Interview: Lindsay Jones, Senior Writer for The Athletic NFL
Lindsay Gibbs interviews Lindsay Jones, Senior Writer for the Athletic NFL about the 2021 Super Bowl. They talk about Covid's impact on media coverage of the NFL season, the leadership of Patrick Mahomes for Kansas City on and off the field, and the contradiction of Tampa Bay Head Coach Bruce Arians in hiring female coaches while disregarding sexual violence against women.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Lindsay G: Hello flamethrowers! Lindsay Gibbs here. It is Super Bowl week, and so for our interview this week I couldn’t think of anyone better to come on than Lindsay Jones. Got two Lindsays here – both spell it the correct way, it should be noted. It’s very important in the Lindsay community–
Lindsay J: Absolutely. This is very important.
Lindsay G: It’s very important! [laughs]
Lindsay J: It’s an important distinction.
Lindsay G: There’s definitely arguments. But she is the senior writer at The Athletic in their NFL coverage, and recently became the president of the pro football writers association. Congratulations!
Lindsay J: Well, thank you. I was the VP for the last two years so it was kind of a formality, but it’s still exciting, intimidating.
Lindsay G: Yeah.
Lindsay J: We have a lot of work to do ahead of us in 2021 and 2022.
Lindsay G: Well look, we’ve got the Super Bowl, it’ll be on Sunday – kind of one of the only normal things that are happening in the world right now – between Tampa Bay and Kansas City. We don’t get down into the weeds often on the football x’s and o’s…I listened to you on the Bill Barnwell podcast and things like that to get those, but give us a brief overview of what we’re look at with this game. We’ve got Tom Brady of course on Tampa Bay, Patrick Mahomes on Kansas City – they’re the defending champions. What else, what are we looking at? What are the storylines?
Lindsay J: Well, obviously the quarterbacks is the big storyline, and that’s the thing that you’re going to hear about all week ad nauseam. The broadcast on Sunday, it’s going to be on CBS, and you’re going to hear a lot of quarterback legacy talk from Tony Romo especially. We got a little preview of that on a CBS talent press conference last week. So yeah, the quarterbacks is by far the biggest storyline, the sexiest storyline. You know that the NFL and CBS were falling all over themselves when this ended up being the matchup because quarterbacks sell. You have kind of unlimited storylines when you talk about Tom Brady, and it’s a little different, Tom Brady storylines this year, than we’ve had. This is his 10th Super Bowl, you know? I think I’ve covered…This is going to be my 11th or 12th, and 4 or 5 of them have had Tom Brady. But this is the first one where he is independent of the Patriot way, and it’s him starting over at this new place. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff about the way that this Bucs team was built and came together and the collection of talent that they assembled.
But I think from a purely football perspective these are two teams that can score a lot, they can score very very quickly. They have very dynamic offensive weapons. But they also have really good defenses, and while we love to talk about that this is the matchup between Mahomes and Brady. You know, the matchups that are really gonna define this game are Todd Bowles and the Bucs defense and what they're able to do against Tom Brady on the offense. Then you have Steve Spagnuolo, who’s the defensive coordinator for the Kansas City Chiefs, and their pass rush and their defensive play and going against Brady. Of course, Steve Spagnuolo was the defensive coordinator of the New York Giants when he created the game plans and the way that they beat Brady and the Patriots twice with the Giants back in the 2000s.
Lindsay G: Oh, wow!
Lindsay J: So, there’s a lot of really interesting kind of football stuff that’s going to go on in this game beyond just the quarterbacks, but…You know, and everything else about this game is that it’s going to be the COVID Super Bowl – a third capacity, it’s going to be very weird. I’m going to Tampa in a couple of days, not really sure what to expect other than it’s going to be the weirdest football game I’ve ever been at.
Lindsay G: Yeah. I wanna get into the COVID stuff, I think. I have a lot of questions about that. But I wanna go back – why has it worked so well? We see legends go to other teams late in their career and often it’s a victory tour of sorts but without the win, right? Just kind of a last hurrah, the championship contender status isn’t quite there, a lot of the magic has gone. Why has it worked for Tom Brady and Tampa?
Lindsay J: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of things that go into it. One is that he’s still physically able to play at a really high level. One of the things that we all had questions about over the last couple of seasons in New England was their decline offensively because Brady couldn’t throw deep anymore because he had lost a step, or was it because of the fact that they didn’t have a lot of talent around him? That they didn't have guys that could get open, they didn’t have guys who could protect long enough to let these down field plays develop.
So, all of a sudden Brady lands in a spot where they are loaded on offense. It’s the best collection of skill position players that he has been with in a very very long time. You probably have to go back to some of those really good Patriots teams of the mid-2000s in terms of the receiving talent that he was around – Chris Godwin, Mike Evans, who is as good as any deep threat wide receiver that he’s ever played with. Then they brought back Rob Gronkowski, who’s kind of his old reliable; Scotty Miller, who’s a really kind of fun deep threat weapon, he’s just really really fast and a gadgety kind of player. Then they added Antonio Brown, who we don’t know if he’s going to play in the Super Bowl, and adding Antonio Brown obviously opens up a whole lot of conversations that would be perfect to have here on this podcast.
Lindsay G: Right. [laughs]
Lindsay J: Which is why I love you guys so much. But in terms of just if we’re talking strictly football, why is it working. And it didn’t work right away, you know? There were some growing pains with this offense, and does Tom Brady’s style fit with Bruce Arians’ “no risk it, no biscuit” down field kind of game, and it took a while for them to get there. But it has worked, and we’ve been reminded that Tom Brady still has it and it’s incredible that he still has it at 43. I mean, I’m not even 40 yet and I feel like I woke up this morning and I could barely move my neck and I cannot imagine some of the physical stuff that he is doing at his age. Then the other part of it in why it’s working too is their defense is really good, and I remember Bruce Arians said this…I think it was even back in March or April when Tom Brady first landed on their roster, was that they built this team to win regardless of who the quarterback was. Then the fact that they were able to get Tom Brady onto their roster and he’s the kind of franchise-changing player, you know? He comes into the building and changes the expectations for everybody.
But they already had a really good defensive core, a really young and talented secondary, really good pass rushers in Jason Pierre-Paul and Shaquil Barrett, maybe some of the best inside line backers with Devin White and Lavonte David. I mean, maybe the best due in the NFL. So, they were already constructed to win, and then you bring in a guy who actually knows how to win to lead your organization, and it’s worked. They weren’t the best team in football for a long time, they didn’t win their division this year, you know, they got swept by the Saints. But I don’t think there’s really a question, especially the way that they played in the NFC championship game against the Packers, that they’re the best team in the NFC and they absolutely deserve to be here at the Super Bowl.
Lindsay G: On the other side we have Kansas City who last year was this great kind of underdog story to root for and is Andy Reid finally going to get his moment in the sun, can Patrick Mahomes get the coronation? Of course, the answer to all that was yes. [laughs] How are they able to follow that up and avoid a Super Bowl hangover, which is what we see time and time again from teams, and get back to this stage? Why was this team built for that?
Lindsay J: Yeah, and I mean, they’ve said run it back. That’s been their motto for this year, is the Chiefs are gonna run it back. They’ve been saying it really since last February. As far as the Super Bowl hangover thing, I think there’s probably something to the fact that COVID kind of shut everything down and they didn’t get to really have their victory tour that a lot of Super Bowl champions get where you’re out there feeling yourselves for months and months and months and you’re kind of back at practice as the kings and you're getting big parties in Las Vegas and that didn't really happen. They got their big parade in Kansas City the week after the Super Bowl, and that was basically it. I mean, they didn’t kind of have–
Lindsay G: The world stopped.
Lindsay J: Yeah. The world stopped. They didn’t have the big White House visit, they didn’t have the huge ring party. I mean, they did this weird kind of socially distanced thing on the field but it wasn’t a big spectacle. So, they didn’t quite get the same fanfare that a lot of Super Bowl champions get. But then there’s just the fact that you have tremendous continuity on your offense in terms of your offensive roster, your offensive coaching staff, your play caller, your offensive coordinator, your quarterbacks coach. There’s a lot of issues with the fact that Eric Bieniemy has not been hired as a head coach already, that there's a lot of really complicated conversations to have there. But it has certainly benefitted the Chiefs, right? They have this complete consistency on their offense.
You also have the best quarterback in football, the best NFL player, the best football player on the planet. So, that certainly helps. I think a lot of the teams that aren’t able to repeat, that aren’t able to build a sort of dynasty, it’s because your quarterback is not otherworldly, and you need to do a lot of other things around him to win with the quarterback that you have. I mean, you look at the Los Angeles Rams – two years ago they were in the Super Bowl with this really crazy high-powered offense, but I think they learned really quickly that while they could win with Jared Goff they couldn’t win with Jared Goff all the time. They couldn’t win without doing a lot of things around him, and now they’ve moved on from him just two years after he was in Super Bowls.
Lindsay G: Right. [laughs]
Lindsay J: So yeah, I think for the Chiefs a lot has changed though since last Super Bowl. They had to pay Patrick Mahomes; he got a 10 year $500 million contract extension last summer. We’ll see if he ends up getting all of that or if he has to renegotiate it at some point like seven years from now. But that’s an insane contract. They were able to re-sign Chris Jones, they were able to bring back Sammy Watkins – he was a free agent, but they decided to bring him back. There was a lot of elements of knowing this was going to be an unconventional offseason, they weren’t gonna get a lot of practice, so if they really did wanna make a chance of going back to the Super Bowl and keeping this group intact, you bring back those guys like Sammy Watkins. So yeah, I just think it was a very conscious decision on the part of Andy Reid and Brett Veach, the general manager, about how they wanted to build this team not to win just one Super Bowl but to be going year after year after year.
Lindsay G: There’s been so much talk, and I know you’ve written and talked about this as well, about how Mahomes has grown in the past year as a leader not only on the field but off the field. What have you seen from him, especially during such a difficult year as 2020?
Lindsay J: Yeah, I think there was no question even in 2018 when he became the starting quarterback for the Chiefs and went on that kind of ridiculous year and he was the unquestioned MVP of the league that the people within the Kansas City locker room, that that organization responded to him. But we really have just seen him grow into this where he is the new face of the NFL and he’s going to be extremely marketable, but he is also very conscious of his business investments, the causes that he gets behind. It is not an accident that when Michael Thomas and Tyrann Mathieu were really the two players who were the driving forces behind the players’ Black Lives Matter video early June of last year, that one of the first guys they recruited was Patrick Mahomes. Deshaun Watson was also part of that video.
But it was not an accident that the first player to say the words Black Lives Matter in that video that was directed at Roger Goodell was Patrick Mahomes, and that kind of when they put the grid of 9 or 12 players that Patrick Mahomes was in the center of it. That is not an accident, and that is not something that you would’ve seen previous generations of quarterbacks doing. He is the best player in the NFL, he is confident in who he is and what he believes in and the causes that he needs to get behind and the ways to use his voice in ways that a lot of other players haven't done. Even today – we’re recording this on Monday, we just had the first media session of Super Bowl week – Tom Brady, who has been the face of the NFL for a very very long time, has never wanted to talk about any sort of social issues, you know? We’ve seen him with a MAGA hat in his locker before.
Nancy Armour, one of my closest friends and somebody I tremendously respect in this business, asked Tom Brady a question today about his political beliefs and his ability to kind of dodge questions or talk about social issues, and it was like he malfunctioned, like he was a robot who didn't even know how to react. When we get Patrick Mahomes on these Zoom interviews later today and he gets asked about, like, how do you feel about the Black Lives Matter movement and your role in the video and voting registration drives and all that stuff, he's gonna know exactly what to say and he’s going to be a leader in this front that his predecessors never were comfortable doing, and I think that’s good for the NFL. I think the NFL’s gonna change for the better after what happened this last year. We’ve seen college athletes now being more confident with their platform, their voices, knowing that they have a say in social matters. And then the young players, these young leaders, guys like Mahomes and Deshaun Watson, that they’re doing it too, I think it’s ultimately going to benefit the NFL years from now to have leaders like Patrick Mahomes.
Lindsay G: Obviously it's unfortunate that they don't have that verbal support from leaders like Tom Brady and a lot of the white quarterbacks across the league, but I think you’re right. It’s an overall positive for the league. So, you talked about being on Zoom sessions – what does the media environment look like for…Let’s start with Super Bowl week, and then I wanna go back and talk a little bit about the season as a whole. But Super Bowl media day is something we’re all used to watching, right? Is that all being done virtually now?
Lindsay J: Yes, it’s entirely virtual. The Chiefs, they’re in Kansas City, they’re basically doing all of their media stuff over Zoom just like this entire year has been. So yeah, usually Monday for the last five or so years, media day became media night. It was this made for television broadcast event, it was in primetime, it aired live on NFL Network where it was all about the television production. They did not care about people like me, and that’s fine. They’re not catering to me, you know? I was working at USA Today and now here at The Athletic. They call it media day, but it’s not meant for the media, it’s meant for television spectacle. It’s all about Deion Sanders and the NFL Network hosts kind of climbing up onto these podiums and getting right in Tom Brady’s face and chuckling and asking these questions. They sold tickets for fans and over the last couple of years they’ve even had a stage and pre-press conference introductions and musical acts and Scott Hanson hosting it.
I can still hear Scott Hanson – who’s a lovely gentleman, and I love hearing him on RedZone – but I can still hear him in my head narrating media night while we’re trying to conduct interviews. Like, you would go back and listen to your recording, like, I’m over here with some running back’s coach trying to get some anecdote for my story about Todd Gurley before the Rams are in the Super Bowl and all I can hear is Scott Hanson and Deion Sanders yelling in my recorder. So, I will say, I did not miss that this morning [Lindsay laughs] when we had the first round of media day interviews. It’s all via Zoom, it’s all moderated, it’s on what we believe is a secure platform. I mean, it has not been infiltrated yet…We’re only one day in. But kind of a secure platform where you raise your hand, the moderator calls on you, they unmute you, you ask your question, they mute you, you don’t get to get a follow up.
So, it’s very orderly. It’s probably not as great from a storytelling perspective because a lot of these times you get somebody talking about their mom or their dad or their high school football coach or something and you’re muted and can’t ask a follow up to tell me more about the story. So, it doesn’t feel like a conversation. You know, sometimes at media night you’re lucky to get a question in and you’re shouting over each other and you’re getting elbowed. It’s very much like a full-contact sport, and it's one of those things that I think about in the pre-COVID world. I cannot imagine being that close to that many people, I’m like, horrified at the fact that just a year ago we were doing that. [laughs] In Miami of all places!
Lindsay G: I know! [laughs]
Lindsay J: But you know, there are times during Super Bowl week where access is actually really great, where you can sit down with a tight ends coach or the receivers coach or the backup quarterback. I get asked a lot when I talk to young reporters about what advice do you have or, “I’m new to covering the league…” – backup quarterbacks are the best for information. And nobody ever wants to talk to the backup quarterbacks, so you could sit down with Chad Henne and learn a lot of really interesting stuff about Patrick Mahomes. But you don’t get to do that this year. Those guys are not being available. So, you know, there’s some things that are maybe better about it, some things that are definitely worse. I don’t love fighting for time with a puppet, but I do hope that by next year we’ll be at a place where we can do that again and for that to happen that means that our country is healed in ways we’re not even close to right now.
Lindsay G: Right. You said you are going down to Tampa, so what will that look like? And is this your first live game this year? Have you been going to games?
Lindsay J: So, I live in Denver and I went to three Broncos games where I was able to just drive 7 miles up I-25 and sit in a socially distanced press box with masks and stuff. But this will be my first time on an airplane since the Combine last year. It was the end of February. So, I have my own kind of anxieties about it. A lot of my colleagues have traveled, so I know people have done this. This is hardly like the first one who’s doing something like this, but I have my own personal anxieties. I actually just right before we started this podcast went and got a pre-travel COVID test so at least I have those results back before I go get on a plane. It’s going to look very different. There is a radio row but it’s not going to be the typical, you know, all these shows broadcasting live and just hundreds of former NFL players and celebrities coming through their publicists. It’s not going to be like that at all.
There is going to be a Roger Goodell press conference on Thursday with a small amount of media in person, which is really the reason I’m going down there a couple of days before the Super Bowl so I can be there for that. That’ll be my first time interviewing somebody in person in quite a while! [laughter] I literally cannot remember the last time. So, that’ll be kind of an interesting setup. Then on game day they’ve just drastically reduced the number of credentials. I think typically from The Athletic or from when I was at USA Today, our staffs would have 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 credentials, something like that. There’s this huge auxiliary media space, they take over some of the bleachers or sections of the stadium. None of that stuff is happening this year. It’s just in the press box. We’ll have three people on site from The Athletic: me, and then our beat writers from the Chiefs and Bucs, and that's it. I’ve been texting with my colleagues around the country, like, who’s going, who’s not going…
Lindsay G: Yeah.
Lindsay J: There’s not going to be any big dinners, you know? None of that kind of schmoozey stuff you usually do at the Super Bowl. It’s gonna be messaging with people that I know that work at the NFL about, well, maybe we can meet for an outdoor coffee. It’s just gonna looks very very different.
Lindsay G: Wow.
Lindsay J: All the postgame stuff is going to be on Zoom, just like it is now. It’s gonna be a lot fewer players available. So yeah, I think a lot of the cool stories that you usually get coming out of the Super Bowl where it’s like…You know, I remember last year I was in the Chiefs locker room and going back to the backup quarterbacks talking to Matt Moore, Chad Henne, and also Mike Kafka who’s the Chiefs quarterback’s coach, to get really inside that Wasp play.
Lindsay G: Yeah.
Lindsay J: The play that turned everything in the Super Bowl. And it was the backup quarterbacks who were like, “Oh yeah, it’s called Wasp, and here, let me draw it up for you, and this is how it works…” Like, it’s gonna be a lot harder to get those really cool nuggets of inside the game and the biggest moments of the game because it’s gonna be hundreds of people on a Zoom with Patrick Mahomes instead of being able to kind of mine the locker room for those really unique bits of information.
Lindsay G: So, we have made it to the Super Bowl–
Lindsay J: Somehow, here we are!
Lindsay G: –at the time that the NFL originally slated. There have definitely been some problems throughout the year, COVID-related. How do you think this season went COVID-wise? I know you just wrote about this, how do both the NFL and the players feel about how this season went?
Lindsay J: Yeah, I think they’re definitely proud and relieved that they got here. It was not easy, it was not without a lot of criticism, including from myself. I wrote multiple columns over the last year about why is the NFL rushing to start the league year? This pandemic is just starting – why do they need to do this? There’s nothing that says they have to start the league year on March 17th the way that they typically do. There were times where I said why don’t they pause the season now? So, I’ve definitely been in that chorus of people saying, “What is going on here? Why is the NFL proceeding the way that they are?” At the same time, they have made a lot of very conscious decisions that have gotten them to this point in terms of their protocols, their testing, their contact tracing, and I do think at least their medical officials have been very transparent about the way that they’ve been going about it.
The NFL was in an interesting situation where when the pandemic started they were in their offseason, so they did have this luxury of time where they could kind of see what was gonna happen and watch how the pandemic response was going in the country, watch what these other leagues were going to do. But they could also not just replicate what the NBA and the NHL did for their kind of abbreviated postseasons, the way that they kind of tried to reconvene things in a bubble. The NBA got a ton of praise for the way that they did their bubble this summer, and rightfully so. It was a tremendous accomplishment to kind of put that all together and to keep it as safe as they did. We’re now seeing the NBA trying to embark on a season without a bubble and how challenging it is, and so I think a lot of the criticism that the NFL got from within the sports world about, “Look what the NBA did,” and, “The NBA was so right, and the NFL is evil for doing this.” I think you see that it's just really hard for everybody involved, and I think that the complicated question that we always have to ask is: should they have played at all?
Lindsay G: Right.
Lindsay J: Was this just a terrible decision? Were they putting lives at risk? Possibly. Were they just going after money? Absolutely, they were chasing a lot of money. I mean, they’re already losing billions of dollars and they have played a full season including they’re about to play a Super Bowl, and they’ve still lost billions of dollars. But once you kind of just have to wrap your head around “this is happening,” we have to look at how did they get here? What were the things that they put in place? What were the inflection points that enabled this to happen? I also think there’s a lot of things that we’re just maybe not gonna know for a while in terms of the long term health effects.
I also think there’s been a lot of luck involved that gotten them to this point, that they haven’t had really serious cases. I mean, we always kind of thought that the worst case scenario is that an active player could be in the ICU. Somebody could die from this. And that didn’t happen, and I don’t necessarily think that happened strictly because of how great their protocols were or how great everybody adhered to their protocols or whatever. I think they might’ve just gotten kind of lucky and have avoided their worst case scenarios.
Lindsay G: Yeah. Another serious topic that you mentioned earlier, like you said, is a Burn It All Down topic, is of course how we treat and talk about and deal with players in the NFL who have been accused of sexual violence. There are a couple players in this game that could have a big part…You mentioned Antonio Brown, who’s been accused of sexual assault, and then of course Tyreek Hill on Kansas City who has been accused of and admitted to being guilty of horrific domestic violence in the past. Then of course in the NFL there was just this past week the story of what the Seattle Seahawks lineman Chad Wheeler, the horrific domestic violence he committed.
Lindsay J: Yes.
Lindsay G: You’ve been covering this topic so closely in covering the league. Have you noticed any difference in the way that players and coaches or even the media are talking about and/or dealing with this?
Lindsay J: It’s hard, because I think in general we are better equipped to cover issues of violence against women now than we were in 2014 when the Ray Rice scandal just really rocked the NFL, you know? If you’re a news organization you can’t say you don’t know how to do this. I know it’s something that a lot of us have written extensively about. We have resources available, we have style guides, but that doesn’t mean everybody actually covered it responsibly. I know it’s something that we at The Athletic have had a lot of discussions about. We had our Super Bowl planning meeting as soon as this matchup was set, and I said we’re not writing any Antonio Brown redemption pieces. It’s just not gonna happen. You cannot frame an Antonio Brown gets to the Super Bowl story without talking about the active investigations that are still going on. The fact that he has been accused of rape, using the right language, it’s all these sorts of…You can't write it as a “look how hard his last year has been and how great it is that he got to the Super Bowl.”
Those stories are gonna be out there sometime this week. I haven’t seen any of them yet. They’re gonna get written somewhere, I just wanna make sure that they’re not being written on the platform that I’m on, the NFL masthead. That's not gonna happen. But I think when it comes to policies, there’s still a lot of inconsistencies about the way that the NFL treats it, the way that their personal conduct policy is enforced. It really still is basically all up to Roger Goodell. Heading into last year’s Super Bowl we had a lot of conversations internally about how we were gonna talk about Tyreek Hill, Frank Clark when he was at the University of Michigan. So, I decided to kind of handle it as like, I’m gonna do a deep dive into what the personal conduct policy has looked like over the past five years. So, 2014-2019, kind of the post-Ray Rice era, what punishment looks like.
Basically, the takeaway is if you are a good player or a great player the standard is different, the investigations take a lot longer. The burden of proof is still a lot higher. If you are a marginal player like Chad Wheeler it is very easy for the NFL to discard of you very quickly. Last week this horrific incident occurred, the Seahawks cut him immediately. He’s a guy we will probably never hear from in the NFL again. They’ll suspend him, they’ll probably announce in two weeks that Chad Wheeler, free agent formerly of the Seattle Seahawks, has been suspended eight games under the personal conduct policy. That’s it, that’s all we’ll hear again. But then there’s somebody like Antonio Brown who is all pro, was on a hall of fame career path. This investigation into the rape allegations has been open for almost a year and a half and is probably not anywhere near close to concluding. There are some complications there that it is a civil allegation and there’s not a lot of precedent for this within the NFL, but they move really quickly on a lot of other cases and then cases where you’ve got a lot of talent.
I just think that that’s the one thing that’s always going to be true here – you can make all of these policies and talk about how much you care about women and how much you abhor violence against women and all of these education programs and training programs and hiring people…Bottom line is that if you are a good player and if a coach on a team believes that you can help them win, they will forgive just about anything. They will make an excuse for just about anything. So, that’s kind of the hard thing to reconcile. I know something that me and probably a lot of other women who cover this league and women who root for the NFL or whatever it is, it’s really incredible that there are two female coaches in this game.
Lindsay G: Yeah.
Lindsay J: That Bruce Arians has hired two full time female coaches. He has been on the forefront of all the NFL’s diversity initiatives and especially with being a proponent for women in football. But he also signed Antonio Brown this year, and it’s really hard to reconcile those two things.
Lindsay G: I agree, and he had just a terrible answer, I remember, when he was asked about it.
Lindsay J: Yeah.
Lindsay G: He just kind of completely deflected and minimized it. You’re right, he hires Black coordinators and promotes them, and women. Yeah, I think ultimately you’re right. It comes down to at the end of the day these people wanna win and that’s what they’re going for. Is there any maybe on or off the field storyline that, you know, not the big headlines but that you’re on the lookout for this Super Bowl?
Lindsay J: Yeah, I mean, the quarterbacks are dominating everything. I will say, the fact that there are two female coaches in this game is great, and they’re both really really interesting. So, the Bucs assistant strength and conditioning coach Maral Javadifar, she’s been very out of the spotlight, but I think she has a PT background, she works directly with kind of all players on the roster. Then Lori Locust, who I think her story is just incredible. She’s a mom, she came really late to football. I mean, she played football – she didn’t start coaching until like her 40s and 50s. She's working with Ndamukong Suh and Jason Pierre-Paul and just this really interesting group of players. It’s not normalized yet, but we're getting there, and it’s gonna be really cool. I have a young daughter and I showed her, I said, “Look, there’s these two women who are gonna be coaching in football,” and she kind of just was like, okay, cool! Like, it wasn’t a, “Wow, I didn’t think women could do that.” But that is a cool moment. I’m glad we’re gonna be able to see that.
Tyrann Mathieu is kind of one of the most interesting, fun players in the NFL. Obviously he was drafted, five years on the Cardinals, played for Bruce Arians in Arizona, is one of Bruce Arians’ favorite players of all time, now obviously is kind of in line to potentially win a second championship with the Chiefs. He’s one of the most interesting guys, I think, in the NFL. The career arc that he has been on, the way that his college career ended at LSU, the chance that he got at Arizona and now how he’s just become this really amazing leader and player and kind of a model for who you are in college shouldn’t define you into the NFL. So, he’s been really fun to watch. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I have a lot. I’m just writing a lot of Mahomes and diversity coaching stuff this week!
Lindsay G: Yeah. I wanna go find some more of these fun under the radar kind of stories, positive things to talk about instead of just all the heavy stuff we’ve already talked about.
Lindsay J: You’re right, it is more difficult when you’re not…Because so many of those stories come from talking to the person in the locker room who nobody else is talking to. [laughs] That’s where those stories come from.
Lindsay G: Yeah, and that’s so much of what we usually do this time of year. I remember this time last year our Chiefs beat writer Nate Taylor and I were just like, “What’s the craziest shit you’ve ever seen Patrick Mahomes do?” So it was going to like, backup offensive linemen and all of the assistant coaches, and that was so fun. You just can't really get that in this same manner where you could just bop from person to person to person to person. So, hopefully the 2022 Super Bowl in Los Angeles will be able to do a little bit more of that next year. We’ll see.
Lindsay J: I hope so. I will say, we got into the COVID stuff a little bit on this press conference with Jim Nantz and Tony Romo and Tracy Wilson and some CBS executives last week. Get ready for Jim Nantz to do a lot of talking about how the Super Bowl and the NFL helped “heal” our country and this is this unifying event.
Lindsay G: Ugh. [groans]
Lindsay J: I am not ready for it. [Lindsay laughs] But I would just like everybody to be prepared, like, get your wine open. It’s going to happen. Prepare your eye-rolls. I mean, look – it’s a football game, and I make my living covering the NFL and I’m glad personally that I’m getting to cover football or whatever, but there are some really significant questions and challenges that have happened. I mean, our country’s in a world of shit still, and the Super Bowl is not going to heal any of it.
Lindsay G: Sure. And what we don’t know is how many of the cases from the people attending the games and getting together at watch parties and nobody’s tracking that stuff.
Lindsay J: Yeah.
Lindsay G: Please don’t go to a Super Bowl party.
Lindsay J: Don’t go to a Super Bowl party!
Lindsay G: Please! [laughs]
Lindsay J: Let’s just put that out there. Sit at your house, you can get your own beverages and snacks and watch with your immediate family and your household and you can Zoom with your buddies, or group texts. Let’s just not have Super Bowl parties. I think, and I put this in the story that I wrote this weekend, that the NFL and NFLPA officials are very cognizant of we’re not gonna celebrate getting here because just getting to kickoff of Super Bowl Sunday is no indication that this was the right thing, that there were no outbreaks, that the fans that are there aren’t gonna do something…And Major League Baseball, COVID destroyed game six of their World Series. Justin Turner was pulled from the last game of the World Series and then was out on the field celebrating, taking pictures. The NFL cannot let that happen. They cannot have their bubble burst on the field after the game because all of a sudden they realize Tom Brady has COVID, you know? That just cannot happen.
The risk that, you know, I’ve already seen videos from people in Tampa out on the bay front boulevard and lots of crowds of people, like, I’m terrified! I’m gonna wear my N95 and not leave my hotel room until I absolutely have to. [laughs] It’s scary! So let’s all just try to be cool, responsible people, and not make this any worse than it already is.
Lindsay G: Lindsay, I wish that people would heed that advice. I’m not counting on it, unfortunately. [laughter]
Lindsay J: I mean, maybe having the Bucs in the Super Bowl, it's saving…I mean, if the Packers had been in the Super Bowl think how many Packers fans would have been like, we are going, we're getting on a plane! Like, how many extra people…Maybe because it’s the Bucs there’s gonna be less people flying in and traveling, like, extra people, maybe.
Lindsay G: Sure, yeah.
Lindsay J: Like, if the Bucs fans could just not fill Ybor City without their masks on, that would be great.
Lindsay G: That would be really great. Final, final question: who’s gonna win? What's your prediction? [laughs]
Lindsay J: So, my very initial prediction that I did as soon as this matchup was set right after the championship game was I picked the Chiefs, and I think I picked it 34-30. So, I’m gonna stick with that. I do think that the Chiefs are the best team and they have the singular best player. It feels really scary to pick against Tom Brady, but… [Lindsay laughs] I also think it would be very unwise to pick against Patrick Mahomes, so I’m gonna pick the Chiefs and I’m gonna stick with it.
Lindsay G: Well, look, if we’ve come this far, if they’ve put us through all this, let’s at least just hope for a good game, right? [laughs]
Lindsay J: It has to be.
Lindsay G: I don’t know whether this season should’ve happened or not. I probably don’t think it should have…
Lindsay J: Yeah.
Lindsay G: But if we’re here, might as well enjoy it. [laughs]
Lindsay J: At least make it entertaining!
Lindsay G: Lindsay, I’m so glad we finally got you on Burn It All Down. Thank you so much for coming and for getting us ready for the game. If any of you missed our Tuesday podcast it was myself, Amira and Brenda, and we kind of dug into the history of the Super Bowl and some more of the off-field stuff that’s going on. So, think of it as a companion piece to this interview. Remember, you can follow us @burnitdownpod, and please if you get a chance go to Apple Podcasts and give us a rating and review. Lindsay, where can they follow you?
Lindsay J: You can follow me on Twitter @bylindsayhjones – and obviously that’s Lindsay with an ‘a’!
Lindsay G: Obviously. [laughs]
Lindsay J: Then my work is at The Athletic.
Lindsay G: Awesome. Thanks so much.
Lindsay J: Great, thanks for having me.