The Bears get their man, the Jets seemingly close in on theirs, and the league has a coaching search + agent conundrum
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2025
⏱️ 83 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Lions letdown turned out to be the Bears opportunity, with the latter hiring Ben Johnson 48 hours after the former's playoff loss. On this episode of The Athletic Football Show, Robert Mays welcomes on Albert Breer of The MMQB and Sports Illustrated to cover the latest in this year's coaching cycle. Then, Kalyn Kahler from ESPN joins the show to discuss her story on the surprising amount of power agents hold in the head coach and GM hiring process.
Host: Robert Mays
With: Albert Breer and Kalyn Kahler
Producer: Michael Beller
Subscribe to The Athletic Football Show...
Follow Robert on Bluesky: @robertmays.bsky.social
Follow Derrik on Bluesky: @qbklass.bsky.social
Follow Robert on X: @robertmays
Follow Derrik on X: @QBKlass
Theme song: Haunted
Written by Dylan Slocum, Trevor Dietrich, Ruben Duarte, Kyle McAulay, and Meredith VanWoert / Performed by Spanish Love Songs
Courtesy of Pure Noise / By arrangement with Bank Robber Music, LLC
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:06.1 | I'm Robert Mays, a fun show for you guys today. |
| 0:08.1 | It's all coaches all the time. |
| 0:10.5 | First off, we have Albert Breer from the MMQB and Sports Illustrated to chat about the most recent news items in the coaching carousel. |
| 0:18.0 | Ben Johnson going to Chicago, Mike Borganzi going to the Titans as the |
| 0:21.0 | GM chatting a little bit about the other coaching searches that are currently in progress. |
| 0:26.4 | Josh McDaniels got hired by the Patriots while we were recording. So a lot of fun stuff that we |
| 0:30.6 | hit with Bert, really, really good insights and a lot of those processes and where they are |
| 0:35.3 | and why for those individual teams. After that, we were joined by Kaylin Kaler, now of ESPN, to discuss her fascinating story |
| 0:42.6 | about the process of GM and head coach packaging and how some of these hiring practices |
| 0:48.7 | happened in the NFL based on the connections that mostly coaching agents have around this industry specifically. |
| 0:56.4 | So really enjoyed that conversation with Kalin. |
| 0:59.6 | Before we get to both of those, I wanted to just talk about the Ben Johnson thing, |
| 1:04.5 | because we did a little bit of this with Bert, |
| 1:06.2 | but I figured I would just download a lot of my thoughts right now before we actually |
| 1:10.7 | dug into that. I've written down none of this. I'm doing this off the cuff just because I think it my thoughts right now before we actually dug into that. |
| 1:11.4 | I've written down none of this. |
| 1:12.5 | I'm doing this off the cuff just because I think it's the right way to handle it. |
| 1:16.2 | This to me was the best possible outcome for where the Chicago Bears are right now. |
| 1:20.7 | Every coaching candidate has pluses and minuses, strengths, weaknesses, risks, upsides, |
| 1:25.2 | downsides. |
| 1:26.2 | I understand everything that's been said about Ben Johnson from a personality standpoint. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Athletic, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Athletic and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.