writer, Daniel Popper, is going to be joining me a little bits. Really excited about today's show. Our Chargers writer, |
| 0:21.3 | Daniel Popper, is going to be joining me a little bit later. He and I chat yesterday about just the state of this team, which obviously has a lot of talent, a lot of expectations in year one of Brandon Staley, really enjoyed our chat. Before we get to that, though, I am very excited to welcome my good friend, ESPN's Bill Barnwell. |
| 0:18.9 | Barnwell, how you doing, buddy? |
| 0:20.5 | I'm good, Mays. |
| 0:21.7 | Can you explain what the topic of our show today is going to be? I absolutely can. So every year when I was at the Ringer, I used to do a full 32-team power rankings. And I actually really enjoyed it. It was a chance to really dig into every team and think about the |
| 0:54.3 | landscape of the league. My job has shifted a little bit. Sheel actually did something very |
| 0:58.1 | similar to that to what I used to do last week. If people have not checked out, Sheel's |
| 1:02.5 | treatise on the NFL, I highly encourage that you do it. And I always went through the process, |
| 1:08.5 | and the hardest part every single time without fail was figuring |
| 1:12.8 | out how to write about the teams from like 18 through 24 in the power rankings it wasn't the |
| 1:19.3 | teams at the bottom because the teams at the bottom were always interesting because they were |
| 1:23.6 | terrible or they were rebuilding it wasn't hard to come up with ideas for that. |
| 1:32.6 | But the teams really stuck in the middle, the teams that didn't seem to be that interesting or engaging but also didn't have a path to contention, I always had such a hard time |
| 1:37.5 | writing about them. |
| 1:38.9 | And I feel like we avoid them because of that. |
| 1:41.6 | So I wanted to spend an entire show talking about those teams, the ones that are |
| 1:46.9 | essentially stuck right there in the back half of the middle of the league without a clear |
| 1:52.3 | path out. |
| 1:53.0 | And when I was thinking about it, I said, who would make something that doesn't seem inherently |
... |
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