Mike DeCourcy Talks Champions League and NFL Draft Insights

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00:00Mike DeCorsi with the Sporting News joins us every week.

00:02You can catch him as well during the basketball season on Fox Sports,

00:06doing College Rack and the Big Ten Network.

00:08He's on the take for the Indiana Hoosiers.

00:11I want to start with this.

00:12I know you love soccer, and I've been watching the Champions League

00:17like every week, whatever, whenever these games are on,

00:20and I have it on right now.

00:21And PSG scored early on Arsenal in London,

00:24and they lead 1-0 in about the 30th minute, and it's the semis,

00:28and they'll play, obviously, back in Paris, the second leg of this.

00:34And, you know, the other matchup as well is, I guess, tomorrow.

00:38And what do you think of it?

00:39Have you been watching?

00:41Oh, absolutely.

00:42And it's been very interesting.

00:45Ousmane Dembele for Paris.

00:48Saint-Germain has been fantastic this season,

00:51having a world-class year.

00:54And his goal, a remarkable goal,

00:57but mostly because Arsenal somehow decided that even though he's got something

01:02like 40 goals this year,

01:03that he wasn't worth covering when he entered the top of the box.

01:06So not exactly sure what was going on there.

01:09But you've got this matchup today.

01:11They'll repeat next week.

01:13And then tomorrow, you've got the wonderful matchup between Inter of Milan and FC Barcelona.

01:22Interestingly, if you want to make the Champions League semis,

01:25you bring me and my wife to your town.

01:28Because we were in Barcelona two summers ago.

01:30Last year, we went to see Inter Milan.

01:32So bring me to town.

01:34Maybe you can make it too.

01:35Right.

01:36Like, I remember when you went to see Inter play.

01:41What was it like?

01:43Again, I want to flash back to that.

01:45What was it like going to Milan, Italy and seeing them play at home?

01:49That had to be a thrill.

01:50Oh, it was an experience as a spectator, unlike anything I've ever felt.

01:58The atmosphere at the Inter game.

02:01And they were playing a very poor team in Serie A.

02:05So it wasn't like they were super jacked just to play this particular team, Lecce.

02:10It was just, this is the way they are every week.

02:14What I remember most vividly is that what they call the ultras are on the one end zone.

02:22And on that end zone, they have like four or five or six yell leaders, I guess we'd call them,

02:28or whatever you want.

02:29Capos, they sometimes call them in soccer.

02:31Or whatever you want to call them.

02:32I don't know what the word in Italian is.

02:34But they are straddling the guardrail.

02:39The rail that separates the seats from the lower level.

02:45So they're on the second level, and they are straddling the guardrail.

02:48And there's seven or eight of them there doing that.

02:50And it's nuts.

02:52But they are so into their teams.

02:54And they aren't just straddling looking down.

02:56They're straddling and telling their fans to cheer louder.

02:59How they manage that is maybe more of an athletic accomplishment than anything that happens on the field.

03:05So I went to the Olympics in Athens, right?

03:08And I took my dad, and we went to the soccer.

03:11And I'll never forget the fans.

03:14It was smoke bombs and flags, these giant flags.

03:19And the atmosphere was unlike anything I'd ever experienced as a sporting fan,

03:26or even otherwise as a media member.

03:29I was like blown away by the insanity of it,

03:32and their passion, and their intensity, and their craziness.

03:35I have to ask you, when you were in Milan, and when you were in Italy,

03:39did you go to Rome, and did you go to the Vatican, and did you experience all of that?

03:46I know my dad has done all that and gone to see the Vatican and all that.

03:52I want to know if you did that as well.

03:55Not on this trip, because we were in northern Italy in Milan,

04:00and so we went to Switzerland as a second part of the trip.

04:02But we had been to Rome and seen St. Peter's and seen the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel and all of that in 1996.

04:09So, not saying I'd never go back.

04:12Rome is amazing.

04:13But we had made that trip, and so we wanted to see a different part of Italy this time.

04:19Isn't it cool?

04:20I think it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life,

04:23when they select a new pope, and that white smoke comes out of that chimney,

04:27and how that place erupts, and how they react to the conclave,

04:32making a decision on who the next pope will be.

04:34And when that guy comes out of that door into that square and looks out over all those hundreds of thousands of people,

04:43and he's the new pope, I've never seen anything like that in anything.

04:47We don't do that when they nominate these hack presidents we have in this country.

04:52They get inaugurated, and no one gives a rat's ass.

04:56We don't.

04:57But now what we do do to take this back to sports, Scott,

05:01is we have 300,000 people at the NFL draft.

05:04So when Cam Ward gets anointed the number one overall pick in the NFL draft,

05:09we have 300,000 people there to celebrate it.

05:12So there is a yes, people who were listening,

05:15how are we going to get from the pope back to sports?

05:17Well, we managed.

05:18Well, so you wrote about Shadur Sanders going to the stinky Browns.

05:25Yeah, and what was interesting about that was that if he had been selected with the pick in the third round,

05:31it would have made perfect sense, or if they had passed there, taken, I don't know,

05:36a wide receiver or whatever, and then come back around on a fourth-round pick and taken him,

05:40that would have made sense, too, because once we got to a certain point in the draft,

05:44Shadur Sanders was a bargain pick.

05:46Exactly where that was, third round, fourth round,

05:49certainly if he'd gone beyond that, he would have been a bargain pick.

05:55As a first-rounder, I never bought it, Scott.

05:57I never did.

05:58I watched his take.

05:59Neither did I.

06:00And I'm like, nobody that is elite in this league right now doesn't have a high-end arm.

06:08And I talked to some people about, obviously, the first person you think about when you think,

06:14who has ever been a great quarterback in the NFL without a high-end arm,

06:18and right away, okay, Tom Brady.

06:20All right, so we're going to, like, you get a one-in-a-million shot with Tom Brady,

06:23you're going to be that.

06:24Somebody else brings up Drew Brees.

06:26Okay, now we're down to two in the last quarter century.

06:28So how many guys are out there?

06:31And of the current crop, there are none.

06:33I mean, I think Lamar Jackson would be said to have an above-average arm,

06:37not an elite arm, but above-average.

06:39But every other high-end quarterback, Joe Burrow, Allen, certainly Mahomes,

06:45all of Kyler Murray, those guys all have absolute shotguns on their arms.

06:50And so Sanders isn't that.

06:52Okay, so if he isn't that, he must be an unbelievable athlete like his dad was.

06:56Well, he's not that either, considered to be fairly average in the dynamism department.

07:02So why would he be one of the first-round picks?

07:06I didn't buy it.

07:07The teams clearly didn't buy it.

07:09I don't know why the NFL draft analysts all bought into that.

07:13But here's the thing.

07:14He can now go to Cleveland and prove everybody except Mel Kuyper and Daniel Jeremiah

07:19and the rest of them wrong.

07:20He can prove all the scouts wrong.

07:23He can prove all the media people like me wrong by going out and lighting it up for the Browns.

07:28I don't suspect that'll happen, but it's certainly available to him.

07:33Do you think he'll, in that quarterback room and that crop that they have of old vets like Flacco,

07:40Kenny Smallhands, who you and I have already been through that torture in Pittsburgh,

07:45and then, you know, that whole room that they have, even getting the kid Dylan Gabriel and Sanders,

07:54how do you think it'll play out?

07:56Well, I think it'll end up with Flacco starting the season as the number one quarterback,

08:00and then it'll depend on the development of Gabriel and Sanders while we're going through training camp

08:07and mini camp and then the early part of the season, and then how the team progresses.

08:11Look, if they're eight, nine games in and they're three and seven or whatever,

08:16ten games, I guess that would be.

08:18If they're there, they're not going to continue to start Flacco.

08:20They're going to try one of the young guys, and that could be Kenny.

08:23It could be Kenny.

08:24It could be one of the two rookies, but one of those guys is going to get a shot if the team doesn't succeed.

08:30On the other hand, if Flacco succeeds, he'll continue to carry it all the way to the end,

08:34and the other guys won't get on the field.

08:36How about Kenny Smallhands?

08:38They didn't pick up his fifth-year option, and he'll end up, I guarantee you, you can smell it already,

08:43he'll be on his fourth team when they get rid of him in Cleveland.

08:48Probably so.

08:49But he will make a decent living, and this takes us back to the Nico situation of a week or ten days ago.

08:57And these are jobs that are very coveted and pay very well.

09:01And Kenny is, hey, I'd take Kenny Pickett on my team as a backup, but he knows how to play.

09:08He can see the field.

09:09He's made big throws.

09:10I just wouldn't want him to be my guy.

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