Tom Brady Retires — Skip: “It felt like a death in the family”
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This is going to be everything I can't share with you during a two and a half hour go for the throat debate show. So on today's Undisputed, the Skip Bayless show, I'm going to take you way behind the scenes and show you how Tom Brady turned my life upside down over the last week. And

I'm going to tell you about an epic and a groundbreaking on-air clash I had with my favorite all-time Cincinnati Bengal, Chad Johnson, Chad Ochocinco, and how it changed life for the show that I do now on Undisputed.

I'm going to tell you how I was shocked that Nathaniel Hackett got the Denver Broncos job. Wait, the same Nathaniel I first met when he was seven years old? Yeah, that one. And I'm also going to tell you the painful truth as I see it about Patrick Mahomes. As always, I'll get to several of your questions and I got some beauties today.

But first up, as always, it's time for a not to be skipped. Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr. is no more in the National Football League. He has officially retired, as you well know, and as I unfortunately know, and I'm here to tell you, I just can't get used to it. I can't wrap my head around it. I get it.

But I don't get it. I'm sorry, but yeah, family, yeah, health. He's 100% healthy. He just played arguably the best season he's ever played, albeit at 44 years of age. As my wife Ernestine continues to hound me and tell me, wait a second, don't blame it on the family. Don't make them the scapegoats as if they yank Tom away from football.

He always did whatever he wants to do. It's got to be on him. I don't get it. I don't think he's going to be happy, but that's me, and I'm 10 million miles away from the brain of Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr. So whatever's in his brain, I can't fathom. Whatever he just decided to do,

I'm all in for. I just believe that it's a waste that he won't be playing football next year because I just believe he'd go win an eighth Super Bowl or a ninth or a tenth. I thought he was going to play until he's 50. And yet, I must admit to you, I am hugely relieved that it's finally over. I told you on last week's podcast, for me, it started a week ago Tuesday. It was actually that Monday night before football.

when a very good source of mine, high place Tampa Bay Buccaneers source, told me that out of the blue in a text message, "We will be pleasantly surprised if Tom plays next year." You what? We didn't hear a peep about this all year. There was no farewell tour. You'd be pleasantly surprised? I texted back and my source texted right back, "No, scratch that. We'd be pleasantly shocked."

Where did that come from? Why? Cryptic. I don't know. No, that's all I can tell you. This is way off the record. Don't wreck it for him because he wants to control the narrative. He wants to announce it when he announces it and make it his story as opposed to the media's story. So the rest of the week passed and we got to Saturday. Would you believe Saturday was going to be my first real off day in six months?

And I know it's hard to fathom this, but football/NBA season is hard on me. As much as I live for this and love it, I feel like I'm responsible for watching every game that's ever played. So for me, it was blissful to think that my wife Ernestine and I and our daughter Hazel, our little five-year-old Maltese, we are going to get a day to ourselves with no games. No more college football, obviously. No more NFL on Saturday football.

I was going to have a wall-to-wall 24 hours off. We did watch the Lakers at Charlotte on Friday night, but Saturday was Valhalla for us. We had circled the date. First time in six months we could, I don't know, go for a walk, go for a drive, go out to lunch. Pandemic's still here, got to sit outside, but we were going to do all of the above. So I get on the treadmill,

This is late, I slept in, I slept till 10 o'clock. I get up at 2:00 a.m. every morning out here on the West Coast to get ready for Undisputed. Take a nap in the afternoon, but I'm always up on the dot 2:00 a.m. So by Friday night, I'm fading fast. Saturday, thank God, I'm able to sleep straight through to 10. Wake up refreshed, I'm a new man. I get on the treadmill at 11ish.

I'm looking for something to watch because usually it's sports and I don't have any sports. I start watching the old cowboy movie. You probably don't even know this one from the late 70s, North Dallas 40. I'm actually working on a screenplay, a sports movie of my own. It's going to be a barn burner. It's going to be one of those gritty sports stories that has never been told to me, real behind the scenes. I'll share more of it with you future podcasts.

but like a graphic novel come to life as a sports story. So I'm watching North Dallas 40 just to think, "Man, this is kind of cheesy. This is kind of silly. How did they do this? How did they choose to do that?" And all of a sudden, my wife ducks her head around the corner to the treadmill area and she says, "Ah, your buddy just retired." "What?" She said sarcastically. I finish, I get off.

scouring the internet, ESPN's broken the story, Adam Schefter, Jeff Darlington, high regard for both. That's it, he's planning to retire. Tom Brady is going to retire, not that he had retired, so she wasn't sure if it came from Tom. She just really had casually looked at the headlines, but I knew I was in for it.

And for the next three hours, I'm all over it. I look at Twitter. I'm trending number one in the United States because everybody thinks I'm going to jump out the window. And I thought about it for a minute. And then I tweeted. I always tell you, I tweet is my great escape during games. It's my anger management program is just tweet. Tweet it out. Tweet your emotions out. So I go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Then I think a little bit more and I go boom, boom, boom. And then we start to get the rebuttals.

And one after another, Don Yee, the agent for Tom Brady says, "Nope, nope, nothing's been decided." Bruce Arians, coach of the Bucks, "Nope, nothing has been decided." Tom Brady Sr. says, "Nope, nothing has been decided." All premature, Tom's out of the country, hasn't thought about it yet. Now I got some second thoughts, and now I start hearing from friends of Tom Brady, and I know a bunch of them. I don't know Tom, he said nice things about me, but

I am close to several who have been very close with Tom. And all of a sudden, the window I was going to jump out, it cracks open a little bit with a ray of hope. And the friends are saying, wait a second. Now that ESPN has jumped the gun, knowing Tom the way we know him, the way I know Tom, is that he's one of those watch this guys. You cross him, you dare him, you doubt him.

You tried to jump the gun with his retirement story and he's capable of saying, okay, I don't retire. I'll show you and I'll put you all to shame. I'll shut you all up. I'll make you all look like fools as he often has on the football field by coming back to play again. So I thought, well, thank you, Adam Schefter and Jeff Darlington.

Maybe you just sent Tom Brady out of retirement back into a Buccaneers uniform or who knows, maybe another uniform. I threw out the 49ers. He wanted to go there two years ago and they made the mistake of their lives. Kyle Shanahan, John Lynch, they should have said yes then to Tom Brady. Instead, they said, well, we got Jimmy G. And reportedly he said, you want to keep that? And I can't say the word, sorry.

I won't say it. But you want to keep that guy? Very colorful language. Yep, they did. I think they thought Tom was just about done. A lot of people thought he was, to use LeBron's favorite word, washed. Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. My partner, Shannon Sharp, washed. Nope. And there he went to Tampa, and there went another Super Bowl. And I thought he was going to win another one this year. And all he did was put up numbers that are...

MVP caliber numbers. I thought he should win MVP. I'm sure Aaron Rodgers will. But that's the guy who, if you cross him and you jump the gun on his retirement, is highly capable of saying, April Fool's, I'm back. So now it starts. And I hear from some inside sources that, yeah, we have hope that maybe he'll now reconsider. And then Monday night happened.

I'm out in our gated community walking Hazel with Ernestine. I always take like a 10 minute break from the frantic prep for the next day's show. My phone pings, my pocket. I look down, it's my Tampa Bay source, inside source. Two word text. This is Monday night about six o'clock Pacific time, maybe nine Eastern. Two word text, it's over. What? It's over? I text back, are you sure?

Sure, but this is off the record. Don't do it. Let him announce it. But trust me, it's over. Okay, so now I have to do another show on Tuesday morning. And we plan it and we prep it. And we're going to hit Brady in the A block, our opening block of the show. But we got a show that's just jam-packed with all sorts of Super Bowl. We got the Jim Harbaugh. We got a LeBron and his knee issue. Is it real or imagined or big deal, no big deal?

We got Antonio Brown's glove is up for auction. We got a dozen other stories besides the A Block story because we're still sort of shooting in the dark. But we shoot and I try to tap dance around the fact that I'm pretty sure it's over because I was real sure. And I'm trying to protect my source and not preempt Brady again.

And out of the blue, Jenny Taft interrupts to say, "We have breaking news. Tom has officially announced his retirement." Lord have mercy. So I'm at once relieved that I don't have to tap dance anymore and I can blurt out, "Yeah, I actually heard this last night. I know it's a fact because that's what the Bucks think. They are moving on." And yet it gets so crazy on air

that my partner, Shannon Sharp, starts crying real tears on the air. What? What are you crying for? He despises Brady. Not that he personally hates him, he just hates everything he stands for. And to me, Shannon has always been highly resentful that he had to stop playing football at 35, did make it to the Hall of Fame, but wanted to go on. He'd play today if he could. And Tom was still going great guns at 44, nine years later.

What are you crying for? He says, because I'm upset that the league didn't force him to retire. They didn't make him go home because he couldn't play anymore. Shannon's saying he walked away of his own volition. I said, he didn't just walk away. He strode away. He probably...

trotted away because he's a thousand percent healthy. Shannon's got all kinds of knee issues, swelling knees. He's had one hip replaced. I think he's going to have a second one replaced. This hurts. That hurts. Tom's like 44 going on 24. He didn't limp away. He strode away. He trotted away and it was killing Shannon. And then I started feeling tears in my eyes for two reasons, because I can't imagine life in the NFL without Tom Brady.

And because I am fried, man. I've had enough. I can't figure it out. I can't wrap my head around it. I can't explain it logically to myself. And I'm just relieved it's over. And yet I can't believe it's over. So we got tears going everywhere. It's lunacy. It's chaos on live TV. And we finally hit the first break. And more chaos ensues because

They're entrusting me to just blow up the rundown and come up with eight or nine Tom Brady questions, topics, issues that we can delve into because this has got to be wall-to-wall Brady day.

And it was. But I'm racking my brain again for we could go here. We could do that. We could go there. What about Deflategate? What about Spygate? What about this? What about this? What's his legacy? Greatest sports career ever? Yeah, I think so. Greatest clutch player ever? Yeah. What about Belichick? What did he prove against Bill Belichick? Well, that he was at least 75% of the reason for those Patriot dynasties. So we're going back and forth about that.

Shannon was in a weird mood because he still is in awe of Brady's career, yet he's walking the tightrope between, should I bless him now? Should I honor him? Because it felt like the man had passed away. And in football terms, he had. It felt like a death in my family. So in the end, I'm worn out. I'm strung out. I'm left out to dry by a man I don't even know.

a man who has helped shape my career, a man who's won me dozens and dozens of cases of Diet Mountain Dew. It's like it was the wildest week of my life. And in passing and in the end, I would just like to say to Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr., I love you, man, and I thank you, man, and I wish one day you'd explain to me why you quit prematurely.

Let's take a question from the audience, shall we? How about Devon from Kalamazoo? Hmm. Do you envision the NBA's GOAT, LeBron James, taking a page out of Tom Brady's playbook soon and drumming up retirement speculation? What? Devon, the NBA's GOAT retired in 1998, for the most part, with the last dance in Chicago.

Michael Jordan won six championships with six MVPs. LeBron James has lost six NBA finals. And Devon, how dare you put LeBron James' name in the same sentence with Tom Brady? Tom Brady won seven of ten Super Bowls. Tom Brady did his part to win two other Super Bowls, and Belichick let him down.

Belichick's defense spit the bit twice in the first Eli Super Bowl, 75 yards for a touchdown, two minutes left, and obviously against Nick Foles in the Philadelphia Eagles when Brady threw for a playoff record, not a Super Bowl, but a playoff record, 505 yards.

put up 33 on a top five defense and lost 41 to 33. Should have won nine of 10 Super Bowls and you're putting LeBron in the same sentence with the greatest clutch player ever beyond Jordan for me only because Brady kept doing it so many more times in his sports biggest stage. First six Super Bowls came with six game winning drives in the fourth quarter overtime. That's impossibly great.

Poor LeBron was born without a clutch gene. Devon, you know it and I know it. LeBron is simply the worst superstar late game free throw shooter we have ever seen. He notoriously runs from the late game free throw line because he is a notoriously poor free throw shooter at any stage of the game, especially late. He is a notoriously poor three-point shooter, way below average. And you dare?

to call him the NBA's GOAT? Seriously? The closest LeBron will ever get to GOAT, Devon, is in a barnyard. But I do appreciate your question. It is now time for a flashback. It is now time in honor of the Cincinnati Bengals being in the Super Bowl. I just said that. It is time for me to look back upon my all-time favorite Bengals team and more important,

my all-time favorite Bengal, a wide receiver you might remember, named Chad Johnson, aka Chad Ocho Cinco. Chad, you might remember, became a featured attraction of those Bengals teams of Marvin Lewis starting in the early 2000s. And Chad made five straight Pro Bowls, but was better known for his touchdown celebration skits.

and they were Academy Award worthy. I loved them. Favorite was always the Riverdance. Highly creative, beautifully performed. Chad was actually better at the skits than he was at playing football. Again, he made five straight Pro Bowls and that team was loaded with talent. Marvin Lewis wasn't just a good, he was a very good, bordering on great football coach who just needed a break.

He needed a team that probably didn't have so many solo stars and bad actors. But that team was so loaded that it went 11-5 in 05, you might remember, and had a home playoff game against arch rival Pittsburgh. Carson Palmer at quarterback, Chad and my other friend, T.J. Hushmanzada at receiver. What a great possession receiver he was. He made a pro ball also. Used to have

TJ on first take. He's done a lot of work here at FS1 also. And I'd learned a lot about Chad from TJ. But that team was so loaded. And you might remember the late, great Chris Henry. Second play of that home playoff game, Carson Palmer went deep. 66 yards to Chris Henry. What a talent he was. And on that play, the immortal Kimo van Olhoffen

crashed into Carson Palmer's planted leg, ruptured, I don't know, it seemed like every knee ligament, and off they carted Carson Palmer after two plays. And that was the end of those Bengals as we knew, and I was starting to love them. They lost that game 31-17 with John Kitna standing in at quarterback. And yet, Chad continued to rise and shine. 06, they went 8-8. 07, they went 7-9, but it was all Chad all the time.

In '08, they really struggled. They went 4-11-1. But along that trail, I started to see on Twitter that Chad Johnson was taking shots at me. Those were the days I actually read my @s, my mentions, my timeline. I've stopped because it just pollutes your brain. If you let it and you're on air, Twitter will define you. It will reform you. It will make you its own.

And I don't want that. I just want to be 1000% me. So at some point fairly soon after this, I just quit reading what was going on on Twitter. I like to tweet. I don't like to read. I don't need that. But it was great that I did in 2008 because Chad and I started a running battle against each other. And I got a great kick out of it.

It was mostly high-spirited, good-spirited, occasionally a little mean-spirited, I thought, on Chad's part, but he was clever and he was combative. And that is a recipe for electricity on Twitter or on live television, as you know. And as you remember, Chad's sort of catchphrase was "Child, please." Do I have it right? "Child, please." And I would respond back, "Please, child," to him.

just to irk him, to irritate him. And here we went escalating into realms that finally caught the attention of some of the higher ups at ESPN who kicked it around and commissioned our producer Galen Gordon at the time to, hey, maybe get these two together face to face on television. Never been done before that I know of in sports TV history.

I had once upon a time, maybe four or five years earlier with Stephen A. Smith, we had guest hosted PTI for Michael and Tony, and I had many battles with Terrell Owens, and that was the first one, but it was in their segment, Five Good Minutes, so you can't really go too deep and too far. He was on remote. This was

obviously intended to be face-to-face. So our producer connected with the PR staff in Cincinnati. They bounced off Chad. Chad said, bring it on. And we booked it. We were going to take first take on the road for the first time ever. We were going to go to Cincinnati and they said the only place we could do it, the only place Chad wanted to do it was on a Tuesday, their off day in Paul Brown Stadium in the visitor's locker room. Hmm.

Okay, I'm game. Let's do it. This happened on September the 8th of 2009. It was the morning after Labor Day. I watched Miami and Florida State do battle in the Cincinnati Hotel on television the night before on Labor Day night. And here we went, showdown at high noon, or in this case, it was high 10, as in 10 a.m. But we had a pre-show meeting at probably 8.30-ish.

I doubted Chad would show for it, but he did. Up he pulled. I happened to be standing. This is down the hall from that locker room. I happened to be standing out near the player's parking lot awaiting him, and he rolled up, or I should say roared up in a 2008 black Dodge Charger SRT8. It had become one of my favorite cars because a movie had been out, you might remember, in 2008 called Street Kings with Keanu Reeves.

you want to talk about a badass car and a badass perpetrator and keanu in that movie i wanted me some of that and chad had it and his stock went right through the roof for me when he pulled up in that black charger i think it's 450 horse it was roaring but he brought no entourage i was intrigued by that and he did come to our meeting

And he was extremely quiet and withdrawn, which I often find with very outgoing entertainer athletes that sometimes they can be very introverted. I have some of that in me, but not to the degree Chad had that day. Might have been a little overwhelmed by what he was about to get himself into, but he participated in bits and pieces and I assured him

Yeah, I'm going to come at him, but you're going to have all the time you need or want to respond. All you, all the time. You take the ball, you run with it as far as you need to. We have time. And here we went into the visitor's locker room.

In those days, our moderator was Jay Crawford. In those days, the show sort of revolved around me against the world because we did not have a Stephen A. yet. There was no permanent debate partner for me. I took on any and everybody. And on this day, it was perfect for me to go head to head only with Chad. Jay sat in the middle. I'm left. Chad's right.

and I look up in the visitors locker room and it's astounding how many lights and how many cameras had been set up in there. It was jam-packed for our little show. And I must tell you, it felt big and it felt real and it felt important. And I had carefully plotted where I wanted to go and I went. Shea first handed me the ball, "Skip, what are your issues with Chad?" And off I went. And I made it very clear to Chad that

gifted receiver, gifted entertainer, but a me player in the ultimate Wii sport. And it won't work unless all you care about is starring as opposed to winning. If all you care about is you, then the Wii will suffer, especially when you are the featured attraction. You're supposed to be the leader because you're one of, if not the best player,

And if you're all only about you, if you're only into you, if all of your celebrations are all about you and don't involve anybody else from your football team, your team will suffer and you will ultimately lose. And that's what started happening, obviously, to a loaded Bengals team. Ryan Reynolds here from Intmobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down.

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This episode is brought to you by Honda. When you test drive the all-new Prologue EV, there's a lot that can impress you about it. There's the class-leading passenger space, the clean, thoughtful design, and the intuitive technology. But out of everything, what you'll really love most is that it's a Honda. Visit Honda.com slash EV to see offers. And my final point to Chad was...

"You can't do what you had just done on Monday Night Football, and that is wear a fake gold Hall of Fame jacket that you had made up." Because I said, "Chad, you have now managed to offend and alienate every Hall of Famer, actual Hall of Famer, because they're all saying how presumptuous of you to think that you'll ever make it in alongside our bus in Canton."

Was Chad on the path? I guess you could say he was on the path, but he had a long way to go because up to that point, he played one playoff game. They had lost it, and Chad had had no reason to do any river dances in that game because he caught no touchdown passes. So, Chad, you can't go there. You stepped completely out of bounds with that one.

And as I finished my salvo, I glanced up at Chad and he's got tears in his eyes. And I'm talking real tears, not on cue actors tears, legit tears, because I stung him, I hurt him. And I realized at that moment, Chad's really a good guy because he's got a really good heart. And I've said this before, I'm over simplistic with this, but my view of the world is I divided into either have a good heart or a bad heart.

Lot of bad hearts out there. Lot of good hearts out there. Chad's heart is good. It's maybe not always in the right place, but it's a good heart. He's a sweetheart of a guy, deep down. Misguided, gone over the edge into social media, trying to be what Twitter wanted him to be. Yes, yes, yes. That was his biggest problem. More interested in starring than winning. And I must say,

He let me quote unquote take him to the woodshed that day in part because it was a big deal. He was on national TV. Going at it was skip. He loved it as much as he hated it at that moment because I hit every last nerve in his body. He knew that I was making a lot of good points. To his credit, he valiantly then fought back. But he was stung. He was shook. And I guess it was great TV because...

All I eventually heard about this moment was it was watershed at ESPN. It was seminal. It was something that had never happened before. And it put first take on the map at the mothership. If you recall, we were originally called pizza for three years in New York. And then they, with a change at the top of ESPN, a new regime took over. They pulled all the New York plugs.

Stephen Hayes, quite frankly, ESPN Classic, Josh Elliott. I think they wanted to pull the cold pizza plug, but we were making some money because we were starting to rate. And what was rating were the debate segments, which came four times in a two-hour show. So they said, hey, let's quit paying all the freight in New York City, where we were in the basement of the New Yorker Hotel in a studio that had to be built just for cold pizza.

Let's undo those expenses by moving that show to the mothership up in Bristol. So we had been up there for a little bit of '07, then '08, and this is '09. So we'd just been sort of floundering in the shadows. Nobody cared about us. Nobody noticed us until that moment. At that point, Chad was Chad Ocho Cinco, as in Ocho Cinco Eight Five, his number.

So everybody was buzzing at ESPN about the Ocho Cinco confrontation. And it felt big, said my superiors. It felt like a moment on TV that could live forever on YouTube. And I guess it did. I subsequently battled Chad on television, I don't know, eight or ten other times, including some on Undisputed here. It's always been great. We became friends.

i'm not going to say friends but at least friendly and i will tell you that when that day ended after we got through the a block we did a couple of more blocks with him just talking football talking bengals talking season they actually had a pretty good season that upcoming that they were about to play the denver broncos in the opener they did make the playoffs they had another home playoff game against the jets and chad unfortunately

got lost on Revis Island, if you recall. He got lost. He got stranded. He was a castaway on Revis Island in a very cold weather game, did next to nothing. So Chad's played two playoff games and had nothing to show for it statistically. But we continue to be friendly. That moment did live forever.

but I'll button it up with one untold story about what happened off camera that day. In the first commercial break, in stormed Marvin Lewis, the head coach of the Bengals, and he was unhinged. He was furious at Chad, furious at the PR staff, furious that we had invaded the space at Paul Brown Stadium.

even on a Tuesday off day, which obviously was not an off day for the coaching staff. It had not been cleared through the coaching staff. And I could just see the rage in Marvin's face. You could just see that he believed this was part and parcel of why his Bengals teams couldn't win.

They made the playoffs in his 16 years seven times and never won a playoff game. And I still believe Marvin Lewis can coach, should be able to coach again, should get a job. He is really good at what he does. But he got handed teams with a lot of Chad Johnson solo acts and a lot of Vontaze Burfecht bad actors. And here was Chad spinning out of control in Marvin's estimation because it's opening day week.

your mind should be all on football and you've got a big camera crew set up and you're doing some show on ESPN. Stop it. He tried to shut us down, but then he threw up his hands and he knew we had other segments planned. He said, okay, okay, just do whatever you got to do. And so I look back on that day as one of the greatest days of my life. And yet it was a day that was sort of the beginning of the end for those highly entertaining Bengals teams.

It was a day I look back on fondly because I went someplace with Chad Ochocinco that I'm not sure I've ever quite gone on TV with any other athlete. And Chad, I want you to know, I love you, man. Let's take another question from the audience, shall we? Let's go to Lisa from Henderson, Nevada. Lisa asks, "Do you ever watch yourself back to analyze your performance on Undisputed?"

That is a great and a painful question, Lisa, and I thank you for it. The answer is I have not, I will not, I will never even consider doing that. I believe that most other people in my business do watch themselves back. Some I know just like to look at themselves on television. I can't. I am at heart, as my wife will tell you, to a fault. I am a raging perfectionist.

And I beat myself up enough without critiquing my performance on Undisputed. Undisputed is a unique beast for me. It is virtually completely unscripted. It is mostly unplanned. It is 1000% authentic. We do know that

I'm a yes and he's a no, but I have no idea where he's going to go or how he's going to get there. I know where I need to go in case he goes there. I've told you before, every debate to me is one the night before in your preparation work. But the point of Undisputed is that it's its own entity. It's a life force that goes places you can't anticipate. So there's no acting in Undisputed.

If I start to critique a tape, trust me, I'll say, ooh, maybe I should have cringed there. Maybe I should have rolled my eyes. Why didn't I say that? You can't second guess it. You just got to get back on the horse and write it again tomorrow and tomorrow because there's going to be another day and another day and another day. It's five days a week, two and a half live unscripted hours a day.

It wears on me, but I live for it because I love it. And I love the immediacy of it. And I love it that it's not taped. It's not live to tape. It is raw and real and live. And you can't get it back. I don't have a cursor when I'm writing. You know, you can edit. I can't edit anything. And I love...

the pressure of that. It's great pressure because you have no choice but to unleash. So when I get out there, I've prepared hard, I feel confident in what I know, and then I just let it fly. So I don't want to watch it back because I don't want to turn into an actor. It is completely not contrived. It is not tricked up. So why

Why would I want to then say, "Huh, if I were a better actor," you can't act and make it work. So I appreciate your question. And I sometimes wonder when I get asked this question, could I be better if I studied my tape? Possibly so. Better question, could I be worse if I watched my tape? More likely so, but a great question. Now for a story.

that will involve Denver Broncos fans, Dallas Cowboys fans, Green Bay Packers fans. This story concerns the new head coach, and I can't believe I'm saying this, the new head coach of your Denver Broncos, Nathaniel Hackett. It also concerns his father, Paul, a longtime, very close friend of mine.

Nathaniel and Paul have provided me with the two most surreal moments of my career. I'll explain in a moment. I first met Nathaniel's father, Paul, when he was the offensive coordinator out here in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California. USC Trojans featured Paul Hackett's offense. He was Sean McVay before Sean McVay. He was the boy wonder, the boy genius. He was amazing.

a fountain of energy and creativity. He was the livest wire I'd ever been around. And I first talked to him for a book I was writing on a player at Cal, a quarterback you might or probably won't remember, named Joe Roth. Joe Roth, very tragically, died of malignant melanoma, a cancer, in 1977.

Just as he was on his way to being the first overall pick in the draft, out of Cal, probably bound to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, made it to the Hula Bowl in Hawaii where I first interviewed Joe. Well, actually, I'd done a feature on him for the LA Times earlier, but when I sat down to talk to him about his cancer, I flew to Hawaii.

And off that interview, the family asked me to do a book on Joe. It's a long story what happened to that book. It's not a pretty story, and I'll tell it to you in a subsequent podcast. But I did need to talk to Paul Hackett for that book because he was Joe's quarterback coach at Cal before Paul went to USC. Paul and I clicked. He was...

loads of fun for me because he was spilling over with football knowledge and stories and anecdotes and charisma that connected with me. It was like a soul connection that I can't explain, but we started to become very close. Paul went on to be Joe Montana's coach as the offensive coordinator under Bill Walsh in San Francisco.

Did great. He was the hottest name in coaching circles. I knew he was destined to be a head coach. I just wasn't sure where and how, but I helped put his name in several hats, making calls for him to cities, to columnists, to beat writers, because he wanted to be a head coach. And I figured he'd be a great one. Fast forward to one night, I'm back in Dallas, where I then worked and lived, writing columns for the Dallas Times-Herald.

covering the Cowboys. I'm half watching the local news, the sports comes on, Central Time, it's 10:25ish, and I fall off my couch when I see Paul Hackett on my TV, and the sportscaster is telling me that Paul Hackett has been named the passing game coordinator of my Dallas Cowboys. The what? The passing game coordinator under Tom Landry? There's really no such thing.

The great and powerful Oz that was Tom Landry, he did it all. He ran that offense top to bottom. He called every play. And I barely caught my breath when my phone rang. It's Paul Hackett. He said, I'm sorry, I couldn't tell you. Tex Schramm said, don't tell him. We got to break it one time and we got to control the narrative in the story. Tex knew that I was close with Paul because Paul had confided.

Tech Schramm, if you don't remember, for you non-Cowboy fans, was the original architect of the Cowboys. He was the founding father, the driving force, the brains of the operation. He was a brilliant man, was Texas E. Schramm. I had my battles with him, but I loved where his brain was going because Paul told me that Tech Schramm had hired Paul to succeed Tom Landry.

Tex had promised that he had already started easing Tom out to pasture. It's getting close. It's getting time. The Cowboys in '85 had stolen the vision. I still don't know how they did it. I got stories about it. It involved this thing called psychotronics. The strength and conditioning coach told me they used this apparatus called psychotronic to somehow

affect negatively the other teams? I don't know. I wrote a book about it, but that's how wild it was. And that team wound up out here in Southern California in Anaheim against my friend, Eric Dickerson, who literally ran them off the field. Playoff record yardage. I don't even want to talk about it, but it was a nightmare. And I remember I even asked Coach Landry after that game, are you thinking about hanging them up? He said no, but Tex was definitely thinking yes.

Tex, blessed Paul Hackett to be the next coach of the Dallas Cowboys. And that would make him only the second coach. They'd never had another coach. 30 years of Tom Landry, Thomas Wade Landry, Mount Rushmore, five Super Bowl appearances, two Lombardis, offensive genius, and to many, defensive genius. Just a flat-out football genius. And my guy, Paul,

was going to be the next Tom Landry. And Paul told me that night on the phone, he had just met Tom for the first time that day. So Tom had no hand in his hiring. And at that meeting, Tom handed him the cowboy playbook and said, here, you take it because I don't need it anymore. And he said it somewhat bitterly and somewhat sarcastically. And it shook Paul up because he was in awe of Landry, but he knew that he had been destined. It was his job sooner than later to

And I was astounded. My guy, Paul, was going to be our coach in Dallas. So here they went. 86, Paul's calling plays. He got to call the plays. First time anybody except Landry had ever called the plays. He's calling for Herschel Walker and Tony Dorsett, the dream backfield. It was actually more of a nightmare. They go 7-9. 87, the strike year, they go 7-8. Yeah.

hit bottom the next year, 3-13. Paul's biggest problem was he no longer had Roger Staubach. He had Danny White and Steve Palura at quarterback, and they just couldn't cut it. I thought Paul was pretty great. Tech Schramm thought he was really great. It was full speed ahead for Paul to be the next head coach, and then the bombshell dropped. The most shocking event for me in the history of the Dallas Cowboys.

Jerry Jones was allowed to buy my Dallas Cowboys. I still can't quite get over that. Jerry Jones, the quote unquote hick from the sticks, the interloper from Arkansas, the Beverly hillbilly, come to Dallas? Bum Bright, then the owner, had chosen among five bidders for the Cowboys, Jerry Jones, the lowest bidder, because Bum Bright despised Tom Landry.

Tom had cold-shouldered Bum Bright at every Christmas party. Bum had slipped him a play that he wanted called. It's out of bounds. But Tom had scoffed and rolled his eyes and basically thrown it in the trash. You got to at least pat Bum Bright on the head. He owns your football team, but Landry was above that. Landry looked down on anybody who dared to even sort of cross his path in the Cowboy facilities. And that was it. Bum Bright just said, "Hell with you, Tom."

I choose Jerry Jones because he's the only one of these bidders who don't want to keep you. Bum had no idea that Tex had a grand plan with Paul Hackett. That was way, way below the Bumbright pay grade. But he chose Jerry because he got a kick out of him because he's going to bring some college coach, Jimmy Johnson, to coach the Cowboys. And Bum said, ha, ha, ha, watch this. He chose Jerry. And you know what happened?

Jerry soon fired Tech Schramm, because Jerry's going to run the show, and he hired Jimmy Johnson to replace Thomas Wade Landry. And Jimmy Johnson immediately fired Paul Hackett. What? This was impossible. Paul derailed. Paul looking for a job. Paul wound up the head coach at Pitt. Didn't do great. 13-20-1.

Paul wound up the head coach at USC. It's pretty great, but he didn't do great. 19 and 18. He was followed by this guy, Pete Carroll, you might remember. A couple of national championships ensued. Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, you know the story. Right after Paul. But Paul remained wildly popular and highly respected within the coaching community. Everybody loved Hack, as everybody called him. And so,

Hack, as he segued into retirement, made sure that he opened a door for his son Nathaniel. So now I hark back to Paul's first year in Dallas, 1986. Yeah, I socialized with Paul and his wife Elizabeth. I went to their house for dinner a couple times. He had two sons. The older boy, David, was a pretty good high school football player, a receiver,

School called South Lake Carroll you might know of Texas powerhouse I went to playoff games sat in the cold with Paul and Elizabeth Watching David catch passes pretty good. I also met the seven-year-old son Much younger didn't seem to have a lot of interest in sports His name was Nathaniel Hackett had kind of a quirky personality like his dad David was more like the mom but Nathaniel didn't seem to have

a lot of athletic ability or all that much interest in sports. I didn't pay much attention to him. He wound up going where his father played quarterback at Cal Davis, smaller school. Paul was just a mediocre, smaller college quarterback. But Nathaniel went there and guess what he was? He was the long snapper. That's barely making it, right? Barely hanging on. You're the long snapper. Okay, that made sense to me.

But that seven-year-old wanted a coach. Who knew? And Paul Hackett, who knew a few folks, he got Nathaniel's foot in the door. And all of a sudden, he starts with the bucks. They call it quality control. You're just a gopher. You're working in the film room. You're just doing odds and ends, running and getting sandwiches.

They all start there, it seems like. And then he went to the Bills, doing pretty much the same. And then he went back to college football to Syracuse and moved up the ladder, went back to the Bills. All of a sudden I read that Nathaniel's the offensive coordinator for the Bills? That's impossible. Then he's the Jags offensive coordinator. 2016, '17, '18, they got to the AFC Championship game and got bradyed, got goaded at GOAT, you remember? They're up 20-10 in the fourth quarter with Blake Bortles at quarterback. And then Brady happened.

And all of a sudden, Nathaniel Hackett is with the Packers. And obviously, Matt LaFleur calls all the plays, but he was sort of the quote-unquote offensive coordinator. But I keep reading that Aaron Rodgers has fallen in love with him, believes in him, gets a kick out of him. He can really command the quarterback room. He's basically just the quarterback's coach. So he's blessed by Aaron Rodgers. That's a pretty big deal because, obviously, we never know whether Aaron's coming or going. And all of a sudden...

In my other surreal moment, as opposed to the one that night on my couch in Dallas when I saw Paul Hackett on my TV screen, I look up one afternoon and I see Nathaniel Hackett's mug up on my TV screen at my home here in LA. I'm lifting weights and I look up and it's Nathaniel Hackett. Wait, wait. Nathaniel Hackett is the head coach of the Denver Broncos of John Elway and Shannon Sharp? You're kidding. How did this happen? That seven-year-old?

who didn't seem to care that much about football and became the long snapper at Cal State. He's the head coach. How does this happen? I've told you before, I'll get into it more in another podcast, but I never know how coaches rise in the NFL. It's the weirdest, quirkiest system where position coaches become coordinators. And what exactly does a coordinator have to do with being a head coach? How about nothing?

I mean, Nathaniel didn't even call the plays in Green Bay, but because he hit it off with Aaron and Denver thinks it's possible they would land Aaron via trade, Nathaniel got blessed by the Broncos. Nathaniel was lucky because he was born with a quote unquote NFL silver spoon in his mouth just because his father was so highly regarded around a league in which his father never got a head coaching job, only coordinator jobs.

obviously in San Francisco with Kansas City, Montana. Everybody knew Hack. Everybody believed in him, loved him. But in the end, I sat back and said, well, isn't it great that somebody in that family actually got a head coaching job in the National Football League? But it was Nathaniel, the seven-year-old. That's impossible. Do I really think that Paul Hackett

If he had gotten the Cowboy job, if Tex had stayed in power, would have been a better coach than Jimmy Johnson? No, I don't. It was crushing to my soul to watch my good friend get the Dallas Cowboys job, the Tom Landry job, yanked right out from under him because Bum Bright sold to Gerald Wayne Jones Jr., who's been a blessing and a curse for me. So in the end,

I hope Nathaniel does his dad proud. I hope he lights it up in Denver because trust me, that would fill a hole in his father's heart. Let's go back to a question from you. Hmm. Nikki from Oceanside, California, just down the freeway from here. What would you consider your big break in your career? Interesting. I'll give you a quick two big breaks.

First one happened three days before graduation. I'm at Vanderbilt University, had no business there. Somehow won a full scholarship for sports writing, or my mom could have never sent me there, but I managed to make it through. I did okay. My junior summer before senior year, I interned back in Oklahoma City at the paper I grew up living for, dying for, reading wall-to-wall every day, back-to-front, the Daily Oklahoman.

I interned and they let me do everything. I'm sort of picking and choosing my assignments. It was the greatest summer of my life. I'm living with my mom at home. I'm playing golf every morning because I don't have to work until the afternoon or evening. And I'm up late, but I don't need sleep. I'm 21. I'm fine. Sleep when I'm dead. Let's get up early and play golf. And of course, they offered me a job and said, please come back, but we can't pay you very much money. This is all we can pay you.

It's $150 a week. I didn't care. I thought, "I'm rich. I'll just live with my mom. I don't care. I'll play golf. I'll do whatever I want for the Daily Oklahoman." Phone rings three days before I'm in the dorm room, happen to answer. This is pre-cell phone. Lucky I answered the phone. It's the columnist I grew up reading at the Daily Oklahoman who says, "You can't come here. I'm just telling you right now, I refuse to let you come back here." What?

It'll be death for you. You'll get stuck here. It's shameful how little we're paying you. You can do better than this. I don't have a job. I'm three days away from graduate. I'll get you a job. Trust me on this. And he got me a job the next day. I'm flying the next afternoon. I'm flying to Miami, Florida, where I'd never been before to interview with the Miami Herald. And they offered me the job on the spot for $190. And then I really thought I was rich.

And I closed my eyes and took it, and I look back on that and think, if I'd gone back home, I might never have left home. And then obviously, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. Break number two came 1993. Out of the blue, I get a phone call from an independent producer at ESPN named Joe Valerio, who recently passed away. God rest his soul.

I'd done a few sports reporters, if you remember that show on Sunday mornings. Became friends with Dick Schapp, who loved having me on the show, but I'd only done a handful. And Joe said, we're starting a new segment because we're starting a new show called Prime Monday. It's a prelude show on ESPN to Monday Night Football, which then was on ABC. And

He said, "We want to do kind of what we call a Knights of the Round Table sort of debate. We've never done anything like this, but I want to pair you up with Michael Wilbon of The Washington Post and Mitch Albom from Detroit. You've written a lot of books, wrote for the Free Press in Detroit, and we want to do debates and have you on for twice a show for fairly lengthy segments." Okay. Changed my life.

so i started flying from dallas to bristol every monday morning i was doing a radio show in dallas also some of it i have to do in the car on the way to the airport to make the flight to hartford and there was a young what they call pa a producer's assistant named mark shapiro who got a kick out of me in those segments they were not unscripted they were very scripted you could say what your opinion was but then you you had to actually script it out where joe would say okay

Okay, you say that, but then, Michael, you go next and say that. Mitch, you can say that, and then back to you, Skip. So we were sort of scripted, unscripted debate. It wasn't that they told you what to say. They just told you how little of it you could say and when you could say it.

They worked. And Mark Shapiro would catch me in the hall after the segments and continue the debate with me in the hall, and I thought, "Who is this kid?" Well, this kid fairly quickly ran ESPN, and that kid fairly quickly hired me to do a show called Cold Pizza in 2004 in New York City.

which morphed into first take, which morphed into for me, undisputed, and that's why I'm here, right here, right now. My final full topic today concerns Patrick Mahomes. As you probably know, he stunk it up in the second half of the AFC Championship game the other day, and that was no shock to me.

As you might know if you watch Undisputed, I've never been quite sold on Patrick Mahomes because I believe he has gotten away with spectacular gambles.

that have this year for the first time started to backfire on him. No more blissful ignorance. No more, wow, this is easy. It's almost too easy. I got away with that and that. I can throw no looks. I can throw left-handed passes. I can throw it behind my back. I can throw it between my legs. I can get away with it because my coach blesses me. My coach spoils me. My coach loves this because his coach, Andy Reid,

loves to polish his own ego by playing with his toy that he went up in the draft to snatch or steal. So he's spoiled Patrick Mahomes because it makes Andy Reid look like even more of a genius. Andy loves to flex with his play calls. He loves, especially down near the goal line, to hit you with all the trick play artistry that he has in that huge brain of his. He can be a creative genius.

And he's got the ultimate man at the trigger, Patrick Mahomes, who will try anything at any moment. I kept telling Shannon Sharp, it's my homeboy, my homeboy. That's all I hear from Shannon, my homeboy. Never seen anything like him. I said, yeah, but Tom Brady plays quarterback way better than Patrick Mahomes plays quarterback. No, he doesn't. He's not in Patrick's league. Yes, he is. He's better than Patrick Mahomes. He'll always be better because he's

he plays the position at a higher level more consistently than Patrick does. So what happened after Patrick broke through off an MVP year and won the Super Bowl, beat the 49ers and Jimmy G, as I call him, Jimmy Gag, Patrick requested to come on Undisputed. I've known his agent Lee Steinberg for many years. I'll tell those stories in an upcoming podcast. But I'm sure Lee was behind it to some extent. I've had my battles with Lee.

Falling out with him occasionally. But Patrick wanted to come on because he wanted to put me in my place because I have at times been critical. And I said, bring it on. I take my shots. Anybody else can come on and take theirs. And he did. I didn't think it was the classiest way to do business on his part because I'm not sure he deserved to go to gloat off that Super Bowl. I think he thinks he's the goat. He's almost a Freudian slip, but

gloating why exactly so let's look hard back at that Super Bowl victory 523 left in the third quarter Patrick Mahomes threw a bad interception gets away with near murder didn't get away with that one all of a sudden spectacular gambles are turning into nightmares then 11 57 in the fourth quarter not too much after that he throws another awful interception they're still down 20 to 10 at this point

Then, with 7:13 left in the football game, Mahomes is facing third and 15 from his 35, and he gets away with near murder again. He's got a pass rusher in his face, and he just sort of flips it, blind flips it, left into the flat where he hopes that Tyreek is camped. Well, Tyreek basically has to come back for the football and wait for a fair catch.

That's how bad the pass was. It's a pass and a prayer. And fortunately for Patrick, it was caught by his guy, Tyreek Hill. It was a huge game, 44 yards all the way down to the 49ers 21. It turned and saved the game for Patrick Mahomes. It wasn't exactly a work of art. I didn't see any real creative genius to the play, but he got away with it. And here they came and there they went.

And there went Jimmy Gag because in the fourth quarter, Jimmy G was 3 of 11 for 36 yards with an interception. Late in that game, minute 40 left, third and 10 from the 49ers, 49. Jimmy Gag had Emmanuel Sanders wide open near the goal line and just flat missed him. If he hits him, I don't know. Are we having a different conversation, Patrick? Are you going to call up and want to come on undisputed, Patrick? I don't think so.

What happened in last year's Super Bowl against the GOAT at Tampa Bay? Well, that was the offensive line's fault. Makeshift patchwork. Couldn't protect him. Okay, okay, whatever. Patrick Mahomes unraveled, came unglued. 26-49 for 270, but no touchdowns and two interceptions. QBR that day was 42. That's on a scale zero to 100, so that's sub-average. And then you saw what happened this past Sunday against the Bengals.

sensational in the first half, and then all of a sudden, when they turned up the heat on Patrick Mahomes, he melted. It was a meltdown, and it started on that classic Mahomesian play, the Andy Reid special with five seconds left in the first half. You got him on the run. You got him up against the wall. Patrick Mahomes is supposed to take one look with five seconds left, throw it away, and no, I got to do something spectacular. I got to create a highlight.

I'll throw it to Cheetah. I'll throw it to Tyreek. He's actually behind me in the flat. There are two Bengals out there waiting for him, but that's okay. I'll throw a backward pass to Tyreek with five seconds left. He'll pull it off and we'll be on the highlight shows tonight and I'm going to be Super Bowl MVP again. And you know and I know what happened. No points happened. So they have to trot into the locker room having lost

seven points, all their momentum, and all of a sudden the Bengals are saying after the game, that was the turning point. We knew we had them right there. And Patrick Mahomes went from bad to worst, to worst in the second half. His QBR in the first half was 98, and never in the history of QBR had there been such a swing because in the second half he was 1.8 QBR, 98 to 1.8, averaged out to a 41, scale zero to 100, so well below average.

So that means in those three big games, two Super Bowls and the AFC Championship game at home, the QBR averages out to 49. That's below average. Three games below average QBR. There's, let's see, five touchdown passes in those three games and six interceptions. This is my homeboy we're talking about.

60% completion percentage in those three games compared to career 66% in the regular season. So in the end, are you sure about Patrick Mahomes? Because I'm not. Has he been spoiled rotten by head coach who has a much bigger ego than people give it credit for? I think that gets cloaked and camouflaged.

by what a good guy Andy Reid is. He's so accessible, he's such a nice guy with the media. He has an enormous ego. His ego is even eclipsing Patrick's. And Patrick has gotten way too full of himself too soon in my point of view.

I'm just not sure he's that guy, as in transcendent, as in we've never seen anything like that guy, says my debate partner, Shannon Sharp. Yeah, I've seen a lot like him. And they come and they go. Not saying he's not very good, but all time great, not buying it, not seeing it, not yet. Tom Brady, stop it.

He doesn't know 1/100 of what Tom Brady knows and can perform playing quarterback. I'm gonna miss Tom Brady. I think he made a huge mistake. Seems like such a waste. What do I know? I'm just some guy sitting here in Los Angeles. Thomas Edward Patrick Brady was one of one. There's never been anything like him. And I think unfortunately we'll never see anything like that man. Tom,

I'm dying over here. That's it for me on another Skip Bayless show. I want to thank you for hanging with me, for listening, and if you're watching, for watching. I want to thank Jonathan Berger and his All Pro team for making this show go. I want to thank Tyler Corn for producing and keeping me propped up. Remember, Undisputed, every weekday, Monday through Friday, 9:30 to noon Eastern Time.

The Skip Bayless Show every single week.