Welcome to the Athletic Football Show.

I'm Robert Mays.

We are cutting down the table today.

For those of you guys who aren't familiar with the exercise, before the season started,

we decided that we were going to take 10 teams and put them at the contenders table in the NFL heading into the year,

the teams that we thought had a legitimate chance to win the Super Bowl.

We could tweak those teams over the course of the year. We've taken four teams out,

I believe, and put four teams in. But keeping it at 10, I don't know, those aren't real stakes.

That's not hard. We wanted to keep it a little bit spicy and cut the table down at some point

during the year. And this is that moment.

So we are cutting the table from 10 down to eight teams today.

Reminder, if a team is off, they cannot be put back on.

So the teams that we're cutting off today,

they cannot be put back into the conversation.

And so there's some tough stuff here. Like, well, there are some hard

decisions that had to be made and there are some dicey ones that had to be made. Really enjoyed

this discussion with me, Dave Hellman and Derek Klesson. Let's get to it right now.

I've been looking forward to this one.

I think I was a little scared of it earlier in the week when we first started kicking this conversation down the road about how this might go today.

Because there are going to be some tough decisions that we have to land on over the course of this show.

Dave, I know that you've just been relishing this.

You actually were looking forward to this in a real way. I hate it so much. I hate it. I think like for right or for wrong, I just, I just can't stop imagining like the hype videos that caught, like every team or like content creators put out for the playoffs. Oh, that guy? He has a real name on Twitter now,

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