The TAFS mailbag is back!
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We're into the offseason, which means we're once again checking the mail. The TAFS mailbag returns with more than a few questions about what we can learn—or not—from this season's Super Bowl teams. Robert Mays, Derrik Klassen and Dave Helman tackle questions on big nickel, attacking Mike Macdonald's meta, teams that experience a one-year turnaround similar to what we just saw from the Patriots, and a whole lot more.
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Host: Robert Mays
Co-Hosts: Derrik Klassen and Dave Helman
With: Michael Beller
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Video Producer: Katy Duffy
Audio Producer: Michael Beller
Social Producer: Scott Krinch
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
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the athletic football show. |
| 0:05.1 | I'm Robert Mays. |
| 0:06.0 | It's the first mailbag of the off season. |
| 0:09.5 | Always enjoy doing these. |
| 0:11.0 | Sincerely appreciate everyone who took the time to send questions in. |
| 0:15.0 | We will be doing them regularly. |
| 0:16.5 | We may not have one next week because of the combine, |
| 0:18.4 | but after that, I plan on having them essentially weekly |
| 0:20.4 | throughout the entire off season. We do that in part because you guys do |
| 0:23.5 | such a great job with the questions. Today was no exception. Dave and Derek joined me to |
| 0:28.8 | answer the questions like we did last year. Beller is going to be the one teeing them up. So we |
| 0:34.3 | got a little four-man weave going today. Really enjoyed this discussion. |
| 0:38.4 | Hope you guys do as well. Let's get to it right now. |
| 0:46.2 | We are back with the off-season mailbags here on the athletic football show. |
| 0:51.6 | We did mailbag Monday last year. I'm not tying us to that because the offseason schedule is a little bit in flux, |
| 0:57.7 | but we will be doing regular mailbags. |
| 1:00.0 | The plan is to have them weekly outside of certain exceptions, free agency week, |
| 1:06.6 | combine next week, all of that kind of stuff. |
| 1:08.4 | But we're going to be doing these throughout the entire off season as this is the first one. As always, sincerely appreciate everyone who spent |
| 1:16.2 | the time to send in questions. We got a bunch of them. A reminder, I said this on the Friday show, |
| 1:21.2 | just worth throwing out again. We are going to be pulling questions from Discord the entire |
| 1:25.3 | off season and we're going to be pulling at least half of them from the Discord. So if you have not signed up for the Discord, |
... |
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