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Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. Today is Friday, December 31st, New Year's Eve edition. I'm Robert Mays. Joining me today is my good friend Nate Tice. Nate, how you doing, buddy? That's great. I'm spending every holiday with you now. Like that's, we've knocked out Thanksgiving. we got Christmas together, we got New Year's together. We're doing them all. It's great. It's funny because when I looked at the schedule original, it's like, oh, this is great. We won't have to change our schedule at all because we don't record on Fridays and that's when Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are going to be. But then you also realize that means we haven't taken a day off through the entire holidays that we wouldn't have already had off. So at a time when other people are getting to enjoy their families and everything else, we've just been going as usual. It's been great. I've loved it. I've loved the fact that we've gotten a chance to do this and hit everything that we would want to. I'm in an especially good mood today. Lindsay Jones just texted me before we started recording this.

Devin Hester is a Hall of Fame finalist, which is, I'm like legitimately emotional about it. Like when she sent me that, when I saw it, I got chills because it, we've talked about this before. We did it on our Canton Court episode. He's in. He should be in. He is a Hall of Famer. If the Hall of Fame exists to celebrate players like Devin Hester, who are truly the greatest player ever at one single thing and somebody who was undeniably cool and just

had this aura about him when he played and him being celebrated in that way, it makes my day.

It's what a great way to kind of end 2021 on a football note with Devin Hester. We are going to breeze through today's games a little bit. We're going to talk about four games, not for labor this. Obviously, it's New Year's Eve. We have Shield coming out a little bit later to do week 17 picks, but let's get to it. We have four games we're going to dig into.

I want to start with Chiefs Bengals because this is a great game.

We've talked a lot about the Chief, excuse me, the Bengals offense recently.

We're not going to dig into that as much.

You and I both went in and watched the Chiefs offense again from last week.

How would you characterize where the chief's

offense is right now and kind of where they've made some tweaks that have helped them

compared to what they were doing in the first half of the season? As we all know, their most

important player is Noah Gray. But no, it's honestly, this chief's offense, it's, I've seen

a couple sprinkles this the last couple of weeks, you know, it gets to Chargers and I'm trying to think the other game in there. But it's kind of getting back to the basics. Like they were really kind of running some stuff that they've run over the last couple of years. They stopped leaning into the funky, if that makes sense. Give me an example. What are a couple of staples that you feel like they've really been able to hone in on?

One good one is they're running spacing again.

Spacing is more of a quick game concept.

What they've been doing is they're trying to get the best of both worlds, which I get.

You want to put the ball in Patrick Mohn's hands and do as much, you know, make him

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