The Wildest Wild-card Weekend
Hang Up and Listen
Joel Meyer
4.6 • 986 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hosts Alex Kirshner, Lindsay Gibbs, and Ben Lindbergh unpack a thrilling wild-card round of the NFL playoffs. Lindsay’s Panthers are out, John Harbaugh has been fired, the reigning champions exit early, and Caleb Williams grated some cheese.
The panel is then joined by soccer journalist Hayden Van Brewer to explain how Manchester United have gotten so abysmally bad over the years. To close, Lindsay and Ben ask Alex to break down the College Football Playoffs and the upcoming championship game.
On the bonus episode, available exclusively for Slate Plus members, the panel talks about the new viral queer hockey romance, Heated Rivalry.
NFL (4:52): Bye Eagles, Bye
Man U (20:35): Bent and broken
CFB (38:41): How Indiana reached the top
(Note: time codes are only accurate for Slate Plus members, who listen ad-free.)
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You can email us at hangup@slate.com.
Podcast production and editing by Kevin Bendis, with production assistance from Patrick Fort.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It is Monday, January 12th, 2006. |
| 0:08.9 | Welcome back to Hang Up and Listen, the sports podcast here at Slate. |
| 0:12.3 | I'm Alex Kirshner back with you this week. |
| 0:14.0 | I'm a contributing writer for Slate, and I also co-host Split Zone Duo. |
| 0:18.1 | That is a college football podcast. |
| 0:19.9 | On the show this week, we're going to talk |
| 0:21.5 | about a wild few days in the National Football League from the Ravens firing their head coach of |
| 0:26.4 | 18 seasons, John Harbaugh, to a really electric start to the playoffs. We'll dive deep with a special |
| 0:32.1 | guest on the stunning and long decline of one of the great brand names in sport, Manchester United, which just cannot get it together. |
| 0:39.7 | And we'll talk about how Indiana, in football, by the way, in Miami, in 2025, long after its purported heyday, |
| 0:47.2 | put the past aside and made it to the college football playoff national championship game. |
| 0:51.5 | As usual with me this week is Lindsay Gibbs, the women's sports lead |
| 0:55.0 | at CBS Sports, and the publisher of Power Plays, a newsletter on the key stories of the hour in |
| 1:00.2 | women's sports. Lindsay, condolences on the end of the pounding and the Carolina Panthers making |
| 1:07.1 | a valiant exit, I would say. It was valiant from the NFL playoffs. They played really hard. |
| 1:11.7 | Yeah, I am still, I'm buzzing. I thought I loved it. I mean, I hated that they lost. It was |
| 1:16.9 | sad to see this season over, but I don't think I've ever been this happy about a playoff loss ever. |
| 1:23.9 | I feel like most of their playoff losses have come in, you know, embarrassing fashion, |
| 1:29.7 | or they've been favorites and just laid an egg, or Jake Dallone was thrown like six interceptions. |
| 1:35.3 | But this, Bryce Young went toe to toe with Matt Stafford, and the stadium was full of Panthers fans. |
| 1:42.7 | Charlotte was buzzing, and, you know, there's certainly plays that would like back, but they could have won this |
| 1:49.3 | game. |
... |
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