A Shocking Lakers Sale. Plus, the 20 Best and Worst Youth Sports for Parents With Cousin Sal.

The Bill Simmons podcast brought to you by the ringer podcast network. I had a rewatchables for you. On Monday, we did the Italian job, me and Van Lathen and Chris Ryan super fun pod. And in fact, we're doing two rewatchables this week. So we have another one coming on Thursday. It's a one for us, but I also think it's in the running for best romcom of all time. It is about last night with Rob Lowe into me more. I came up 40 years ago. It's a really important movie and a fun one to talk about. It's on Netflix right now. So if you want to watch it before we do it, go check it out. But we're going to do it about last night, me and Chris Ryan and Mallory Ribbon. And that's going to be up Thursday night. So to this week, and then on Monday, the re-speed. Yeah, the re-speed is happening. We did speed as one of the first ones we ever did. And now we are doing speed again. So that is what the schedule is for rewatchables. On this podcast at the top, I want to talk about this crazy Laker sale. I'm just going to solo that part of everything I'm hearing and all my thoughts is going to just dump them on you. And then Cousin Salas is coming on because this is something I want to do this whole summer and it's finally time. The youth sport parent rankings from 20 to one. These are my rankings only. But I think the worst to best youth sports all the way through high school are for parents. And it's probably not going to be liked by everyone who loses his putt. But that's the thing. It's an honest conversation and these are all my thoughts. And I can't wait to go through them with Sal. So that's what we have in the docket today. We're going to take a break, bring a Pearl Jam, and then my thoughts on the Lakers. All right, we're recording this part of the podcast around lunchtime, Pacific time. I am in California where the Lakers just got sold again for the second time in less than two years in the single most shocking franchise sale in the history of the National Basketball Association, which is almost eight decades old at this point. Nobody saw this coming. There was no inclination, no inkling. There were no whispers. I never heard one thing about this, the Lakers and the Dodgers who were both owned by Walter were being for the last year morphed together into basically one super franchise where there was a lot of talk about redundancy and people who had the same jobs and it was going to be a zero sum game that the two organizations were going to mesh in all these different ways. There was real fear in the NBA that with the bus family who would own the Lakers forever that were basically a mom and pop operation presiding over one of the three biggest franchises in the league that we went from the mom and pop side to now these cutthroat analytics, tons of money, search for every edge and the Lakers become in the same kind of franchise that the Dodgers became who just won the last two world series and spent crazy amounts of money and have found every single possible edge you can find a majorly based spot to the point that we're about to have a long lock out next year because of basically what's happened with the Dodgers and a couple other things. So the thought was that this guy was going to preside over but there was a couple of whispers just about what was going on with this guy became a topic this summer in Los Angeles and I think it in the rich guy circles too because there was a report that he had had either a mile or a legitimate stroke in 2024. He was being investigated by the Department of Justice and there was some possible insurance fraud. There were always whispers about how did he come up with as much money as he came up with to buy what I think is 78% of the Lakers. He'd already had to own the piece and he had to show out. I think close to $5 billion to buy the rest of it and there was always talk that he got Middle Eastern money for that, did the league know that ahead of time, where did he get it? This is a bigger question about what's happening in professional sports leagues now, how people are paying for these giant, giant, giant franchises. The craziest thing about this story is what Ramona Shelburne reported that Bob Aiger and Josh Kirschner, Josh Kirschner is the one who bought the team, he has, he has thrived, they have investments everywhere and he is, I think in the younger class of, of really really, really rich people, he's one of the richest and he has Bob Aiger and his team who just left Disney and Aiger and Kirschner are buying the Lakers together. That really means that Kirschner is paying for almost all of it, Aiger is going to run the Lakers, have thoughts on that in a second, that they called Mark Walto over the weekend, supposedly on Sunday and asked if he'd be interested in selling him, basically just tried to start Godfather offering him an end up being for $12.5 billion. The sparks were not involved and Bloomberg, before I started recording this, reported that he had been in talks with investors to raise money to pay down the loans he was being investigated for and there's a bunch of conspiracy theories that come out of this. But let's, I'll go in order of the things that I thought were interesting with this. One was that Aiger and Kirschner were considered to be the favorites for the biggest team. And the biggest team, the number it always seemed to be, the league was hoping to get some.5 billion. That was the number that they had said, that's the number they sold the owners on. The owners voted to allow the expansion talks to happen, but they didn't vote on expansion. And I think the big sale for Adam Silver was, if we do expansion, I will be able to get $15 billion from the two teams, which then because they don't have to share with the players. Every one of the 30 NBA owners would get a piece of that. So everybody gets a check for $500 million if that becomes the number. What they didn't expect was Vegas became even livelier than that. You had the Celtics said in the precedent, Chism bought the Celtics for just over $6 billion, but it was actually more than that because he had to buy out partners, the final number and they're being around, I don't know, maybe $7374 billion somewhere around there. The Celtics are worth less than Vegas, apparently, because a bunch of people want to Vegas. And then this turns into what I always talk about on the, whenever we talk about rich people buying sports teams, it becomes, you know, the eBay auction where two people want the item and they just kind of get crazy. People wanted Vegas for a bunch of different reasons. I don't really personally understand a lot of them. I don't really understand why Vegas even has to have an NBA team or why they wouldn't move another team there. People wanted Vegas. And at some point, I got a question and we're like, well, if we're going to pay, I've heard the number is over eight and a half and it's between eight and a half and nine now. It's what they think they can get for Vegas. Those guys are like, if we're going to pay that much, let's make one more run at the Lakers. So they get 78% of the Lakers. I think that's the number. It's 77, 78 somewhere in there because the bus family and a couple of other investors still in small pieces. For 9.5 billion, basically, that's what they're showing out or the, and maybe they have to buy out more people. Maybe the bus family is like, you know what? We want to be dragged into this too. So how are they going to pay for this? That equity, when you have a sale like this, can only cover up to 20%. So 9.5 billion, they can get private equity for, I don't know, almost two. That means I have to cover 58% of this, which is seven billion somehow. Iger, who made a ton of money at Disney, and it's probably worth, you know, he's probably worth over a billion dollars. He's not, doesn't have that kind of cash. But Kushner does. Kushner is at Thrive Capital, which has had big investments all over the place. They were in on SpaceX and there's something bigger going on with some of the money that people are throwing around right now that want to talk about it a second. But Kushner is going to be the money guy for this. Kushner, Josh Kushner, brother of Jared, who is in the news a lot. Now you have Trump ties. Talk about that in a second. The Kushner, Iger combo, this is an incredible coup for Iger. And if you remember when, when he was still at Disney and he was trying to figure out whether he wanted to leave or not, he thought he was getting the chargers in the mid 2010s. And there were always stories about that he misplaced it, that he was a little too, let me tell you guys how, how this could work and, and was a little too full of himself in the NFL owner meetings. And the owners are basically like, who the fuck is this guy? And steered the chargers away from him and he didn't get it. And he thought he was going to be the figurehead of the, the second L.A. team didn't happen. Ends up. He has a great first exit from Disney. Hands it off to his hand pick successor, Bob Chapich. Can't really figure out what to do. COVID happens. And he starts undermining Chapich. has been covered ad nauseam all over the place. including Matt Bell and his excellent podcast, The Town. And as some Disney stuff's not going great, all of a sudden he's lurking again. There's some undermining that has been, I'm sure somebody's gonna write an awesome book about this, and he ends up undermining his own success fair and coming back to Disney, triumphantly, we think. Because it didn't turn out to be that triumphant. I got 2.0 at Disney, did I go great? And I don't think, you know, it was a little like Jordan on the wizards to be honest. And then last year, the stuff that happened with Kimmel, and Kimmel show, and Kimmel was getting fired. I think it was, I'll just tell you, in California it was really bad for Agar. It was the first time it's like your wife is running the school journalism at USC and you're somebody who's famously stood up for free speech other stuff. Now you're running for the hills on this, and I don't think that was great. He kind of had this pretty flat re-exit out of Disney. I would say unceremonious as a fair word, even though he made a lot of money. And he just was, you know, obviously one in one last act, but what was it gonna be? Which was gonna be the Vegas team. Now he's getting the Lakers. Now I assume he's gonna be the one running the Lakers. What an incredible next act for him, right? This is all the teams you can own. NBA NFL baseball, you name it. This is the highest profile team you can own if you want to lean into the profile. You're sitting court side, you're charged everything, you're determining where everyone sits. You're now the power broker, the same way Joe Lakeb, who wasn't as rich as a lot of the people that were coming to his words games during the heyday of the steph era, was still the guy in this room that had all these, you know, the head of Oracle, the head of Facebook, name anybody. It was still like, well, you're coming into my house and sitting in my seats. It's a, it's a real thing from Manigo standpoint and now it's gonna be Bob Eiger, who has suddenly revived his career yet again, incredible careers, but kind of out a bunch of times that's happening again. Okay, what does this mean for the Dodgers Lakers and their organizational alliance? Nobody knows. Walter spent the last year integrating the two organizations and trying to turn them into one bigger organization. Well, Eiger and Christian aren't gonna go for that. So is magic still gonna be involved? Magic thought he was gonna be involved with the Lakers and Dodgers together. Is he involved anymore? Are they gonna want him? Are they gonna need him? Who knows? What does this mean for the future of the Dodgers? If Walter is basically flipping the Lakers and grabbing the cash, does that mean the Dodgers could be potentially in danger as well? We'll see. What does this mean for Walter's future as a businessman? And somebody who everybody thought had the deepest pockets possible but is now flipping franchises 'cause either he thinks he's in trouble or needs the money, not great. Couple bonus things out of this. And again, I'm taping this, it's lunchtime. So things might have changed when we had to find out more information. What happens to the Aoy Sparks? WMBA, hottest that's ever been and in some ways, coldest that's ever been with some of the stupid dialogue about the league. But hottest from players, valuations for the franchises, the new media deal. Aoy Sparks not in the sale. So does that mean Mark Walther is gonna hand that over to magic? Is magic gonna buy it from him? They're trying to tank and get the number one pick 'cause people think if they get it, Juju Walkins is gonna come out after her USC season. So what happens to the Sparks, which I would say is one of the four best teams telling in the WBA, that's one. Two, you saw Jeff Schwartz, who's one of the most successful agents of this century came out right after with a statement saying quote, "Incredible, the Lakers sell for $12 billion." Now it's $12.5. Yet teams won't spend on older vets because the current CBA rules, thank you, Union. So all this is gonna do is exacerbate all of this post CBA remorse that basically everybody has except for the owners 'cause it turned out awesome for them. All it did was supercharged franchise values. It cut down their costs. They can't, they kind of protected themselves from themselves. And meanwhile, you have Anthony Simon's making six million a year in the Sixers when he's a $50 million player. So that's gonna start the bubble up too. Why do we have a second apron but franchise valuations are going the highest ever event? That's gonna be a dialogue. Then the third thing, I was surprised how many threads I was on today that somebody mentioned this to me. Bob Eiger, big Chris Paul guy, big Chris Paul guy. When I was at ESPN, the two guys that he loved were Chris Paul and Chancy Billups. I don't think Chancy's gonna be involved with this Lakers sale. That's one of my big predictions. You can pencil him out. Chris Paul, who just retired, trying to figure out what to do next. I just feel like he's gonna be involved in this and a lot of people do. Could this lead to Chris Paul running a team before LeBron James? We're gonna see, what does this mean for Rob Pelinca? Are they gonna push him out? You think Bob Eiger wants to do with Rob Pelinca? Could you see him put his own people there, including Chris Paul? Keep an eye on Chris Paul. Okay, conspiracy bill. We're gonna bring him in for this. Best Mark Walther conspiracy theorist I've heard. I can't vouch for any of these. I'm just telling you what's going around. Health wasn't great. Had to get out. I think that's a fair one considering we know he had medical issues. About to get completely fucked in the insurance fraud case, somebody texted me. Maybe had a ton of Middle East money in the deal. I think that's true. In the Middle East investors wanted the money back as a conspiracy. I don't know if I believe that, but I like it. That sounds like a movie. The other part of that conspiracy could be he had more Middle East money in the deal than Adam Silver realized and Adam Silver wasn't happy about it. This is why we bring him conspiracy bill. He's laying out the landscape for you. And then the biggest conspiracy going around right now that Mark Walther sold to this Kushner Agger group because Christian's brother has major trump ties and Trump controls the DOJ and the Kushner connection that will get them to call the FBI dogs off. That is even too hot for conspiracy bill. Who knows, it might be pieces of all of those things. It might just be this guy's might be as simple as I'm really worried about my net worth. I just need to flip this asset and make money and I got a Godfather offer from these guys that really wanted a team. Last piece is the most interesting. You've heard variations of everything I just talked about. If you're looking at the NBA teams that just got sold in the last 12 years, 2014 Steve Ballmark Quippers, two billion, didn't own their own arena. 2015 Hawks, $850 million seemed high at the time. The Atlanta Hawks, really? The Nets, 2019, $2.35 million and that included the arena and the Liberty. Also kind of same time, but the size didn't care. He's got a ton of money. Now we're getting into the bargain area during, like right before, during and after COVID, the jazz 1.66 million with the arena, 80% stake. So basically valued at two. Ryan Smith, just figured it out, got the hockey team, now he's got a whole arsenal there. Timberwolves. 1.5 billion paid in tranches, almost like when you bought a lawnmower from somebody and you want to pay them once a month for the next three months or something. 1.5 billion total for the Timberwolves, including the arena, Glen Taylor to the bitter end, just making the worst deals possible. Really one of the worst basketball owners of all time. He couldn't even sell his team properly because less than two years later, the horn itself for $3 billion. What's the difference between the hornets and the Timberwolves? Two small markets, like the suns in 23, 4 billion. Notice how we're going up. We were in the ones. Now I'm at four with the suns. That included the arena, the ishbia Mavericks, 2024, $3.5 billion for the majority. That includes the arena, Cuban kept the stake. Celtics, 6.1. And then when you figure in all the buyout people that they had, it's closer to the low sevens, Lakers last year, 10 billion value. The actual amount of money wasn't that. And then 26, 12. Did I ever think we would have a $12 billion MBA team? In basically the 2020s or 2030s? No, especially the only one I would have said was the next because of MSG and the Rangers. And you could have told me you put all those assets together. Could don't have gotten eight figures. I think he could have. Well, now he's looking at this going holy shit that we're talking in this price range now. Bigger question, why are these franchise valuations skyrocketing like they are? Because we just saw Liverpool, which the Fenway sports group is unraveling a sale for. They just announced like Bayzos isn't it. There's some reasons. I asked around on this and I think this is a pretty good list of reasons for this. There's more money for huge ass purchases like this than ever before. And that happened for a bunch of reasons. AI, supercharges stock market, Trump administration relaxed a bunch of the rich guy rules. So people have more money and kind of easier ways to spend it basically. There's more private equity out there than ever before. People are just getting better and better at the private equity thing. This has been a 40 year run here of where you had only a couple players a while ago. And now pretty much everybody's trying to do this and put together pieces of stuff and things that make sense together. Like you look at what are you manual and those guys are doing like the stuff that they invest in. It's a lot about live event experience and things that tie together with some sort of like fan event venue and how all that stuff intersects with media rights seems to be the thing that they care about. They just announced this huge thing where they bought a bunch of stuff involved in Broadway. But that's like their angle. And a lot of these people that are coming into this space seem to have certain angles. And one of those angles with the money that's out there is like guess what never goes down ever professional sports teams. Guess what nobody has ever regretted ever buying one of the signature best trophy professional sports teams. So look at this stuff that's sold recently. The commanders who used to be the Washington Redskins. Now they're the commanders. But NFL in Washington you're buying from Daniel Snyder. They went over six million belacres, the Celtics, Liverpool. I think this keeps happening. And at some point there's probably a bubble for it. And maybe it'll be after Trump's term is over. Maybe it'll happen sooner. Maybe there'll be some black swan event we don't know about. But everyone is buying in at the highest highest highest possible version of this bubble because they have money to spend. You know like SpaceX a lot of people made a shitload of money from that including Josh Kushner. And they want to park that money. They want to put it somewhere. What better place to park it than a sports team, especially an iconic sports team where you have fixed costs. You get the ego from it. People are asking your life would you invest in this like this? Oh, and I bought the Lakers. You bought the Lakers? Oh my god, I didn't realize you were the Lakers owner. At some point this is a bubble. And I don't know when it is. But these prices are so high that I'm thinking about like what's next? The Chicago Bulls? Is there a number now that Ryan's North would think, all right, I got a, what am I doing? I got to get out of this. I could get 10 billion for the Bulls. I should do this. Chicago Bears, I think is another one. I think the New York Jets. Dolan's conglomerate. And then I wouldn't worry about the Warriors. Just from the standpoint of we took the Steph Curry run as far as we could possibly go. We built the arena. We make the most revenue of any team in the league. Maybe it's time to sell high. Could this be what happens? Here's, here's where we should all be scared as fans. People are moving into these leagues with the signature teams that are doing it solely because of the financial peace and not for another reason. Bob Agger is a next fan who has clipper season tickets. He's not a Laker fan. I don't know what team question roots for. But that's whatever it is. That's not why they bought it. They bought it because it's one of the best things you can buy in sports, the Los Angeles Lakers. We're seeing this over and over again now with the wealthiest of the wealthy buying sports teams as assets and thinking about them like assets. So now you have a commissioner. Adam Silver, who I've been somewhat critical of the last, I don't know, two years or so because I feel like the league is so revenue driven and so franchise price driven that they're kind of not seeing the forest through the trees anymore. And you can see with the WNBA. All the ways they've handled this WNBA asset, which the league owns a piece of, I just disagree with a lot of it. I didn't like that they overexpanded. They've added three expansion teams for reasons they were made unclear. They did this media deal where it's on seven different channels and it's a pain in the ass to figure out who's who. They don't have a real commissioner in place that can solve some of the issues that seem to be repeatedly popping up with this league. Like, you know what the league needed? I'm sorry to go on a WNBA tangent, but the league more than anything else needed somebody an adult to say, stop with all the discourse. All this stuff that has nothing to do with the basketball players we have and the product we're putting on the floor. Let's talk about our stars. Let's talk about our team our best teams and all the positives that have happened over the last few years with this league and said all the dumb shit. And anybody who's trying to dine on the dumb shit for clicks, for attention, for social video, whatever, don't have good intentions. And those people should not be spearheading and pushing the dialogue about our league. Well, nobody did that. And it's just going to continue to happen. And meanwhile you have a game like last night where the fever looked awesome. And, you know, afterwards it's the same old shit. It's Stephanie White having to defend herself in a press conference. Everybody in the WNBA has to defend themselves. Why? The league's the best it's ever been. The scoring's up. And I look at the NBA and I wonder like with the second apron and the players in the revenue stuff and all the stuff they have to care about with the new media deal. I still, maybe it's a pipe dream at this point. You still want to think that the people running the best teams actually care about those teams. Like regardless, the chism who bought the Celtics. So I really like. And I will never understand why they traded Jalen Brown. But at least I know it wasn't a financial decision, right? The money thing wasn't different. There was something else going on there with Jalen and Jason and them feeling like they had maybe Brown made a trade. Who knows what happened. But he at least has my trust that I do think he cares about the team that he grew up watching and caring about that he's not going to want to do wrong by that franchise and by the fan base. You start letting these big money people in here that only care about the investment and only care about what they're getting over the players, what the economics of the league are. Everything is seen through the prism of finance. And this is just listen, in the 1950s and 60s, if you go back and read about the history of the league and you had teams that own NBA teams that own bowling alleys, right? Teams that their entire business rose or fell with how they did with like the Boston Celtics like Walter Brown or on the Celtics and the Bruins. And in the 70s and 80s, the NBA started teams would get flipped over and over again. The Celtics had six seven owners in the 70s and 80s. And at one point, John Y Brown who won the Celtics and Irv Levin who won Buffalo just flipped teams. They just changed owners like it was just crazy backroom shit that would never happen now. And I think the Mavericks when they were an expansion team in 1981, it was like 12 million. And there's been levels of when the numbers went up. And the numbers were realistic until about three, four years ago. And now they're not, they're not realistic. I don't think the Lakers are worth $12 billion when they don't even own their own stadium. Somebody thought they were at that because they paid it. And they're going to figure out how to turn that into an asset and an advantage. But that's a crazy price. And I guess this is just where we're going to be with pro sports with these bigger things. Like you just these teams are getting a pot. And in the old days, you would be worried that you had some drunk owner, you know, or some or a bad guy or somebody who leveraged himself and then didn't have enough money to run the team. Or somebody, this was the fourth most important thing they did and they didn't care or they got left the team and they don't care about it. We had that with the Celtics with Paul Gaston, Don Gaston son. But now we're moving into this whole weather era where these things are just giant hedge fund plays. And is it going to be good for the league? Is it going to be good for professional sports? My instinct is no. But I'm a glass half empty optimistic person. I think this is watching somebody flip the Lakers over a year and a half like he's flipping a mansion in Bel Air or something is fucking bonkers. This is the crown jewel of the league. The Lakers and the Knicks are the two most important teams in the league. I'm a Celtic fan. Even I would admit that. Celtics have the tradition, the titles, the fan base, all that stuff. But if you're just talking about the two most important teams in the league from cities, ratings, money they make, it's the Lakers and it's the Knicks. And one of them just got flipped like a house. So what's it going to mean? I guess we will find out. We're going to take a break, come back, talk about you sport power ranking for parents. Yeah. We're going from the Lakers to you sports right after this. This episode is brought to you by chat GPT. Imagine you're running a professional sports team. Nice. That would be a dream, man. Imagine the player contract reporters do today. Not so nice. You've got performance notes from the coaching staff. You got a salary, spreadsheet from your analyst, three rounds and back and forth emails with the agent. And all that is scattered. Absolutely everywhere. Well, that's where chat GPT work comes in. It's a new way to use chat GPT for bigger multi-step projects. Give chat GPT work access to your your apps and files and can create real work documents, for instance spreadsheets, slides, structured reports. You can bring all those to your next meeting and when you don't need answers, you need help just getting the work across the finish line. Guess what? Chat GPT work can move your projects forward while you stay in control. Put chat GPT to work. And your most ambitious ideas and projects get started. Just go to chat GPT.com. I'm selecting work mode available on plus and pro plants. My friend, Cousin, Sal is here. We are killing a ton of time until football stays and we're in football prep mode. You've been on the ringer-wise guys we're calling it now, which is our oral gambling show, which is on Twitch and YouTube and Spotify, breaking down divisions. But you just came back from Cooperstown. Yes. By the way, let's do it. Let's just do the football. Cooperstown is fine. But let's just do the, we're ready. You're ready? I'm ready. I know. So we're recording the football on August 27th of Thursday. And we're doing a two-parter. And I couldn't be more excited because we're now 15 days away from that. But this was the perfect time. It's my daughter's last college socrates in coming up. You just went to Cooperstown. Your son's team finished six out of 102 teams. You just lived this whole week long. You think you're in a sports movie. And one of the questions that I get the most is people know from the podcast from other stuff that I've been a soccer dad for a long time. When you meet these people who have younger kids and they're like, give me some advice. What do you think my kid should play? What sport would you recommend? And I always find, so I'm finally like, fuck it. We're just going to do this. But before we do that, one of your sons played football. Your son that did wrestling. And then your youngest son is in a whole bunch of stuff, but probably likes baseball the most. So what's your favorite out of all of those? I could speak to football wrestling, baseball, basketball, and rugby, actually. Now, as the five that I've competed in or my kids have. I have to pick a favorite right off the bat. No, you don't. Save it, save it. We'll save it for the rest. All right. We are going to, people are going to hate this. We're going to go from 20 to 1. We're sport for your kid to play from a parent experience. We are not talking about the kids. This is all selfish. This is just for the parents only. Parent only rankings from 20 to 1. And we're just going to try to give you some wisdom. I have some guidelines here. I have seven questions. The first one is, how does the sport actually append your life? Which is an underrated part of being a youth sports parent. Does it regularly affect the time you wake up? Do you have to spend a lot of time driving to far tournaments? Are your weekends just destroyed? Is there food diet stuff that has to tread? Like you wrestled in high school, there's too much stretch where you're not allowed to basically eat anything. How upset will your kid be at you if you miss one of the events and how upset will you be? And then if your weekends are going to be ruined for years or at least having fun or somewhat fun. So from a parent standpoint, I think that's number one. Baseball you've been in a lot of, it's a lot of driving. Yeah, well, first of all, we should clarify a little because what time period, right? Because little league baseball when they're six is delightful. I mean, what's better than staring at them in the cute uniform? So he eats and hit the ball. And he immediately ran the third base. How cute. But if Ethan does that when he's 12, you're looking to fight his father, right? So, I guess we'll put it at what range are we putting it in? Post six years old. This is the whole run. Yeah, we're assuming that your kid is going to at least be competent enough to play from, let's say age six, all the way through around high school age, if it goes well. Okay, okay. Second, second question, you just were in the middle of this. What's the parent culture around the sport? What type of other parents are you consistently hanging out with? How much do you actually have to hang out with them? Are there outs? Can you wander off? Can you like in baseball? You can be like, I'm going to go watch something that's from left field, but you're really trying to get away from agro dad. How crazy are the parents on a scale of one to 10? Just day to day regularly. A practice is how competitive are they with the other kids and parents on the team for scholarship stuff, whatever? And just can you move in and out of this? So wrestling, you go and you're in the stands, you never know, you're watching everybody else and then your kid's up and everybody's kind of pulling for everybody else and wrestling, right? Absolutely, yep. I would say wrestling, you're stuck in a smelly gymnasium for a tournament, I would say. Like a meat on a Tuesday or Thursday is a little more manageable. You know when your kid is wrestling, you can invite relatives out for a tournament. Wayans could be at 7.30 in the morning. The tournament starts at nine and he or she could wrestle at 10 and then two, depending on the way class. So that part of it is miserable, I would say. And not to spoil my rankings. 'Cause these are my rankings. You don't even know what we're doing. But the unpredictability of event times, yes, is so much more important and crucial to this than people seem to realize. Where it's like, my son has a track and field meet today. Well, what is it going to be? I have no idea. It could be 9.30, it could be two. There could be a race here. We might have seven hours to kill. Now I'm eating a hot dog from the concession stand or chips or stuff out of a vending machine. Oh, do we have time to drive 10 minutes to go to like Jack in the box? The more uncertain you have around the schedule, the less fun it is. So you have that. The next question is how expensive is the sport to become good at? So that includes special travel teams, club teams, special expensive equipment. I think lacrosse, hockey, some of these ones where you, or even baseball gloves like, oh, my kid grew. I have to get more stuff. Oh, it's another year. Oh, the lacrosse stick is too short for him now. I gotta get that again. Oh, I gotta get another helmet for whatever. I got to get new gloves the whole thing of that. It's hard to explain the reaction you have when you buy an expensive bat for your kid for Christmas. And then he's using the best hitter on the team's bat by the MLK tournament. Right. And you're like, I just, this is our big Christmas gift to you. It's like four months later. It's too small. And then private training and private coaches because there's some of these where, you know, called privates, but like in baseball, if you want your kids to actually play in college, you're gonna start doing privates. If your kid's a figure skater, like that's a whole, that now you have to hire a coach, like that's going nuts versus like some of these other sports, you know, basketball, you could have, you could definitely have privates. You could also just be a really good athlete who can just lace on some sneakers and go out there and play for a club team. Yeah. I think this is for me, because my kid's a tweener, right? He's not terrible, but he's not gonna play pro or anything close. And all of his friends are in that category. So what do you do with the private lessons? You don't want them to embarrass themselves, but I feel like this isn't the e-bike cell phone category. Like they never need it until a couple of their friends take it and then you're screwed. So you really have to rally the parents to resist as much as you can. I would say for soccer, it is important. Yeah, that's, that's when we go through I'll talk about the different ones. But for some of them, like, just like technique, sports with technique, if you're a baseball pitcher, at some point you're gonna have some sort of private coach that helps you with your throwing motion and all that stuff. All right, so that's expensive as another category. So that's three. So we have, does the sport append your life? What's the parent culture? How expensive it is? The fourth one is physical mental health risk for your kid. I would argue this is the most important. We're talking about concussion potential. We're talking about dieting and all the crazy shit you have to do to compete in certain sports. Injury of potential. Is your body gonna be the same when you're 30 years old because you played this sport? Also, are you solo? Is all the pressure on you or are you part of a team? I would argue it's better to be part of a team and have that dynamic and learn how to compete with other people and the solo thing can get weird, but also, like, it's easier to succeed in. Does the sport get you in better shape? There's certain sports where like, if you play soccer, you're just in good shape, right? You can play baseball and potentially not being great shape, but physical mental health risk. So you're a wrestler. You have all the dieting stuff, all the crazy, you're running up and down the stairs. It's 110 degrees. You have the pressure of these matches of letting the team down. I would say that's like a nine out of 10 pressure tolling your body sport, right? Yeah, I think it's like you're sending your kid to the off to the service, like to the arms forces. And without doing that, you know, without getting in a fight with your wife about doing it. Right. But you would do it again. It's the best in the worst. I'd put it at the top and the very bottom because it's like the mental torture it takes, the physical torture it takes, but later in life, If you're. you have to lose weight, whatever, you got that you are rooting for your team, but it isn't individual sport. I would say from a parent's perspective, if you like to blame people, you're not going to be able to do it. Like, I know we all love to blame people. We're all on the Twitter universe, right? We like to blame what a politics will. It's oh, it's got to be someone else's fault. Once in a while, a referee will call a takedown out of bounds that didn't happen. But for the most part, it's your kid effing up or your kid doing great. So the highs are as high as they can be in the lows or as low as they can be. Yeah, anything when it's just you, cross countries like this, track and fields like this, like ultimately it's just you. Yeah. Yeah. You're in charge of your destiny. There's no other people to blame. You can't say, oh, the coach's kid was playing the wrong position or my kid should have been there. And he instead, they played him with it. Like, you have no excuses. You're just looking at in the mirror. And then, you know, there's some, you're talking about the more physical sports. There's a real toll that happens. Like my son in the high school played as a freshman in sophomore played football in lacrosse. And he's still, he didn't want to play in him. His body is still banged up. Like he has hip stuff already. He had like two minor precautions and and then looking back, you're like, man, should we have let him play football at all? And you have the, the parent goat. Parent goat is almost its own category in this. Um, yeah. I would say for that, they're just real quick like, you know, football as far as like a spectator sport. And this is all subjective. You could like soccer better. But Friday night under lights, nothing better. That's about it. TV should TV shows about it. Movies about it. But same time, you talk about like skipping a game. Like the one of the parents kind of has to be there, just in case that all got awful thing that we read about happens, you know, the head injury or whatever, which is the ambulance is taking kids off the field. It's not as much a concern with, you know, golf or, you know, the field hockey, but it is football for sure. Yeah. And having been in this stand a couple of times when that happens, it's the single worst feeling. Like somebody got hurt. Somebody's down. They stopped the game. Like it's, and he was like, oh, Friday night football is so much fun. And then it's like, holy shit, what are we doing? That kids 15 is getting carted up. Three more categories. Is there actual realistic college scholarship potential? Could this weirdly all pay off all the time we're spending doing whatever, privates, anything? Could you, could this be a shortcut to not having to pay for college, which can be like half a million dollars and five, six years? And then which sports are the sneaky best bets to get a scholarship? I factored that in the ranking too. Oh, I thought you said, which can you bet on, which is also, no, we could also, which sports could be better. But like, water polo is the sport you and I would have been like, yeah, Ben's getting a water polo or, yeah, Harrison's a big water polo guy down. And you're like, what? Right. Water polo. And then you watch, like, my son's school had all of these kids just going from the water polo team to all of these, you know, pretty prestigious colleges because it's not a sport that everybody has. So if you're lucky enough to live in an area that has something like that, you know, it was a water polo college athlete. Who's that? You'll never guess this. I don't think you know the answer to this. Joe House. Really? Joe House was a big high school water polo and basketball. But then in college, did water polo for a couple years until I think we'll shame him and made fun of him to get him to stop. Yeah. Oh, that's funny. Joe House. He stopped. I probably didn't want to just be treading water in a pool in the Patriot League. All right. Two more categories. Parent entertainment value. So this is a positive category. Yeah. How much fun is it to attend the games? Are the schedules consistent? Are you outdoors or indoors? How easy? This is a big one for you. How easy if for you to sneak away and do a work call or some sort of other call during the event. Do you flexibility or you have to be locked in scared the entire time? Are there breaks that I have a bet on the undercard and the UFC in Saudi Arabia at 2 p.m. And I have to get away and watch that match. And you know, we'll see what little Nathan does afterwards. Right. Well, then can you watch, can you watch stuff during the events? I mean, and we would do Sunday pods where Zoe had a soccer tournament. And I would have Sunday ticket on my phone while she's playing games, trying to keep track of everything and taking notes and soccer is a little easier, but there's some other sports that would not be as easy. And you're guilty. Either way, you feel guilty, right? You're missing a kid a little bit or you're missing the Sunday slate. And I have to how am I going to go on Sunday night and make it like I watched everything. But the only other piece for parent entertainment value is is the actual sport relatively easy to understand is it fun for the parent? Do you feel like you could have some sort of opinion slash respectable thoughts about what you're watching or you just like what go in there going. I don't know what the fuck's going on. Where this goes wrong is baseball where everybody thinks they're the biggest expert in the world. So that this is pros and cons. The easier the sport is to understand the more people are weighing in with some of the worst takes of all time. You're in the middle of this with baseball. It was the single worst thing about being a baseball parent. Yeah, there's people aggressively like screaming. Bawk, bawk, every pit, you know, it's like, no, it's not a bawk. You stepped off, cut it out. There's that part of it. And then there's your wife or husband who doesn't know the game after, you know, that nine years of this is just like, so wait, they have to tag him at first, but don't they have to tag him on a ground ball? No, no, no, but I will say this, like, there was something comforting when my son Archie, my oldest decided to play rugby sophomore year. And aside from like worried that he'll get need in the face, but the ball, you know, because they wear those goofy kind of protective helmets, but nothing really on the face. There was something nice about not knowing the rules and just like kind of watching along. And, you know, I didn't get loud about anything because I didn't know the rules. So, you know, when they're throwing it in and one kid standing on the other shoulders and there's a throw in like, it was fine to me. So I don't know. It's a, it could go either way. I had this with lacrosse. I lacrosse is a sport I'd never followed in any capacity, never watched, never cared about. And then my son got pulled onto the lacrosse team and all of a sudden was playing when he was a ninth grader. And I didn't know what was going on. And I, I, I became like, it was almost like I was a foreigner sitting on the sidelines being like, so you, so that guy can't go past midfield. And these people can run off and they're back on and wait, why didn't that goal count? That was just confused for two months. I couldn't understand anything. And the goals were fast. These fouls, then it would be like, there would be like this delayed power play, where if you had the ball and then the guy's running off, but you still have it. And it's like, well, is he off for 30 seconds or two minutes? And I don't know. It was a lot. As long as it eventually makes sense. It eventually makes sense. But for like VAR for all this whole summer, we went right. All right. Last question, bonus question. This is a really important one. When you talk to grownups, your age are a little younger, but adults about the sport that they devoted their youth to. What do they say in retrospect? Are they happy? They did it. Do, would they run it back? Would they do it over again? This is the number one gymnastics is the number one for this. I'm still waiting to meet the first person who did gymnastics all the way through high school or college. And was like, that was great. I would definitely 100% do that again. The person does not exist. Even people like who won Olympic gold men are like, yeah, I don't know. If I'd run that one back. And football is another one where I think if you talk to people who played football in high school and in college, afterwards, yeah, football was great. Would I do it again? No. So it's an interesting one. Whereas other ones like soccer, unless you had some terrible injury or something for the most part, or volleyball, nobody's like, oh, yeah, I would never play volleyball again. Yeah. I mean, first of all, when you ask them the question, you're hoping they haven't sustained enough injuries, whether they're not able to verbalize anything. So they're taping the answer. But I do have a personal story with this, we'll bring up Tony Romo here. It's not exactly play out. But you said, but I wanted my kid. I wanted Archi to play football, starting in seventh grade, like tackle football. And like we know the Romos and we went out with them, started a name drop, whatever. Yeah. And I asked, uh, I was like, I'll get Tony to convince Melissa and his wife will agree and that'll be nice. She's like, it's like Tony, Archi could play tackle in seventh grade, right? Right? And he's like, yeah, he could wait till 10th. And I was like, what? You just ruined it for me. You just took three years of my life. Right. Even though you might have had three to his, but that's not the answer I want to hear. So yeah, you will get, you will get negative, honest feedback for whatever reason from these athletes. Yeah, I wish, I wish we had held Ben out until 10th grade because he was 9th grade. He was starting playing, you know, against 18 year olds. I let back at that. I'm like, this is fucking crazy. But he was doing well and it seemed like a good idea. Now I really regret that. So the questions are, do they acknowledge now is bad for their bodies? Were they more or less likely to have a positive or negative experience with a coach, depending on the sport? You can have have some sports where if you have the wrong coach, you never want to play that. again, you can have other sports where it's like, Oh man, that guy changed the course of my life or that lady. If I hadn't met that person, I'd probably wouldn't be doing this for a living. Another good question is, which sport do you actually wish you would play it? And then the big one, can you keep playing the sport after high school or college? Which I think gets lost in this whole thing, where it's like, if you play football, you're done playing football, either in high school or college, you never play it again, right? There's other sports. Like, if you get in a golf when you're six, now you're playing golf for 80 years. I get invited to Babydoll's Country Club. I get to get to play a teen with them somewhere. I never ends. Tennis is another one. Like, if I'm good at tennis and I have the mechanics of a serve and I could play serve in Bali, I'm playing until I'm 75, you know, and that's it. It's just those two, right? I pick a ball, I guess, if you want to count it now, I don't know how there's some beach fun that'll happen. Yeah, pick about it, not make our list for top 20. But beach volleyball is another one. You could probably play until your 20s or 30s. My daughter's talking about this now because she's really competitive and she's like, I'm not playing, this is my last soccer year I'm done. What am I going to do after? And I think she's going to start playing tennis and I really try to get good at it because she's like, I can play tennis, I can play doubles, you can play singles, like my wife plays five days a week and, you know, she's close to our age. So those are the big ones. So the seven are, I'm going to call it life grenade. How much does this blow up your life when your kid plays the sport, parent culture around it, finances, how expensive it is, physical mental health risks, college scholarship potential, parent entertainment value for us personally. Do we have a good time watching it and then post playing career regrets for the people we know. Those are the seven calculuses. The other thing I would add, maybe wouldn't, maybe this isn't a separate question because it's all encompassing, but what percentage of the games you're rooting against your kids team for whatever reason? Oh, to have the weekend and early because you have to get back because you have to do something else because they're going to get killed by the next team anyway. What is the baseball number one for that? Where it's like, oh man, two more and it's a mercy rule. We can get out of here. It is. It's number one. It's definitely number one. One thing I didn't have on here just so people know is flag football, which I think 10 years from now, I think flag football will basically be football for everyone under 16. And flag football is great. I had so much fun when my, when my son played for his school, the Willows, they won the eighth grade title, which was like one of my great sports moments as a parent. But super fun and not, you don't have to worry about like a major injury for the most part. You might have like, once the kids get better, you might have the collision over the middle where somebody's going for an interception and maybe they hit heads. You see some kids wearing caps, but for the most part, really safe. And I think that's going to keep taking off. And I think you would put football number one for entertainment value and everything else and camaraderie and parents and be able to get away. And all those things you talked about, if not for the injury risk and that flag football could be just as exciting on a Friday night. If you have a competitive game, my kids been in it for like six years now. So it's great. All right. We're going to take a break and we're going to come back and we're going to unleash the top 20. All right. Top 20 best youth sports for parents from 20 to one, 20 being the worst. Very important. These are not sounds rankings. These are my rankings. Yeah. Sounds my conciliaries slash sounding board. I'm happy to move stuff around. Coming in last at number 20. Figure skating. I think it's the perfect storm. I think it checks every negative box. Incredibly expensive. Herific ice rink times. Right. You're getting up. Oh, I got to get it. Julie's got a figure skating. It's 415 tomorrow morning. It's the only time we get the ice rink. Lonely. You're relying on coaches that could be terrible or great. And the upside is, I don't know. They don't have really a figure skating scholarships, right? So the upside is, my kid might be able to go pro and make money in the odds of that. You're competing against literally everybody else in the planet. And you have to buy skates every year. And you can't really do it. Then when you're older, except for if you're doing like a Christmas stroll skate, this is my number number one worst. And I don't think it's arguable. What do you think? Pretty good. I would say the only good thing is you don't have, you know, you're not freezing outside. You're the rain. The weather doesn't affect it because it's indoors. That's the only good thing. You're right about the morning time. But the rinks are cold though. The rinks are kind of cold. Yeah. Yeah. And there could always be some lunatic who hit your knee with a lead pipe. And who the hell knows? It goes on and off on top for decades. Yeah. Yeah. I would put that to, by the way, this is going to be get ready for this because you're going to get more backlash from your list no matter what. I haven't even heard it. Yeah. Then any other podcast you've ever done. I'm fine. I'm going to take it. This is just my rankings only. And if it's an opinion, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one. Everyone's going to have a hundred. That's a problem. Yeah. Figure skating. Also, when it, when it kind of goes up and levels, now I got to buy outfits. Yes. I have to buy the fancy little figure skating dresses. I've got to pay coaches. Like, if you're doing this, you better know from age four. Your kid is an absolute prodigy. I don't, I don't see it. And the weight thing is a problem too, right? Like keeping the weight down. Yeah. There's a whole bunch of, yeah. There's a whole bunch of eating stuff that could happen to. All right. I guess the benefit is if you're, if you're pairs, very tight relationship with your pairs partner. So you're not, you're not alone. That's true. And find a, find a partner. Also, when you think about scariest moment as a parent, like let's say your kid's getting good at figure skating and is in sub tournament, but then does the trip. Oh, here comes the triple axel and then falls. There will be more devastating other than like if your kid's a kicker and football in college. And your kid misses the kick and there's 75,000 people there and your kid just blew everybody the game penalty kicks maybe. Baseball that you're just, your kids never playing football is probably the biggest matter of people. Yeah. So then there's pick six or something, something like that. But yeah, it does individualize it as much as anything else. Figure skating last. Second or last, gymnastics easily could have been number 20. An actual body ruiner. There's, there's a really good book that somebody wrote like 30 years ago. I think it's called Little Girls in Pretty Boxes about like, especially gymnastics. Like it, like has real, real effects on its stunts growth. Like knee back stuff. One of my wife's best friends did gymnastics and is like an advocate now for please don't ever don't have your kids do this. Yeah, it's just that there's, you have back stuff, you have spine stuff, you have leg stuff, you can have foot stuff. You're constantly like, oh, I'm a little sore, but we have a me tomorrow. I got to play like, I'm out on gymnastics. A lot of people like it. Well, everyone loves it in the summer for the summer Olympics. Isn't it the most watched? I mean, it's like, it's the best of the best. It's the one thing the whole family will get together and watch. I feel like, yeah. But those are like the best 50 ever. Like what about all the other ones who, who went through college? See, this is where people are getting mad. Well, they should do a copy of you. The Simone Biles of the world. I'm like, hey, this isn't for everybody. In fact, it's just for the like seven of us and that's it. I try. I think dance is more interesting for jive because we had some some little girls like we had Zoe did gymnastics for. I don't know, like the first year and they were like, you got to get her coming five days a week. She could be amazing. We were like, it's always going to be like five nine, but she's not wishing me a gymnast. But I think there's, there's, I would push toward dance would be my parent advice. Not saying I'm right or wrong, but if you want your little girl to be limber and do stuff, like, like go the dance route, because you're going to get great balance from it and everything else. I have my buddy Tony, I wasn't sure if you're going to include dance. Not our mutual friend, Tony, but I did, he did say insert dance in there. And he's like, from a parent's perspective, it's awful because you're seeing them do the same five minute routine over and over and over again. Yeah. It was that dance did not make the cut. Right. Number 18, swimming. Yeah. So, a bunch of stuff going on here. The all day meets we talked about with wrestling, especially if your kids doing multiple things. You might, the first one might be at 730 and then the next one's at two and then the last one's at five. Our buddy Gus had a kid who was a swimmer and that it was the meets. It really, it's an all-dayer with the added bonus. You can barely tell which kid is yours if you're in like the bigger things. It's like, is he in lane five or lane four and then then you're going and there's a lot of chlorine exposure. Yeah. And the benefits are you get in six shape. Yep. And there's scholarship potential, but I don't know. I'm just like, what are you swimming? Body image issues for sure. Right. I mean, Yeah, six great on. You're in a you're in a one p-dow school. Yeah, that's it. Oh, yeah, boy girl. So it's it is tough. Yeah, that chlorine killed me. My kid trained for junior guards out here to be a lifeguard and it wasn't swim meets. But it was a lot of intensive and the coaches can be crazy too. That's an underrated like, like, like, you know, iron chef type coaches in the background seeming there. We just saw Zackla whose dad was a famous high school coach in Greenwich for swimming and he's going to be furious. That swimming came in 18. Look, there's no there's no losers. These are just the rankings. Um, I include diving and swimming. This is all anything with a pool. Um, also pool times hard. You know, sometimes that's another one where you might have to get up early to go swimming. So anyway, swimming is 18. Uh, wrestling 17. For a lot of the stuff we mentioned. And I say there's no in that you loved wrestling. But when you think, when your kid wins a match and pins somebody about as exciting as it's going to get for a parent better. And then I would say every other piece of it's terrible. A lot of it's terrible. Yeah. The discipline's great for later in life. Like I said, the, the body thing, like if you're 112 pounds trying to get down to 106, now you're talking about like, you know, 8% of your body weight, and it's something growth. And those 112 pounders are, are it'd be tougher than to get to 135 140 in their later years. Uh, the times, like I said, all over the place scattered. Don't know when to invite people to watch your kid for a tournament. Yeah. I mean, I'm in my car for four hours watching EPL on my phone because the time between the weigh-ins 7 a.m. and his first match is 11. And I don't even know if that's, that's going to be, you know, that's another thing. If you're school or whatever, there's a whole other story. We didn't have buses. So we had to each drive our kid for the weigh-ins now and a half a week. Yeah, you got the weigh-ins too. Um, it's rough. Yeah. One other benefit other than when your kid wins. I mean, when you, and then when your kid loses, it's devastating. But you can use this later in life. Like you're like a sneaky, I would trust you in a dark alley as my sidekick if we had to fight people. Like you do have moves and, I don't know, you learn some stuff. You're cagey. Yeah. There's no Fujitsu team in high school, right? So this is, yeah. If you want to be able to handle yourself in a fight, like a lot of these fights end up on the ground. So, but no, I don't, I don't use it for offense bill. You know that. I'm defensive. You're like Mr. Miyagi. Miyagi all the way. Yeah, you know, you're not supposed to punch somebody unless you're challenged. All right. So number 17, I'm sorry, number 16 and 15 I put together cycling and cross country. Cross country is interesting. No, a couple cross country parents. The kids buy themselves just doing stuff. They're on a team and it's fun, but it's really just them. But the real problem is there's, when you actually have like a meat, there's nowhere to go. You basically have to pick a spot. It's like, oh, my son runs 10k. It's like, oh, he's going to run. All right. I'm going to pick this. We'll go meet him at the halfway there in the trail. And then you wait, you wait, and then he runs by I'm like, go go. All right. Come on, buddy. He's not listening because they're like locked in the cross country. Right. So fun, but also not fun at all. At least you get to be outdoors. The benefit is you get to do this after you, you know, your whole life. If you run, you run your whole life. So that's learning, yeah, learning good stuff. I asked for some input here. Am I from my friend Megan, who is a long distance Olympic hopeful, actually, for 2028. So she says the meats are typically further away at some random park or in the middle of the woods or sometimes on a golf course. But again, it's a 20 minute race. So you can realistically be back home by noon. And then she said, this is what really got me said, you would love being a cross country dad, though, because the night before you get to have pasta parties. So you could eat all the carbs, which is right up your alley. She's right. Yes. It is up my house. That sounds amazing. Yeah. So it's a cross country too. Should I put it higher? I guess we'll see. Well, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what we put everything else. Next one's rowing. Number 14. This is so douchey. This is so East Coast prep douchey. You didn't need to put this in, but God, listen, it's it's first of all college car ships available. You get to be an awesome shape. You don't necessarily have to be super coordinated or a great athlete. You just kind of have to be strong and have discipline, right? So if you're like one of those, like you have a strong body, but you're, you know, if you're playing basketball, you're a mess, but rowing maybe, you know, the downside, you have to get up crazy early. I think this might be the earliest other than figure skating. The kids who rode and caught, we had a rowing team and at Holy Cross. We none of us understood it. It's like, why are you doing this to yourself? This is the worst thing ever. I can't go out on Saturday night because I have a meet on Sunday and the meets at seven in the morning. It really ruins your life. It is kind of a fun parent sport though. If your kid gets good, you get to go to these, you know, you can see it in like Oxford blues or some of these movies that they made with the crew. You get to go to your spot, kind of hang out. Like head of the charles is the big thing in Boston, but the morning schedule just sounds like a fucking nightmare. I think you put it too high. You're going to hear from the Winklevoss twins here. Good luck for both of them. Number 13 track and field, which is the, I think the hardest one to figure out on the whole list because you had the scholarship potential. You have all the meets where there's 75 things going on. You don't even know, despite it's a bigger stadium. You don't even know where to go and what you're looking at. And it really depends on the event. I think if your kid's a polevolter, pretty cool, right? You can kind of get near the polevol pit. The running stuff is a little harder, but it's the same thing we talked about earlier with the meets and just not knowing when the times were for things. My buddy, you know, in La Parley kid, coaches now girls track after decades of coaching real sports like football, baseball and wrestling, but he's like, it's easy to coach, but I will say he's like from a parent's perspective, there's a lot of warming up. You'll see these kids warm up and whatever event it is, they will be like 80% of warmups before they get to the actual race. And then you can't like even the lineage, which is, which is which. So that's a negative, I would say. Right. If you have like a 9 a.m. race, you're there an hour and a half early because you got your whole warm up thing. Track it feels fun because there's a lot of different aspects and places to push your kid. And it is a good college scholarship sport, potentially. So there's some benefit there. We're getting, now we're in the top 12. I have hockey 12. So basically all the same physical fears that you would have with football. You know, hockey has so much concussions and people getting hurt and I honestly just body's colliding. The ice rink times are truly horrific unless you're living in like a cold place. If you're in a cold place, maybe better. If you're in Canada, obviously, if you're in Minnesota, if you're in, I don't know, Wisconsin, it's that there's a reason all the best players are all coming from the same few states. Parent culture is insane. Yeah, I don't know if this is a craziest parent sport, but it's got to be top three, right? This is the one like this is the most likely if you're on the Twitter for you or Instagram to see like parents fighting. Probably like just people just punching each other for no reason at a hockey thing. Going through the glass. Yeah, there's some crazy crazy clips on there about parents fighting you. It's the rinks are ben did hockey for two years and he was too late because this is another problem with hockey. You have to start skating by the time you're like four. To actually be good at he started probably, but he would have been good at hockey. And it was fun to go there, but the rinks are freezing. Like they're just like and they're not big rinks either. So you're you're wearing like winter coats and you know, isn't that what out here? The rinks are freezing. Rinks are freezing. Yeah, hockey rinks are freezing. Um, it is really fun. They're cold. Then it's like a king's game or a duck because it's they're smaller rinks. They're not like, okay, you know, um, the games themselves are super fun. Yeah. So that's why I, I have it ahead of football. I mean, I'm sorry. I have it below football. I have football ahead of football because, um, I, what you mentioned about Friday night football, I think is the differentiator. But for the most part, I think these things are pretty even. Equipments, um, pricey, right? Depending on what you want to do with this kind of thing. This is among the most expensive. Yes, sticks, um, privates. It's a commitment. This is if your kid plays hockey, probably not on, probably not doing two other sports, right? Right. This is year round. You're doing this all the time. If you get good at your, your away every weekend, um, there is some measure. You can't not skate for four months. Yeah. You have to kind of keep it going. Whereas football is like three months. It's more contained. You do have like the long preseason of football. So that would be the other one. But I have football 11. I have hockey 12. All right. 11. I football 11. Yeah. Wow. So many pluses of minuses. Oh, this is sad for me. I love football. But I think football with flag football could move up the ranks. I said, we do the movement to more of a hybrid model, but I would say parent culture. Pretty bad. Is there a position for every kind of kid with a body type 100% if you're like the big giant kid, you can be our left guard or, you know, if you're slow, but you're a good athlete, hey, you could be the center or you could be the defensive end. But the physical toll of football is, it's a hard one. I'm just looking at all these sports you're going to put ahead of football. It makes me sad. How about this for a positive? For the most part, a no-cut sport. Everybody makes it. Yeah. Doesn't mean they play, but they're involved, right? The practices and everything else. When do you think tackle football should actually start for kids? Because I've heard every sort of analysis of this, because you could argue it should be like fourth, fifth grade because you learn how to tackle. You learn, you know, basically the technique in your body learns how to, it gets conditioned to the collisions, whereas if you do it a little when you're older, it doesn't. But then you have 10-year-olds just ramming into each other. I think you could bump it up to ninth, tenth grade. This is the great Tony Romo. It's going to be hard by the ringer soon, said to me. I think it could be. I think ninth or tenth grade is fine. I don't know, because I do think like, you know, they talk about CT and all this stuff. Most of it happens in these practices. It really does. I remember getting my bell wrong a bunch of times between tenth and tenth grade, and then if you're in college, but you know, whatever. It's only in the pros, actually, where you're not going home into home, but in practice, at least. So you definitely want to keep what they call them and wrestling bumps. You want to keep that bump to hold down under 1,000 hours. You could tell me tenth grade is the cutoff. If we had a sports hour, the sports hour, probably say you can't play football to your 16. Right. Tackle football. All right. Number 10, skiing/snowboarding. Now, super expensive. I'm not sure about the team dynamic. And you basically have to live near a mountain or close to something, something where you can do it or you can't do it. So I'm just assuming that's for all of those people. But it does seem pretty great. I have one of my cousins has a daughter who's a big snowboarder and they have to, they're a new angle and they have to, you know, drive two, three hours sometimes to go to these things, but they do love it. Injury potential. Yeah, you could wipe out every once in a while. But the big thing with skiing and snowboarding, this is something you can literally do your entire life. Right. Right. And there's like tournaments and, you know, there's, could they keep adding Olympic sports like who knows? There's some college stuff with their team dynamics little weird, but I think for the most part, this is pretty solid. Harrison's friends with a kid who is excels at skiing snowboarding. Surfing and okay at other sports, but that's it. And so now he's got Instagram clips of himself, like, you know, riding a pipeline and everything and just, and I was, and to answer your question, like earlier, like, which one do you wish you would have done? God, it would be great to just be a world class skier. Right. Just been doing it since you were five. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the boxing is not on the list. That's, that's probably my pick. Weekends and vacations constantly. Yeah. So skiing, snowboarding, I guess surfing would be in this too. These are all like the individual where you need some sort of either a wave or a mountain, you need to put all those together. Okay. No, something. Yeah. Number nine, I was surprised to rank this side. Water polo. College scholarship, potential galore. Kind of your kids, everybody who's doing it is an awesome shape. Kind of underrated as a sport to watch in person. It's weird that it has no traction at all TV, although with ESPN, the way they've been adding weird sports to ESPN one and two, maybe water polo have a moment. The biggest, I think, parent to merit is there's a lot going on that you just don't know when you're watching, like, there's stuff going underwater. There's people punching each other. It's sometimes it's hard to see if somebody scored. And there's no juice at all, you know, with water polo. Water polo almost needs like better PR. Well, and it's weird because it's a, it's a, wow, it's a lively gym, right? Yeah. They go to the parents are going nuts after everything. Even if it's just a passing ball around the perimeter, but yeah, you're right. It needs a better PR team because it's fun in the Olympics. It's one of my favorites to watch. Yeah, at Ben's school sometimes like picking them up, they would have a game and the parents are going fucking crazy and it's packed. You know, they, his school had a good water polo team, but I can't believe this house thing. This is amazing. Joe House water polo. By the way, anybody who can produce video footage of Joe House playing water polo at any point in his life, there's a bounty for you. Okay. Number eight. Did he eat while he played? Maybe that was a problem. I think that's why he had to quit because he kept taking pizza up to the pool. He didn't taste as good chlorinated. Yeah. All right. Number eight. Baseball slash softball. Oh, okay. Destroyers your weekends. This is a weekend destroyer. I would say a pretty unarguably bad parent culture because it's really one of the only sports where every parent has an opinion on everything that's going on at all times and also inappropriate comments with with the kids. How does he not bump there? You know, it's like that kids ate like shut the fuck up. The mercy rule stuff and the blowouts like going to a tournament and just being like we're going to lose every game by 15 runs is awful. And I think the highest level of parents talking to other asses. If you're good, there's a whole bunch of privates gets expensive. It can carry over to adult softball, right? If you're good at, let's say you played at a high level softball based on high school, maybe in the college, you now become a ringer in office softball for like 20 years. You could also play in adult leagues when you're older. So you can kind of keep going. But I think this is around the right level. Number eight. Would you agree with this? Yeah. I mean, there's just so many pros and cons. It's what type of where you want to land on it. But I will say the parent thing is so important because you're going to have to eat with these people. And I'm lucky enough to be part of a group that we all like each other. So it's good because you're going to have a 12 o'clock game and then a four o'clock game. And then so from two to three, you're going to have to eat and watch games with these people at the local sports bar. So that's important. But parents in general, baseball parents, it's funny. You talk to coaches or like, yeah, I only got in the coaching so I could be away from the parents. There's a reason they're behind the cage, right? Animals. And I think it's gotten worse. And this is probably true for every sport. But I feel like with baseball, every 10 coach of a 10 new team could start the season saying, hey, you know what? No kid from wherever you're from has ever made it to become a pro. So that's why we're just going to go out there and have fun. We're not going to worry about being serious. But nowadays you can't say that because there's NIL money and everybody thinks like, this is what coaching and teaching is different. Like it used to be in the same spear, but no one thinks their kid is going to grow up to be an astrophysicist. But everyone thinks their kid can make 100 grand playing a sport somehow if they if they play their cards right. And that's why it's gotten worse. It's a great point. You know what I'll say? It's the worst sport for this. Oh, Bobby's up. And all the sudden you got mom or dad beat, you know, right behind right behind the big cage in front of home plate or behind home playing the fence. Yeah, check it out right in there or the kid's pitching. And now the kid's pitching and there's his mom like with the phone like this. And it has the most phone damage potential. The softball. I think would have been higher on the list before they had to put all this protective like having these crazy helmets and stuff. And even like the third basement and the mass and not as much fun as it was 20 years ago. Yeah. Our buddy got his coach some some college softball when he was at Rollins. Did he really? Yeah. Wow. Back in the old day before they had all this stuff on. But yeah, I think it's baseball softball. Fun part is everyone can play. You can hide even the worst kids for a couple of innings and put them in a couple of positions. Everybody can be part of the team. There's some fun. I don't know what you're going to end on here. This is interesting to me that there's seven. Yeah. Better than baseball, football and all these. Okay. Number seven tennis. Okay. There's wins everywhere, especially you get to do it your whole life. You get to do it with your kid. You can just go and be like, Hey, let's go hit some balls and go do it. You can play it anywhere. I think as long as it's not winter and some of the east coast or the Midwest, it's a 12 month. In California, it's a 12 month year sport. You don't necessarily have to belong to a tennis club. You can play in public parks. The rackets are expensive. You gotta keep changing those. Incredibly fun to watch as a parent. Scarship potential and pro potential and NIO potential. And the downsides would be the. which you're gonna have to do if the kid's gonna be good. And then, little lonely. It was why with our daughter, like I kept wondering whether we should get her involved in tennis when she was like eight nine 'cause she would have been good at it. But just kind of by yourself a lot, right? And you're not really part of a team. And it's a lot of like pressure on yourself at all times. And some kids can handle it, some can't. But for the most part, you get to be outdoors, you can play it anywhere, you can play it until you're 75. - Right. And the pressure on the parents thing is what we talked about. You can't blame anyone else if they're losing, right? - No, that's a double. - In a doubles match. - That's where you can blame the partner. - You always blame the partner. - And by the way, doubles is another great one. You play mixed doubles, you play same-sex doubles, like you have all these outs with that. So I think tennis is a really good one. That's the first one that I would really strongly recommend. Do you think, are you gonna lump tennis with pickleball? Like you did, like you do football with flag football? - No, just in that. - We don't acknowledge. - I know tennis is a good pedale. - Tennis isn't going away, but pickleball is very, very big. - So you think there's gonna be like high school pickleball someday? - I think so. - I might move. - That might be it for me. - We can move too. - I don't know. We've somewhere else to move to Italy. - Italy will have it too. - No, they don't move from there. - Pick a ball. - Yeah. Number six, field hockey. - I don't know, shit about this. - All right. - Yeah. - Yeah, this is why it's number six. Under the radar, it's really females only, incredible scholarship potential and super fun to watch. And okay, some states are bigger than others, but man, if you're good at field hockey, the world is your oyster with some of this stuff. You get to run around and it's very similar to soccer. - Sockie. - Sockie, head soccer. Get these big sticks. You have to be a little aggro. When I was at the Olympics, I actually went to a couple of field hockey games and it was like incredibly fun, really high level. And always kind of slips under the radar. - Some folks don't have some soccer. - La Crosse and soccer mixed, or you can't lift your stick, right? Basically. And I guess polo. - You've bent over a little bit. - And you gotta like, go ahead, stand up. Demonstrate. - Yes. - So field hockey is six. Now we're in the top five. Basketball five. Basketball you can play your whole life. Basketball, if it's a tournament, it passes the parent test of I can sneak out. Oh, his next game's not until an hour from now. You're there all day, but it's actually fun to watch basketball. There's different types of players. Your kid can be a three-point shooter, be an athlete, shop walker, pick whatever. Good team culture. The AAU, if your kid's really good, that gets a little weird. The club team start really early. The club team start at like third, fourth grade and that gets a little expensive. But for the most part, the only expenses are a basketball and sneakers. - Sure. And that's it. - Very exciting. You know when your kid's playing for the most part, right? One thing we didn't mention, so many baseball games can go four hours, right? If they're in a tournament and they have to go extra innings and stuff. Basketball I know can go over time, but for the most part, it's going to be shortened. It's going to be by the standards of the clock. So I have that for our final three. It's a huge piece to know the actual schedule and have a sense for a beginning, middle, and end of an event versus baseball where you could tell me like, Harrison had a four-hour game. We went into the 12th inning. We had to call the game 'cause it was dark and then they lost. - Right, right. - What's interesting though about basketball is, if you look at videos of parents fighting, by a mile basketball has more, right? Basketball broth. - Is there just more basketball in the crowd? - That's why we have more videos. Maybe there's that. Oh, there's baseball has a lot of parents like misbehaving, but maybe it's not parents. Maybe it's just like rival schools in the crowd that I'm seeing. - Basketball from a parents standpoint, you get to play with your kids. Basically from age seven on, you can play horse with them, you can play 21, you get a shooting contest with them. Then when you get older, you can actually like really play them. You can, they can go down the park, play with their friends, play five on five, play pickup. There's some injury stuff with basketball, mostly knees and lower half of the body. The club teams, you can, so if you're good at basketball in high school, you can be on a club team. But then you also get to play for your high school. And I would say that's one of the most high profile high school sports to play, right? So that's a win. So I think it's so competitive. - To me, there's five starting spots, though. That's the problem, right? So that's it. And you need to be relatively tall, right? That's another piece. What's the acceptable age your kid could beat you one-on-one in basketball? - Oh man. - Daniel 11, one by two. - 14, 15 probably is one of 'cause. - Yeah, I think that's good. - Yeah. - Stuff like you can bully. - All right, it's only 11 and a half wasn't good for me. - I gotcha. - Coming in at number four, golf. - One downside and one downside only. Insanely expensive. - Yeah. - The most expensive of all these sports. There's literally no other downside. If you play golf and you teach your kid how to play golf, you are now doing this with them all the time and this becomes your thing. Your kid will eventually be good at it. By the way, a lot of college scholarship potential, who knows what other kind of potential, but then they're doing it for the rest of their lives. And it's something that's helpful. You know, I always think about that. I should start playing. I always get invited to play, but I'm always, one of those I either have to play a lot or I don't wanna play at all. And there's so many fun social aspects that come from golf, there's work stuff. And it's the only downside is the expensive. You have to be outdoors to play all these different courses. When you're older, you get to go on college trips with your buddies or whatever. It's like, it's wins everywhere except for the expenses. - Yep. And it's bucket list type destinations, right? I wanna play Pebble Beach. I wanna play this when I'm older and all that stuff. I'll say this, we came back from Cooper's town. And I think my kid, we had a good time and I'll get into that store. But when you see the teams that make the finals, I think it was an eye opener. And he's like, oh, I got a couple of years left to me and baseball. And that's it. He played 18 holes the last three days, three of the last four days of golf. He's like now switching to golf a little bit 'cause he and his buddies like love it. So it's great. It's also the perfect age to start playing. You gotta be like 11, 12, 13, then you can kind of figure out a semblance of a swing and golf balls are expensive. Not crazy expensive, but that's a price. Clubs, if you have a kid, you start playing them when they're six, you have to buy clubs basically every year and a half, two years. So there's, it's insanely expensive compared to some of these other ones, but no other downside. No injury stuff at all, except for maybe a back, right? Back, maybe hips, it's about in. Lightning strikes, every other time. I mean, our agent, James Babydald Dixon, who's now 64, smokes two packs a day and can still play seven days a week. Yeah, but he always has his elbows hanging off his arm or something, right? A bruise, a bruise, whatever he has, a bruise or something. Yeah, true. He has to have like a rotator cuff. I guess that would be another issue. Good one for phone calls, if you're following your kid, like if you're kids in internment, you just get to walk the course with them, you're outside, you can pop away for a phone call, go behind a tree, places to go for the bathroom, all over the place, golf, huge win, and not for everybody because it's really expensive. Coming in third, so this is an interesting one. I have lacrosse at three. I think if it was men's lacrosse only, I would have it in the 10 to 12 range with football and hockey, because of all the physical toll and the concussions. This is like the most underrated concussion sport of all the sports. Girls lacrosse might be number one if we were just doing a boys versus girls thing. No contact really at all. Same as soccer, less people playing it. There's an easier path for college scholarships. Now it's on ESPN where they have women's lacrosse on ESPN. And it's weird because with girls, you're just not allowed to touch each other all the way through high school. You're not allowed to collide anything. And I remember we took Zoe once because I thought Zoe would be good at lacrosse and she would have been. But you go and it's just, people are just running around. It's like, now this person has a ball and nobody can do anything and they're just kind of trying to whack at the stick. So it's a little odd. There's also like some places just don't have it. Like California has a really weak lacrosse scene. - Yeah, definitely. - Whereas like beer in the East Coast where you grew up, like it's fucking everywhere. If you're in DC, Philly, Jersey, New York. But I think girls lacrosse is, I would highly recommend that. - So that's a flag football version of football. - Yeah. - Girls lacrosse. - I would say flag football for boys and some girls play football too, but girls lacrosse would be the other one. I don't know anybody who's daughter played the cross is like that sucked right. Don't do it. Yeah. Okay, and then the final two I'll do an alphabetical order soccer and volleyball I have together and Incredibly fun to watch everyone can understand time-controlled games Lots of scholarships available because the teams are long. So you have that possibility. You have the NIO possibility Soccer's outdoors volleyball's indoors volleyball less injury potential You'll get some shoulder stuff Maybe somebody will have like I don't know planter for shyness soccer is like if you're if you're oh high-end woman soccer player It's 40 to 50% chance you're hurting your knee or some other stuff. I think I would give volleyball the slight edge It's super fun. No, I remember when I covered high school sports for the Boston Harrel the mid 90s volleyball is my favorite one of all the sports Could follow it, you know, it's it resets You know every set You always know what's going on you can't be like a know-it-all with volleyball I'm like, oh, I can't believe the setter that like nobody nobody knows what's going on. You're just their cheering and And you can play it after as an adult you can play beach volleyball. So I think volleyball is one in soccer's two Beach volleyball by the way for a parent might be the best experience actually Yeah, by the beach and watch your kid. I know it's like a niche thing, but niche thing, but it's out out Yeah, out here out West Volleyball is a prestigious if you have a position on the high school team That's a prestigious way to go. Yeah, obviously holding Olympians are from out here. So yeah, it's good And so you wouldn't put soccer interesting And I think volleyball because of if you include the beach volleyball In the rate of concussion thing for soccer, right? So that's It's not underrated. I think at this point people know like, you know, especially when you're talking about collisions with goalies and strikers or two people going for a head and they bang heads like it's You know, it's been my biggest fear ever since like probably age 11 Once people start going airborne, you're just scared about it. The other underrated one is you can just get kicked by the ball Like somebody couldn't be clearing out the ball and kick it, you don't realize it and it just hits the back of your head Like I've seen a few of those. It's definitely Concussions that's that's another thing volleyball versus soccer. I think volleyball I guess you can get a concussion if you just got took a spike in the head Yeah, but other than that. No And then volleyball all different types of body types too because you can have the setters or smaller The other ones are, you know, the people at the net are taller Yeah, everybody's tall. The said there's small people in volleyball. Yeah Small yeah, the setters are small, right? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know, but they could take the setters out The soccer, um, the hell was I gonna say? Yeah, it's interesting with the soccer with the because I think if you go We're mostly talking here 13 to 18 or whatever, but if you go It's the first sport they all play, right? So soccer from 4 to 10 4 to 10. It's number one no matter what it's gotta be and I hate to say that as a baseball joke But it just is because your kid gets to play your kids involved running around Kids not making sandcastles and left field, you know, so I think there's a there's something to that as a positive You just see you're in great shape from soccer The tournaments even though it's a long whatever and you go to these and I've been to a bunch of them You're at these locations where there's 30 fields you got to figure out where the field is But for the most part pretty easy to navigate and you're gonna have two games a day They're usually not staggered where it's like one games at nine and the other ones at six They're usually within like four or five hours of each other so you have time to kind of relax veg out Also fun to just watch other soccer games that are happening which I think volleyball is the same thing if it's in one of those places with a lot of games You can kind of jump around and watch but I think that concussion piece Is outweighs the fact that you're outdoors with soccer, but I think these are the best two You might be right the one day where you you have to drive past 50 soccer fields to get to your tournament Two hours away. You have to drive past 50 baseball dime and it's like oh, we could have played this team in norwalk if 20 minutes away, but by the way, that should be your number one concern for someone who doesn't wear a seatbelt Should be how close the venue is now. I'm wearing a seat on that everybody shame me one of the reasons that I forgot about I remember it's like 20 years ago, and I just completely forgot it thought you came to your senses You have to wear one of the reasons I wanted to talk about with wilds is because I know I'd be publicly shamed for not being a seatbelt guy And I needed to I needed to really have the shame And I had to do it. I heard from so many people well most of the time I'm just driving around LA going 25 miles an hour I get it, and I know you're confident how good a driver you are Everyone else has become everyone else has become a terrible dry everyone else looking at their phone Doesn't that scare you that they're okay? I'm not wearing a seatbelt and everyone's staring at their phone while they're yeah trying to pass me That's true. Yeah, I'm gonna start wearing. I'm I needed I had my whole process. I needed to say that to wilds I don't know if people get mad. All right, we took 55 years. All right I'm gonna count what count down backwards twenty to one 20 figure skating started all the skaters out there 19 gymnastics swimming wrestling cycling cross country together rowing track and field hockey football skiing snowboarding surfing all at number 10 water polo baseball softball tennis field hockey basketball Is fifth golf fourth lacrosse third soccer second volleyball First what's going to be the most controversial Again, this is for parents Yeah, I think like you're gonna hear from like figure skit all the ones you put 2019-18 they're gonna get mad at you I personally would have moved football up a little bit just because I feel like the The juice behind the Friday night stuff is just it takes it to a different level and This is gonna sound ridiculous coming from me because I accused everyone to be in an NBA hole But I think basketball is this one or two Really? Yeah, I do I do If you could start over right now in Harrison and only have them play one sport from age five Which sport would you pick? I think it would be golf if the solo sport would be golf at this point because he's already upset with himself that he's behind his friend who's excellent hits the green alpha off of every tee on a part 3 I would have done lacrosse for Zoe They would have done lacrosse. Yeah, yeah Yeah, but I'm the soccer was great. Yeah, but they but lacrosse lacrosse I think lacrosse was For girls like you removing some of the injury rest that makes soccer a little Mm-hmm a little iffy anyway. I hope that helped. Listen again. That was good She's just my opinion only it doesn't mean I'm right. You can disagree I don't these aren't authoritative rankings. We people could disagree with yeah, people can absolutely disagree with these Oh, all right before we go do a parent corner for us. Well, yeah, let me tell you a little bit about Cooper sound We just got back. I thought it was the greatest. I mean, I really I can't say enough about it It's like the culmination of like eight years of little league. Yeah, and then you get to Cooper sound It's beautifully manicured fields the amount of like Americana thrown at you is like perfect They have the opening ceremonies with a team's march out and they had like a kid who an actual little eager was Participating and they hadn't seen his father was deployed overseas and then the father shows up so very emotional They have that knock that you so and the kids bunk together and you don't see them except for 20 minutes before and after every game So and then you have a few hours to hit the museum which is fantastic and you could hate it because of who's in and who's not but There's plenty of Pete Rose. There's plenty of Barry Bond stuff giant exhibits. Just no plaque. So I'm sure promise it's enjoyable but for my parent corner story so Harrison's team goes up there and he only wants to hit a home run That's that's his whole summer goal because the fence is a Cooper's town or 200 and he's used to like two twenty five two thirty So they're like having home run Derby's he and his friends on the local fields and everything and So we get to playing and we're blood. We have five pool games and we're blowing teams out and three days We have five pool games and we mercy rule four the five teams, but as we're beating these teams He's not hitting home runs and his buddies are all hitting home runs now It's like one of four kids who haven't hit home run and you know He's coming back after we greet their kids after they come out after like a 15 to 2 win He's like choking back tears because the other boys are posing with their home runs and the fathers chase the home run balls And so that everybody could pose and I'm like hey get it together like he's getting singles He's pitching well. He's making plays in the field. I'm like come on. What are you what are you doing? So hey you're waiting for your war is good Exactly, but the only negatives are hitting the home run becomes a priority and also these collectible pins So they trade these pins with the other teams everybody has a pin represented for their teams and they trade With everybody else's teams and the the barracks and the Jalen Brunson pin He's one of the few he has no negotiating skills. So no New York aggression in the kid So he ironically can't get a hold of this Jalen Brunson pin. So no Boja and Bronson Pinn hasn't hit a home run. So fast forward, we went all five full games. We're ranked six out of 102 teams. I'm like, oh man, we could really make a run here. We win the round of 32 game by 10 runs. Round the 16, we're up five won in the last inning. We make four errors over three days. We make five errors in the last inning, and they tie it up. And Harrison's one of the worst one. He boots like a hard hit ball to third just to start the rally. And everyone's devastated. Like, I want to go freaking hide behind the Peeley Reese exhibit and never come out. So I don't-- so it's the bottom of the inning. There's two out, and a kid gets a single. And they pinch run, Harrison. He's one of the faster kids on the team. I'm like, OK, this could be-- he could inadvertently score the winning run. This could be nice, whatever. We'll put a smile on his face maybe after this whole thing. First pitch comes in, he takes off. And I see he doesn't have a great jump. And I'm just watching him like, oh, shit, this could be close. He gets a second. He beats the throw by six feet. He doesn't overslide the base. The hump calls him out. And I am losing my shit. This is the Deskall, the Deskatch all over again. And I'm like, what the-- what? What are you kid? I'm like, what are you looking at up? What are you doing? I'm like, I'm mad at my coach, because he's not arguing. And Harrison's got his arms in the air. And everyone's like, oh, my god, what happened? And I'm like screaming things. I don't even know what I was like in a different dimension. I didn't even know what I was screaming. Yeah. Yeah. And that was it. And then like after like the good 20 Mississippi worth of screaming, one of the fathers elbows me is like, I think they're calling batters interference. And I look at the batter because I hadn't watched. I was just watching them. Right now. But little Dean is in the catcher's lap. So somehow he like overswong and ended up in the-- and that's why the throw didn't get them. Oh, no. In meanwhile, you've said 17 horrible things to them. You showed my hand like like I should be, they should just put me in a white jacket and zip me up. Like that's ridiculous. Like so that was it. You're the baseball parents. We were talking about earlier. It's you. It's me the whole time. And then we lose by like eight runs and extra endings. And that was that. Some some poor second base up from Utica, who's making $10 a game, just getting berated by cousin Sal. Nothing. He's like an army vet who's doing it for free. Oh, god. So that's it. So he didn't get the stale. You guys lost in Harrison, didn't get his home run or the Jalen Brunson pin. No home run, no Jalen Brunson pin. And that's it. So otherwise fantastic experience. Wow. Did he come close to home run? No. Not really. I mean, it's so funny because you end up playing different kind of baseball. It's not like a move the runner over and do this. Like everyone's just jacking it for the fence, but he got like five singles and whatever. But it was a good. Sounds like Major League Baseball. No, that's right. All right. All right. Well, I'm sorry. He didn't get a home run. Thanks for thanks for doing the use sport rankings with me. It's fun. You kids good. I can't. I want to hear. I got to hear the feedback. I really. I can't wait. I'm ready for it. Look, man. Sometimes you got to go out on a limb with content. And not everybody's going to like it. We're going to be back together. August 27th Thursday. Yeah. We're going to do. NFC first or AFC first, whatever you want, man. We usually do. We do awards too. And then do we do a thing? Well, we're going to save the awards futures. Because we're doing it a week early this year, so we can save stuff for the Sunday before. We usually do the conference that had the Super Bowl champ. So I guess we do. Which one was that? I wasn't paying attention. Oh, yeah. It was the NFC. Yeah. But I've appreciated you doing the divisions with Raheem and DeBundo and House and not really tipping your hand this year, which is something I'm doing as well. Just sitting at the table for them. They're doing a great job. Listen to that. We did the AFC. We did the AFC North on Monday and we'll be doing the South on Friday. Yeah. Last year I felt like I did all these pods in August, laying out all my opinions for the year. And then when we did our AFC NFC, everyone kind of knew who listens to the pod. Like, oh, yeah, he's talked about Denver four times. He loves Denver. Yeah. So I'm really trying to keep everything under wraps this year because I have some hard opinions and a couple of things. But I mean, I do too. Honestly. Did you write down the lines? I mean, not because people are such that, I mean, even our ringer-wise guys like really want to talk week one lines. But guys, I can't do it. I should not do it. We're four weeks away now. Should we mail each other lines and then have like a point and a half leeway with the line or something? Maybe we should. I mean, I told you I already saw this. Yeah. I don't know in the line, unfortunately. So I know what that is. Yeah. Patriots getting 10, right? Yeah. Well, it's weird. The exact same line as the Super Bowl, which I was not expecting because usually there's a bump for the home team. But yeah, we might have to have maybe this weekend. We have to mail each other. The Hall of Fame game, seven plus million people watched. I know. And it was the most bet on game more than like any baseball WNBA if you could know, I believe that. I lost. I had a teaser and I lost. You had a teaser and you lost this 32 points. I bet the under on the teaser. Of course, you have to bet the under, what are they going to show? And there was like 32 points in the second quarter. I've been watching enough WNBA to have actual opinions on when we get to the playoffs. Yeah. Really? Yeah. I've been watching. I've actually been getting into it. The league's the best entertainment wise that's ever been. I'm not talking about. Is that really going to make it to the playoffs? It might have a walk out before the playoffs, but like the fever beat the shit out of New York last night and I texted Ruko and he actually said it on the air because Ruko was doing the thing. I was like, this is like watching Nash's sons like Indiana is like, they're just balls to the wall. Like every time they get a rebound, even off makes, they're just going and they have these two great guards and they're like really good. I don't, I think you can make a real case. They can win the title. It's them Minnesota or Vegas. I think are the three. I don't think anybody else, but houses, mystics are getting a little frisky. Yeah. I'm running on the links. I seem to bet them every night when they're favored by 12 on the money line, parley. The ball with them. Yeah. If you like the links at home, just do the over with the links, but they're playing really well, though. I think it's going to be a fun playoffs that will of course be screwed up schedule wise as they try to go against football for some reason. And then I'll end up watching all this and then missing the key game in the finals because I'm watching fucking Cincinnati against Dallas. Yeah. Basketball is your number five. Unbelievable. By the way, speaking of Dallas, some cowboys buzz like I think there's going to be some smart people who are going to pick them to win NFC. Yeah. Some dumb people too, probably, but yeah, the knockstar, they're training with the Rams and then at the end, they're doing wind sprints and they're like, come on. Let's do them with us and the Rams like, nah, we're good. We're better than you. We don't need to do this. I kind of lie. I like the vibe a little bit. They have some blue chippers. Mm-hmm. Team's pretty good. That'd be amazing. I mean, we're superl, it's in LA this year, right? Yeah. It's here. I wonder if the Lakers will sell down the podcast from there. We're going to have to do the last one from there. You know, we talked about, I think we might actually do our Super Bowl podcast from, from SoFi. Does that make sense? I think they offered it to us. Yeah. Yeah, we got to do that. Good times. I don't mean it. Great to see you. Thanks for doing this with me. I'll let you know what the feedback is or if I get threatened by any gymnast experience or anything. Pleasure as always. Good job, are you? Can't wait. Good job by you, buddy. All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Cousin Sal. Thanks to Gihau and Eduardo as well. Don't forget, rewatchables, Italian jobs up about last night coming Thursday night. And then the re-speed on Monday, so this podcast will come back on Sunday. Stay tuned for that and enjoy the rest of the week. Thank you. Thank you. Most be 21 plus and president select states for Kansas in affiliation with Kansas star Cucino or 18 plus and president DC Kentucky or Wyoming game prom call 100 gamble or 1 800 by reset call 888 797777 or visit ccpg.org/chat and Connecticut or mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland. Hope is here. Visit gambling helpline ma.org or call 800 327 50 50 for 24 seven sport Massachusetts or call 877 8 hope and why or text hope and why in New York for Louisiana call 877 770 7867.