00:00It's from Denny to open up the show.
00:01Denny writes, Kevin, is the reaction to Jaden Daniels a bit much
00:07and even more than you thought it would be?
00:10Question mark.
00:12Yeah.
00:13Yeah, this is one of the all-time, all-time PR blunders.
00:20I mean, Jaden has been made sport of for now four consecutive days.
00:26I don't think I've ever seen anything like it.
00:28With a player that is so universally respected and well-liked.
00:36And I'm not talking about just fans or people in the media.
00:39I'm talking about the people he works with.
00:42Just so you know, he is highly respected, well-liked.
00:46There are none of these, you know, behind the scenes.
00:49Yeah, you know what?
00:51I know it looks like everything's great, but trust me, you know,
00:56behind closed doors, he's not that.
00:57He's different and he's difficult.
00:59None of that.
01:00You haven't gotten any of that in the first two years.
01:04It's all been positive.
01:06No one will tell you that behind the scenes they're hearing any sort of,
01:11you know, like, yeah, but, you know, he's really not.
01:15No.
01:16I know I'm a big fan.
01:18Don't get me wrong.
01:19I'm a huge fan, have been since day one.
01:22But if I was also a big fan of Robert Griffin III, I thought it was one of the greatest
01:27rookie seasons ever.
01:28I was predicting multiple MVPs in the middle of 2012.
01:36Look, I don't think he had anything to do with this.
01:42Talked about this, certainly Thursday, the first reaction, before it really blew up, was, to Denny's point,
01:52I'm like, this is a major self-inflicted blunder.
01:58Whomever is responsible for it is going to regret handling this issue the way they've handled it.
02:05It's terrible timing.
02:06It's terrible tact.
02:08Both were true in the moment.
02:11But, no, I could not have predicted every single sports team across America wiping out number five from any sort
02:20of conversation.
02:22Some of them are funny.
02:23Most of them are just not.
02:25I can't believe this guy's been piled on the way he's been piled on.
02:30Again, you know if you were listening Thursday morning, I said this is total self-infliction.
02:37This was unnecessary, and whomever is responsible for it needs to learn from it because this was terrible, terrible advice
02:48and a terrible, you know, public relations thing to do.
02:52I don't think he had much, if anything, to do with it.
02:55I think he's just as disappointed as everybody else.
02:59I think the overarching thought from almost everybody from Baton Rouge to Washington is that his mother was at the
03:08center of this.
03:09She is his mother.
03:11She is also his agent.
03:14The problem is that sometimes parents create more problems than they are able to solve
03:25when they're involved with their kids in sports.
03:30And, yes, there is a cutoff for that.
03:33It's like eighth grade, ninth grade, when they're able to begin advocating on their own behalf.
03:44It's real simple with this one.
03:48If she and anybody else don't learn from this, we're going to get more of these distractions down the road.
03:56And that won't be good for Jaden, and it won't be good for the team.
04:00I had somebody say to me over the weekend, look, at this point, it's now the team's job to completely
04:07cut out whatever sort of benefits people close to the quarterback are getting.
04:14They cannot be involved.
04:16They can't be signing autographs, you know, during practices and joint practices or deciding on, you know, a joint practice.
04:24You know, I'm not signing today like she's the star or somebody else close to him.
04:30They're the stars.
04:31They're not.
04:32They're immaterial to all of this.
04:37Hopefully, they've learned a lesson.
04:40Hopefully, that will be the final distraction.
04:43And unlike Paul Feinbaum and others, I actually don't think that this is something that Jaden can't recover from.
04:51And I'm talking specifically about the relationship with LSU that has been damaged severely.
04:58I think he's good as a person.
05:03I think he will be great as a player.
05:06And I think that that relationship is recoverable.
05:09I think that others were being hyperbolic in terms of that relationship being dead in the water over.
05:16They made a mistake.
05:18The timing of it was terrible.
05:20Anybody with any sense of anything in terms of how the public will react could have said to them, enough.
05:29Stop right there.
05:31Somebody reached out to me over the weekend to say, this reminds me of like the old days where if
05:38they just came to a few people in the market that have been here forever and said, hey, what do
05:43you think about this?
05:45What if we do this?
05:46No, don't do that.
05:49That's an obvious don't do.
05:52But Dan and Bruce, Jason Wright, all of those people, they always sat behind the doors in Ashburn and made
06:01one stupid decision after another.
06:03Now, this was not the team.
06:05The team had nothing to do with this.
06:07Nothing.
06:08So the analogy is not a good one.
06:11But as it relates to Jaden's team, they might want to in the future, before they decide to do something
06:20that has the potential to become newsworthy, check with some people who might have a good sense of how it
06:27might turn out.
06:31All right.
06:33Yeah, I did not think it would blow up the way it's blown up.
06:38I actually think it's really piling on.
06:40And in some cases, it's not even really, to be honest with you, that entertaining.
06:45They're just major reaches.
06:46There have been a couple that have been funny, but not really.
06:50I hope that he is dialed in, as his statement said, on football, and I hope he's moved on from
06:56this.
06:57This is not him, people.
06:59Not him.
07:00It just isn't.
07:03The issue is, you can say this is a big nothing burger.
07:08It would be the biggest nothing burger of all time.
07:13And it ceases to become a nothing burger if the possibility of it happening again is still there.
07:23So the grown-ups involved have to make sure that this doesn't happen again and doesn't create an absolute unforced
07:32error and an unnecessary distraction for everybody.
07:36The good news is they're not playing real games right now.
07:39The good news is a month from now, hopefully we'll be talking about a season-opening win where he threw
07:44for 320, rushed for, I don't want to make it 100.
07:48Let's say he just rushed for 52 yards on just four rushes.
07:52How about that?
07:53And had a couple of touchdowns, and they beat the Eagles.
07:56Story over, obviously for us.
07:59It will linger for him in Baton Rouge.
08:01I feel sorry about that because having that relationship with the place in which you won a Heisman Trophy and
08:10created so many memories for not only yourself, but the fan base.
08:15To have that end, and I don't think it will.
08:18I think it'll come back at some point.
08:21That would be sad.
08:22And especially knowing that it's not his doing.
08:26You know, the LSU people seem to really have a grasp of this, and it's like they have a sense
08:34that this isn't him either.
08:36But it would make sense for him to come out and say, look, I love LSU.
08:41What happened last week was not something that I was really a part of or intended to happen.
08:48I absolutely don't want my name, image, and likeness erased from LSU's history.
08:54I'm a part of that.
08:57Look, the name, image, likeness thing, there's a lot of complications there with a lot of athletes.
09:02The way the NIL deals are structured, they're not in perpetuity.
09:06But at the same time, LSU can't eliminate him from their history.
09:10Team photos, team films and videos understood if they're continuing to prop him up solo and make money off him.
09:19But I don't know.
09:22There was a mutually beneficial relationship.
09:26Usually is.
09:27You know, these players can't go from high school, wait three years to the number two overall pick.
09:33They have to play college football.
09:35They've got to do it in conferences like the SEC and the Big Ten.
09:38They've got to do it at institutions that have, you know, over a century of history and a brand built
09:45up.
09:45It is a tremendous marketing platform, college sports are in this country.
09:51And players that play them benefit from them because it's a free marketing platform.
09:57And now they're getting paid on top of that.
10:01All right.
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