- 2 days ago
Mike Florio joins the show to recap the news from the NFL Meetings and discuss the hottest headlines around the NFL offseason.
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00:00Right now, we're excited to jump on the Rude Guest Hotline and talk to Mr. Pro Football Talk, Mike Florio.
00:06Mike, what's up, dude? I saw you yesterday, and now you're joining us today. Thank you.
00:11What's going on, guys? How are you? Are you still out there? Are you still baking in the Arizona beach?
00:16I love Arizona to visit. How can anyone live there?
00:20It is hot out there.
00:21So, my setup was inside. I felt bad for you guys outside, especially that first day. It was cooking, man.
00:28Well, and we had, like, a white cover that was aimed at keeping the sun out, but it operated like
00:36a convection oven, and every surface that was within reach of my hands was blazing hot.
00:45I eventually had to, like, take my computer and put it in my bag because I thought it was going
00:49to implode or explode or something bad.
00:51My phone was shutting down. I mean, it was so hot. I felt bad for the guests.
00:56They were sweating. Everyone was sweating. It was just very hot. It's better than it would have been.
01:00A couple of weeks ago, it was, like, 105 every day in Arizona.
01:03Crazy. But, you know, they kill me when they go, oh, man, it's dry heat.
01:07105 is 105. I don't care what kind of heat it is.
01:10Heat is heat. Heat is heat.
01:14Totally.
01:15Well, yesterday, it was really interesting.
01:18So, you saw where I was doing my radio show from.
01:22Kyle Shanahan was in a suit standing next to me for, like, five, ten minutes, and I was like, what
01:28is he waiting for?
01:30Then I realized he was coming on with you and Chris, and then I saw LaFleur.
01:34Oh, he didn't want to be outside.
01:35Right.
01:36But then LaFleur walked up at the same time, and they were both wearing, like, the same colored green blazer.
01:43Did you notice that, Mike?
01:46Oh, yes.
01:47We had them both arrive just as our live show was ending.
01:51The cameraman panned over to get a shot of both of them standing there, and we decided, hey, they're both
01:55here at the same time.
01:56Let's go ahead and put them on together.
01:58And I brought us on air by saying, hello, friends.
02:01Welcome to Butler Cabin.
02:02Oh, that's awesome.
02:05And it was fun to have both of them.
02:08When you have two guys from two different teams, it's hard to really get into many nuts and bolts about
02:11what's happening with either franchise.
02:13But it was a broader discussion about a bunch of different topics, and we never panned it.
02:19It's one of those, like, you know, in the future, if we can get two coaches at the same time
02:22who know each other and are comfortable with each other, it can be a pretty good conversation.
02:27Yeah, especially when those two guys used to work together and know each other a long time.
02:32Talking with Mike Florio here from NBC Sports Pro Football Talk on all social media.
02:37Mike, I mean, after being out there, and you may have been out there longer than I was, but it
02:42was kind of a buzz-less annual meeting.
02:46You know, there wasn't a lot of juice to it.
02:49Now, there's still good information.
02:50There's still rule changes, all of that.
02:52But what was kind of your biggest takeaway?
02:56Well, you're right.
02:57And it's kind of like free agency this year.
03:00It was a lot of activity.
03:01But when Tyler Linderbaum and Malik Willis are the two big names, it really wasn't like what we've seen in
03:08past years.
03:09And look, a year ago, the tush-push was all the rage, and that created all sorts of talking points
03:14and consternation.
03:15And the NFL came within two votes of banning the play.
03:18And then this year, it's like, tush-push?
03:20What tush-push?
03:21They completely forgot about it.
03:22So much of the focus is this NFL Referees Association labor dispute that most people don't care about, especially in
03:29March,
03:30other than to just be mildly concerned about the possibility of another fail-mary example from 2012.
03:36So that seems to be the biggest issue right now.
03:40There weren't a lot of significant rule changes.
03:43We're talking about, what, three of the rule changes relate to the kickoff play,
03:48which people don't really care all that much about.
03:52And so, yeah, it just wasn't one of those years that there was a lot of hot topics that needed
03:58to be addressed by the owners
04:00or, before that, the competition committee.
04:02Did the tush-push go away because they began to referee it properly and the Eagles didn't have as much
04:08success with it?
04:10I think it's a combination of factors.
04:12Before the season started, Brian,
04:13when we reported on the Cowboys-Eagles pregame show that the key question was how remarkable or unremarkable the tush
04:22-push would be throughout the course of the season.
04:25Would there be a moment or two or three that made it a major topic heading into the offseason?
04:31The Eagles not getting past the wildcard round had something to do with it not being remarkable in this offseason.
04:37I think in hindsight, and they moved the goalposts all over the place on this thing, it's not safe, it
04:44doesn't look like football.
04:46They had a bunch of different reasons to justify making a run at it, and they got 67% of
04:51the league to say, get rid of it.
04:53I think the catalyst was the commissioner watching the NFC Championship game, seeing Frankie Louvoo and others jump offside multiple
05:01times to the point where referee Sean Hockley had to do something that we rarely hear.
05:08The, you know, I'll turn this car around right now, mister, if you do it again.
05:11He was going to reward a touchdown to the Eagles.
05:13They've never used that rule.
05:15It's called the palpably unfair act.
05:17They were going to, with one more offside by Washington, just give the Eagles the touchdown, because when you think
05:24about it, you get in a first and goal situation from the one, you can just keep jumping offside, jumping
05:30offside, went half the distance, half the distance.
05:32You're going millimeters at some point, and eventually it has to end, and I think that prompted the commissioner to
05:38say, we've got to get rid of this play, because it was just like days after that, Mike Pereira, who
05:43used to be the VP of officiating,
05:44was on somewhere and said, I think they're going to make a run at getting rid of the tush-push
05:49based upon that moment from the NFC Championship.
05:52So I think that was the catalyst.
05:53This year, there was nothing like that that triggered the same kind of urgency.
05:59There's only so much bandwidth the NFL has, and right now, they're focused on figuring out this thing with the
06:06officials, and also, now that there's a new NFLPA executive director,
06:10they want to get to work on expanding the regular season to 18 games.
06:13When do you think the earliest that could happen, 27, 28?
06:20It's amazing to think it could happen by 2027.
06:22We reported the day after the Super Bowl that the Super Bowl to be played in Atlanta in February of
06:282028 does not have a specific date attached to it yet,
06:32specifically because the NFL is keeping it flexible in the event that they expand the regular season by a week
06:40or two,
06:41because one possibility, and I think this is the predominant possibility, if you go to 18 games, you're going to
06:47add a second bye,
06:48which pushes the Super Bowl back two weeks, or maybe just one week if they would start the season Labor
06:53Day weekend.
06:54That's another possibility, too.
06:56They've justified expanding the regular season by saying, oh, we get a President's Day weekend Super Bowl.
07:01Well, we get one this year anyway, under the current schedule, and if they do 18-2 and don't start
07:07Labor Day weekend,
07:08they're going to overshoot President's Day weekend.
07:10I guess the next move is to go to the federal government and say, could you push President's Day weekend
07:13back?
07:14Can we just make President's Day weekend whenever the Super Bowl is?
07:18I think that'd be a hell of a lot easier.
07:20Yeah, it does have that sense of inevitability.
07:26The schedule changes are crazy.
07:28Opening the season on a Wednesday, you're going to get that Thanksgiving Eve game,
07:32that Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
07:34People want their football, though.
07:35More Friday night games.
07:36Yeah, I'm not necessarily mad about it, but it does impact the play on the field, generally.
07:43Well, it does, but from the NFL's perspective, it doesn't.
07:49But the NFL doesn't care about the fact that, for example, between a Sunday and a Thursday,
07:54there's much less of a chance to properly game plan.
07:57There's less of a chance for the players to recover from the game they just played.
08:00The NFL came up with a silver bullet statistic several years ago that the injury rate when you play from
08:07Sunday to Sunday
08:08is no different than when you play Sunday to Thursday.
08:10Now, that's very misleading and incomplete, and it doesn't take a lot of factors into account.
08:14But once they locked on to that, that changed everything.
08:20And now we see teams that can be required to play up to two Thursday games after playing on Sunday.
08:26It used to be it was a burden that would be imposed on all teams once.
08:30Well, you know what?
08:31That leads to some bad Thursday night games.
08:33I remember a Jacksonville-Houston game, I think, or Jacksonville-Tennessee.
08:39There was a Jacksonville-Tennessee game that was going on around Christmastime 10, 12 years ago,
08:43and my wife and I were hanging around, and the game was on.
08:45She's like, why are you watching this?
08:46I was like, oh, it's my job.
08:48But, yeah, the game stinks.
08:49So now they want to have the ability for all of those primetime windows.
08:54They want to be able to handpick the best games.
08:56They came up with Thursday night flex option a few years ago.
08:58Who cares if you have tickets and travel plans to go to a Sunday game in December?
09:04You get the rug pulled out from under you, and all of a sudden that game's played on Thursday.
09:07That Thursday game you were going to go to, all of a sudden it's played on Sunday.
09:10They want to be able to, number one, maximize standalone windows,
09:14because that's where we get 20, 25, 30 million viewers,
09:17and they want to be able to put the best teams in those spots,
09:20the teams that people are more likely to tune in to watch.
09:22So that's where it's moving.
09:23It's more.
09:24That was Jerry's quote from yesterday.
09:2612 years after, Mark Cuban, the former Mavericks owner,
09:29said pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered.
09:32And that was when the NFL was going to Thursday night on a full-time, full-year basis.
09:37Jerry said yesterday, when the ducks quack, feed them.
09:40And they think the ducks are quacking for more football.
09:43And when's that?
09:43I'm surprised it's.
09:56Reception, Friday and Saturday, the Sports Broadcasting Act, the antitrust exemption,
10:01it prevents the NFL between the second Sunday in September and the second Sunday in December
10:06from playing on Friday night and Saturday.
10:09Every other night's open season.
10:11And I suspect we're going to have games five nights a week before too long.
10:16And they will have people viewing it too.
10:18Millions.
10:19Millions.
10:19Millions.
10:21Talking with our friend Mike Florio here on the Rude Guest Hotline.
10:24Rude makes the best HVAC equipment in the DMV.
10:27R-U-U-D.com.
10:29Mike, let's talk a little ball.
10:31I want to get to the commanders eventually, but certainly the biggest actual player conversation
10:37during league meetings in Arizona was surrounding A.J. Brown.
10:40And then, I don't know if you saw this this morning, Fowler from ESPN has a story about
10:48kind of the, somebody's finally saying the quiet part out loud with how bad Jalen Hurts
10:54was last year and how much that is impacting that Eagles offense.
10:58What do you, what do you think is the situation in Philly?
11:03Well, Derek Gunn, who's covered that team for years, did something during the 2025 season
11:10that I think wasn't given the attention that it deserved, that there was frustration within
11:15the coaching staff and within the roster that Jalen Hurts was not doing what they wanted
11:24him to do, that whatever the plan was, whatever the play was, when it was time to go play,
11:28he was going to play his game his way.
11:30And he knew that because of his contract and the way that the Eagles do this cash over cap
11:35thing, where they use annual bonuses that spread out over multiple years and they layer the
11:41cap charge.
11:42The problem with that is if you ever get to the point where you decide you want to trade
11:46the player, it becomes a potential cap nightmare because you've got multiple years, not just
11:52the signing bonus that gets accelerated into the year where you trade him, but all these
11:57other bonuses where you've paid him a big amount of money and you've spread it over multiple
12:01years, it just cascades into a cap hit that you can't manage.
12:06And Derek Gunn's point was he's keenly aware of the position the Eagles are in.
12:12They can't do anything about it.
12:14They can't cut him, not that they would cut him.
12:16They can't trade him.
12:17They can't do anything because of that cap charge.
12:19So I'm surprised it's taken this long for some of these things to come to a head.
12:24And the fact that they finally are, it tells me that the Eagles have decided strategically
12:29it's time to kind of let it be known where things stand as a step toward doing something
12:38if Jalen Hurts doesn't run the new offense under Sean Mannion, a new offense that has
12:44all the stuff that he typically doesn't like reportedly, motions and shifts and all the pre-snap
12:49stuff, he doesn't want that under this McVay style offense that they're in the process
12:55of incorporating.
12:56He's going to have to embrace it or the Eagles at some point are going to be looking for someone
13:01else to play the position.
13:02That's kind of weird that he doesn't like all that stuff.
13:05It typically helps the quarterback out.
13:07The motions and the shifts, it gives you advantages and it lets you know what the defense is playing.
13:11Why wouldn't he want to do that?
13:12Also seems like he doesn't want to run anymore.
13:14Oh, he doesn't want to run at all.
13:17That's a great question.
13:18And when you've won a Super Bowl and when the way that you've done things works and
13:25look, I don't know, every guy's different.
13:27Every guy's wired differently.
13:28Every guy's got different attitudes and maybe this will be his moment to realize, hey, if
13:34I don't do what they expect me to do, if I don't embrace change, and the reality is he's
13:38had change thrust upon him every single year.
13:42You get a new offensive coordinator every year and one year it's because they did so well.
13:47The guy gets the head coaching job.
13:48Then the next guy, he's out after one year.
13:51Then the next guy, Kellen Moore, he becomes head coach after they win the Super Bowl.
13:54And then the next guy, he gets fired.
13:56So it's just a weird dynamic for a team that is among the best in the NFL to be dealing
14:02with
14:02this constant turmoil in the offense.
14:04And they've managed to do a good job of concealing the root causes.
14:08It may be coming out now.
14:10Like, we know that A.J. Brown isn't happy there.
14:13They've managed to hide whatever it is that's at the heart of why A.J. Brown and Jalen Hurts
14:19aren't on the same page.
14:20But everybody knows they're not on the same page.
14:23It just really is a strange, awkward time for the Eagles, given the success they've had
14:26over the past eight years, that they're in this spot where there is a lot of turmoil
14:31that is more and more trickling to the surface.
14:34So it's coming out now that A.J. Brown isn't this crazy.
14:37He has some merit to what he was discussing.
14:40When he gets mad, he's not running the offense.
14:42He's not throwing the ball when he's supposed to.
14:45When he went off last year and it started, he made some comments on a Twitch stream about,
14:50hey, man, don't get me on your fantasy football team.
14:53He was asked about it the next day.
14:55And, you know, it's easy to paint a receiver who starts talking about his lack of opportunities
15:01in an offense as selfish.
15:02My take at the time was A.J. Brown is being selfless because he's willing to be painted
15:07as selfish to send the message.
15:10And the message was simple.
15:11We need to be improving offensively because we're going to get into games where we need
15:16to move the ball, score points, or we're going to get kicked out of the playoffs.
15:20And what happened to them?
15:21And one of the focal points of the story on ESPN today is the play they ran at the end
15:26of the playoff loss to the 49ers.
15:28They ran a four-vertical play that Jalen Hurst wanted that wasn't ideal for the circumstances,
15:34and it failed.
15:35So A.J. Brown was trying to send the alarm.
15:37And there were others in the organization that understood, this guy's trying to help
15:42us get out of this funk that we're in.
15:44So just a strange, strange time for the organization.
15:47And it feels like this article is just part of the effort by the Eagles to make one final
15:53run at getting Jalen Hurst to do what they want him to do and what they need him to do.
15:58Because one of these years, and I need to take a look at how the cap charges change in the
16:04coming years, but as you get deeper into a quarterback's contract, it gets a little
16:08bit easier, and it gets a little bit easier, and it gets a little bit easier to move on.
16:11At some point, they're going to be in a spot where they are comfortable dealing with the
16:17cap charge that would come from moving in a different direction.
16:20Well, and what's crazy is you've seen more and more teams, when they want to get out of
16:24some of these deals, they're willing to just eat it.
16:26I mean, the Cardinals, Sean Payton kind of started it with the Broncos, the Dolphins,
16:32you know, they're just like, we got to start new.
16:34And I'm not saying the Eagles are in that situation, because those other teams are also
16:38very bad.
16:40Like, the Eagles are still trying to compete.
16:43I remember when the Falcons traded Matt Ryan, it was some ridiculous dead money charge
16:48at the time of like $20 million, and we're like, oh my God, how can you do that?
16:51But, you know, the cap keeps going up and up and up, and numbers that once seemed
16:56incomprehensible really aren't crazy when we're, you know, we've gone in five years
16:59from $186 million per team to $301 million per team.
17:04So, yeah, is it ideal to take $99 million in dead money over two years to move on from
17:08Tua Tonga by Loa?
17:09No, but it's not impossible.
17:11And you're right.
17:12At some point, they'll just say, we'll find a way to make this work, and we'll eat this
17:16dead charge, and we'll just move on.
17:17Yeah, agreed.
17:18I wanted to get one Washington one in quickly, if I can.
17:22Just curious, I think this draft, Adam Peters told me he has no idea who they're going to
17:28draft, which I tend to agree, just because it's so wide open.
17:32Are there any names you've heard where maybe publicly they are overvalued, that they'll
17:40actually slide a bit?
17:41Or any guys that maybe are projected to be a 15th overall pick that you think could creep
17:47up into the top 10?
17:49Yeah, there's so much stuff that circulates this time of year, and after doing this for
17:5325 years, you kind of get numb to it because there's different agendas.
17:57Agents are out there trying to get their guys drafted as high as possible.
18:00We had that ESPN full-week cycle on Ty Simpson and Fernando Mendoza.
18:05And there's a point where it's like, let's just see what happens.
18:09And when you look at the way the commanders were built the first two years of this regime
18:12with so many older players, it's critical to whoever's there.
18:17You need somebody who's going to be a foundational player under a rookie contract.
18:22That rookie contract is so valuable to teams because it is cheap.
18:28That was the biggest gain the teams got in 2011 after the lockout.
18:33The new scale that dramatically reduces what the first-rounders make.
18:36And across the board, you get a guy who, if you pick right and you develop that player,
18:42you get him for four or five years at a very reasonable rate, and then you can make a clear
18:47-eyed
18:47decision as to whether or not you want to give him a second contract.
18:50Every team needs a nucleus of those guys, and I think that is imperative.
18:56At this stage of the development of the commanders, you've got to get away from the older guys.
19:00You've got to get away from the high-priced guys.
19:02You've got to get new guys, young guys in who are going to build and grow around Jaden Daniels,
19:08especially with Daniels on his way to his second contract after this year.
19:15Once you start paying a quarterback franchise-level money, if that's what happens with Daniels,
19:20it's even more important to have the younger players.
19:22Yeah, totally.
19:23And I just, you wish there was like a stud receiver and like a true alpha number one wide receiver
19:32in this draft
19:32because I think that would be the easiest decision for them.
19:35And maybe they still go receiver.
19:36We'll see how it all unfolds.
19:38Mike, thank you for the time.
19:39We always trade down, too.
19:40That's part of the game.
19:41Trade down, trade up.
19:42Trade here, trade there.
19:43It's part of the fun.
19:44And we're only three weeks away.
19:46I know.
19:46It's crazy, man.
19:47Thank you for the time, dude.
19:48All right, Mike.
19:50That is Mike Florio.
19:52Give him a follow at Pro Football Talk.
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