The nine most interesting teams of the offseason, Volume 1: Rams, Chargers and Raiders
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2025
⏱️ 84 minutes
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Summary
Welcome back to The Athletic Football Show's favorite combine week tradition: mining our ridiculously knowledgable beat writers for all the insight they have on their teams. We handpicked nine teams we deemed the most interesting of this offseason after the Super Bowl, then scheduled time during combine week to talk with each of their beat writers. This is the first entry in that series, featuring Jourdan Rodrigue on the Rams; Daniel Popper on the Chargers; and Tashan Reed on the Raiders. When and how with the Matthew Stafford domino fall? What will the Chargers do with all their financial flexibility? What do the Raiders look like under the Pete Caroll/John Spytek (and Tom Brady) regime? Robert Mays gets into all that with the beat writers, and a whole lot more.
Host: Robert Mays
Co-Host: Derrik Klassen
With: Jourdan Rodrigue, Daniel Popper, Tashan Reed
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Producer: Michael Beller
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:06.2 | I'm Robert Mays coming to you guys from the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, |
| 0:11.1 | here with the entire athletic NFL staff on the first day of the combine, |
| 0:15.8 | and we're going to be wielding the power of that staff on our next three shows here from Indy. We did this two years ago, and I like doing it for a few different reasons. One, the combine comes in an awkward time. Free agency is going to happen first, but it's a draft event. So what do we talk about? Draft, free agency, how do you handle this? I think the best answer is let's just talk about the teams and their needs and their |
| 0:38.2 | outlook. And again, we are uniquely positioned to do this at the athletic. So we're going to do a |
| 0:43.2 | series of shows over the next three days that are looking at fudging it a little bit, what we're |
| 0:48.7 | conceiving as the most interesting teams of the NFL offseason. We're going to do three each day. |
| 0:53.8 | And how we pick these teams is kind of all over the place. Some teams have a NFL offseason. We're going to do three each day. And how we pick these teams |
| 0:55.9 | is kind of all over the place. Some teams have a ton of cap space. Some teams have a new regime, |
| 1:00.2 | and we're trying to figure out some information about them. But I feel like we landed on nine |
| 1:04.8 | teams that I do think are going to drive a lot of the discussion about this NFL offseason. |
| 1:10.1 | And we started this on the West Coast, not on purpose, |
| 1:13.7 | but all of these teams are either in Nevada or California. |
| 1:17.1 | We kick this conversation, the series of conversations off, |
| 1:20.0 | with our Rams writer Jordan Roderig, |
| 1:21.5 | because I feel like the Matthew Stafford Domino is arguably the biggest one |
| 1:25.6 | that has to fall this offseason. What ends up |
| 1:28.1 | happening with Stafford and the Rams is going to set off a chain of events about |
| 1:32.7 | quarterbacks in three, four, five different places. So we dug into the Stafford situation and |
| 1:38.0 | the rest of the Rams outlook with Jordan. We stuck in L.A. to chat with Daniel Popper, our |
| 1:42.6 | Chargers writer, about what year two looks like for |
| 1:46.0 | Jim Harbaugh and Joe Hortiz. This team now has up to $90-ish million in cap space after having |
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