Cousin Sal and Bill Simmons talk about the NFL action of Week 15, guess the lines for Week 16, and review the Homeland and Survivor finales.
Cousin Sal joins Bill to commemorate the Cowboys' collapse and guess the Week 9 lines, then ESPN's Wright Thompson joins to discuss the new 30 for 30 film Ghosts of Ole Miss.
JackO joins Bill to break down the exciting finish of the MLB season and discuss the 2012 Red Sox.
Bill Simmons breaks down Week 1 with the NFL Network's Mike Lombardi, and then celebrates RG3's big game with D.C. native Joe House.
The return of the NFL season means the return of Mike Lombardi to the B.S. Report to talk all things football.
It's been a while since Chuck Klosterman and I banged out one of our marathon "We thought it would be 45 minutes but ended up going for nearly two hours, so we had to belatedly record an 'out' for Part 1 and an 'in' for Part 2" podcasts. Discussed in detail this time around: satellite radio, best music books, The Doors, the concept of eras for music and movies, Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky/Penn State, the NCAA versus Roger Goodell, Kentucky basketball, Jeremy Lin, the upcoming Olympics, our favorite Olympic sports and David Stern. I know, it's just as weird as it sounds.
In advance of the debut of The Announcement, Bill Simmons and Magic Johnson sat down in the Grantland Studios to record a two-part podcast, which will air this weekend as a special program immediately after the ESPN Films documentary. (You can watch The Announcement at 9 p.m. ET Sunday on ESPN.) In Part 1 of the pod, Simmons and Magic discuss LeBron James's fourth-quarter woes, spar over the '80s-era Lakers and Celtics, and debate who would win in a matchup of Dream Teams: the 1992 squad, or the one we'll watch in the Summer Games this year.
Plus, Magic details the greatest basketball game ever played — a scrappy scrimmage between the Eastern Conference representatives on the '92 Dream Team and their Western Conference counterparts.
I'll just cut to the chase: We built a state-of-the-art podcast studio in the Grantland offices at L.A. Live. Dave Jacoby and I spent the past three months conceiving it, building it, decorating it and having arguments that included sentences like, "You can't have another Red Sox picture in here, you already have two!" and "We need more NBA players from the early 1980s and that's final!"
Why a podcast studio? Because I wanted a place to tape pods that didn't sound like I was recording them from my house (which, by the way, I currently am). Because we wanted a place that would make any celebrity guests say, "Wow, this studio is pretty cool, this feels like a real thing" instead of, "Wow, I can't believe I had to come over to this dude's house to tape a podcast, this is weird." Because we wanted the ability to tape complete podcasts, then edit them into "Best of …" shows with multiple guests that could run in the wee hours on ESPN and ESPN2 instead of Day 10 of the 2005 World Series of Poker. Because we're running little 90-second snippets from some of them on the 1 a.m. SportsCenter every other Tuesday night, so it would have been weird if we didn't have a place to tape them. And for a few other reasons that I will reveal down the road.
Our first guest in the new digs: my favorite boxer ever, Sugar Ray Leonard. This turned out to be an especially candid conversation, and I'm not entirely sure why that happened, or how we got there, but we did and that's what matters. It's worth a listen. Thanks so much to Ray for his time and candor.
Whenever I want to record a boxing/baseball podcast, I have only two options: Brian Kenny and Max Kellerman. That's why I had them fight last night at the Kronk Gym in Detroit for the right to appear on today's BS Report. Kenny won decisively (KO 3) and had enough stamina left over to crank out an hour-long discussion on Floyd Mayweather's place in the Boxing Villain hierarchy, what he'd do as the czar of boxing, who really won the Hagler-Hearns fight, does boxing have a PED problem, can pitchers win the MVP, can the Red Sox hold on for the right to get swept in Round 1, is Jose Bautista having a better or worse season than we think, and how far Kenny plans on pushing sabermetrics with his new MLB Network gig. The entire conversation reminded me that it sucks not to have BK as an ESPN coworker any more. At least we can still watch him in HD.
You knew that the Cowboys found Week 2 hero Jesse Holley through a Spike TV reality show that nobody watched, but did you know that's also how we found Cousin Sal for the B.S. Report? Back in 2008, right as podcasts were starting to take off, Sal won the hearts of celebrity judges Carson Daly, Gayle Gardner, Roy Firestone and the late Buddy Hackett on the one and only season of ESPN2's ill-fated "Pod And The Interruption." The rest was history.
You know who is probably not having a relaxing summer? NBA commissioner David Stern. The league's still locked out, talks with the union don't seem to be going anywhere fast, and Turkey is apparently an appealing destination these days.
