Go watch what he did with Jake Browning last year. Tee Higgins is fucking great. They were going to Tee Higgins on every big play against Minnesota on that Saturday game. And like Higgins is a true number one. And if they can get both those guys back, great. Back to Darnold really quick. If you're Minnesota and they're not franchise-typing, you're going to let them hit the market. Okay, what does it say to J.J. McCarthy if you do bring him back on a $25 to $30 million contract? Does it tell the rest of the league that J.J. McCarthy were not... This is the bind with Minnesota. They don't know what they have in J.J. McCarthy. And you could read all the positive press. Like they don't know what they have in J.J. McCarthy. He was injured all last year. He was on the sidelines. Like they haven't seen him play.

So it's not like they know. If you take a guy in the top 10, he's got to be your quarterback. Okay.

So you let, you let Darnold walk out the door. You don't you don't say let's try to two for 35 yeah do

you have it out after one year like one of those type of

deals and if you're darnel you know you played your best football with kevin o'connell let me do it one more year and then i then i can maybe break the bank like i think i think they're gonna make a very concerted effort i'm darned i'm

like by the way i had COVID those last two games. Sorry. Sorry, guys. I can't believe you guys didn't get sick.

Why'd you make me play? Should

it make me nervous that the Pats are probably going to spend on Ronnie Stanley? Because I still don't understand why the Ravens would let Ronnie Stanley go as their left tackle?

Because the Ravens have a different salary cap situation and different team. Okay, good. I'm not nervous. Thank you. I mean, if I'm the Patriots, I'm looking at Zach Vaughn, if the Eagles let him out. I'm looking at Josh Sweat. I'm looking at Milton Williams. They

said they didn't like Josh Sweat. I think Vaughn is a real possibility, though.

Vaughn would be great, and Sweat is good, and Milton Williams is good. The other name, I don't know if, Nick Bolton from the Chiefs, like unbelievable linebacker. Is he available? Oh, he's, they can get Nick Bolton. I mean, it's Robert Spillane. Like these are like real

names that can add to this team. Well, the move is what you, what the commanders did last year. Getting those guys that weren't the A-list guys, but they were like, it's almost like the White Lotus cast strategy. No doubt. It's like, we're going to get Carrie Coon. Bring me Carrie Coon. She's a really good actress. Yeah, Carrie Coon's a really good actress. Washington just went out and got like nine Carrie Coons. Yeah, so that makes

Zach Ertz here. Patrick Schwarzenegger? I think so. Yeah, maybe it does. Austin Eckler starring as Leslie Bibb. Yeah, Austin

Eckler is Greg Gary, the evil

guy. I

mean, that guy's been in

all three seasons and I mean, just consistently doesn't say a word on the episodes. Just look at the camera.

He has that and he was the drug dealer in 90210. He's got one of the great IMDb's of all time. Yeah, he got Dylan hooked on drugs. Khalil Mack, what are the Chargers doing? Bosa and

Mack? Yeah, a bloated salary. They could. They could. We'll see. That's why I'm not like, I want to wait and see on that. And this is also Joe Hortiz who comes from the Ravens. It's his first real offseason. Last year he was the GM and they drafted well. But like this is now you got to, you know, it's time to make some decisions that might not be as easy as just

drafting and signing players.

Last

question. Houston is the most interesting offseason team to me because I don't know how far away they are from being impactful. I thought they were in the mix last year, especially if you look back at how the season went, how they were able to play against the Chiefs defensively, What they were missing feels easy to add. I like their coaching staff. I like their division. They're in a great division. That could easily be like a 14-3 team next year. You

were high on them last year. I was. They had bad luck. No, they finished strong. I know, but Diggs got hurt.

They lost two receivers by the time we got to

the playoffs. Diggs will be a free agent. Like he's going to be gone. Okay. What was really interesting to me was Bobby Sloick was one of the offensive masterminds interviewing for head coaching jobs two years ago after they had this great successful season, they didn't think they got enough out of the offense. They fire their offensive coordinator and then they go to the Rams and they get Nick Caley, who was a wonder kind under Sean McVay. They bring Caley in. And they also with this offense, like they didn't have, like you said, Stefan Diggs, they didn't have Tank Dell in the last few weeks of the season. And they still in that Chiefs game, move the ball up and down the field. If they don't have two botched special teams plays and a block kick and get sacked eight times. They're in that game.

In retrospect, that was the red flag game for the Super Bowl, looking back, as I still continue to kick myself for not just having the balls take Philly. You've mentioned this on quite a few pods. That Houston game was a bad sign for the Chiefs. That they hung around like they did with the, I don't know. Blocked

field goals, muffed kickoffs. Like they got everything from the Texans and they couldn't put them away until the very end. So there was some red flags there.

But what are you going to do?

I didn't bet, but I picked the Chiefs to win in that Super Bowl too. And I've heard from Philly fans the entire last month. So it's all good.

We have to go. I have to go talk to Wesley Morris about the Oscars. Oscars.

Can I tell you? Probably have not seen any of these movies. Now I'll go see one of them. I'll go see Nora.

Great move. Nora's good. You should see Nora. Is it good? Yeah. Schraggs, we'll talk to you before the draft. Great to see you as always. You're the man, Bill. Thank you. My old longtime friend, Wesley Morris is here. We used to work together at Grantland. He's at the New York Times. Did not talk to him right before the Oscars. Although we talked a couple months ago, we were waiting until after the Oscars, which was a very strange Oscars and was dominated by a movie called Anora. Chalamet is not, I did like Anora. Chalamet did not win. Demi Moore did not win. I'm going to start here and we haven't talked we've only texted a little bit i was so happy mikey madison won i thought that was the best performance of any movie i saw and i did not see the brutalist yet um but i thought she was awesome and this whole sometimes this will happen in sports too where they'll just decide well demie moore she's been waiting forever she's got to win. And that was an important movie. And I was just like, what the fuck? Like, Mikey Madison should win. Now, do you agree or disagree with that? Because I feel like you might disagree. Well,

okay. I disagree with everything. I think, okay. First of all, I just want to be clear. I, I have no deep visceral problem with Mikey Madison winning. I actually was, I was happy for the surprise of it. Um, of those five nominees, I wasn't terribly excited about. I loved Fernanda Torres and I'm still here. I think that Demi Moore, we can talk about what Demi Moore is doing in the substance that I think made her deserving of an Oscar. But my two favorite performances are two of my very favorite performances from last year. Their movies got no nominations. And I just was kind of like this. There needs to be an asterisk next to this, next to these five nominees. Who were the two performances? Nicole Kidman in Baby Girl.

Yeah, she was really good in that. I can't believe she didn't get nominated actually

for that. That is one of the greatest, I mean, this is true of Nicole Kidman in general in the last like 15 years, but that performance in baby girl is one of the greatest feats of psychological acting I have ever seen. I don't know how you I'm, I'm not an actor and, um, I don't know how you simulate any of the things that Nicole Kidman, uh, was asked to do. Um, and Harris Dickman, or is it, is it Harris Dixon, Dickinson? Um,

Dickinson, I think he, he

is also great. That is, that is one of the top, that's his performance is one of the top five performances I saw last year. Um,

would that have been supporting actor for you or actor?

I can live with supporting. We can talk about category fraud too. Yeah. Because two of our winners, total category fraudsters. And I, anyway, I think that Mikey Madison is good in that movie. Yeah. My problem with the performance is only that the four guys she is working with in this film are extraordinary. All four of those guys is great. And all four of those guys are great. And, you know, Joroborislav, I'm so out of practice with these names. I'm going to get some of them wrong. But, you know, to single him out is right because, you know, he's got the scene at the end in the car, which is which is her great moment as an actor, too, in this movie. I like Inora. I like it. I like it more than fine, but I don't love it. That's

how I felt. I

think that I'd be curious to hear you talk about what you love about Mikey Madison so much. I

thought it was a very strange movie year. I didn't feel like a lot of stuff jumped out. And I, you know, we always talk about how it's a little bit like sports where you look back years later and like, Oh, what was that year? Oh, that was the year Nora won all this stuff. Um, I just thought I didn't know her really at all other than TV stuff. And, um, you know, she was once

upon a time and working

actress. She was like the 11th person and once upon a time in Hollywood. Um, I just felt like I liked those movies sometimes where it's just like, Oh, this person's a star. I'm watching her become a star during the movie. I thought it was a pretty, pretty out there performance. It's a crazy movie that I think has some flaws, which we talked about in the past. But I just thought it was a really like memorable performance, which, but I also felt that way about Nicole Kidman. If she had won in that category of her, I still wouldn't have agreed, but I would have understood it. Here's what I'll say about Demi Moore. There's

a shot at the beginning or toward the beginning of this film where she has left the set of her aerobics instruction uh show her big hit uh fitness show she's going to the bathroom and on our on our walk from the studio i believe or maybe the executives i don't exactly know what where the hallway is going to and leading i know it's going to the bathroom but anyway there are all of these photos of various versions of Elizabeth Sparkle, Demi Moore's character in The Substance, on the wall. And they're all from different periods of this character's life. And I just felt like I was also watching the Hall of Demi Moore. And it's like all those portraits correspond at least, at least in my brain, they corresponded to some moment in Demi Moore's cultural life and her movie star life. And then she gets to the bathroom and I believe there's like somebody's cleaning the women's room. So what does she have to do? She goes into the men's bathroom. That is the Demi Moore's shot or sequence maybe ever. And this movie is so dialed in in its way because it's not about America. It's not about it's like set in a kind of fictionalized Hollywood. of Europeanification and the sort of the ways in which non-American filmmakers and ideas have officially made an inexorable mark on the Academy Awards and the Academy itself. It's just not going anywhere anytime soon. So we have to think about what the Oscars even are going forward. But anyway, this movie me, and when she gets into the bathroom, you have the Dennis Quaid character in the bathroom talking about how over the hill Demi Moore is as an actress. Or, you know, Elizabeth Sparkle is as an actress. And I, from that sequence forward, this movie was as much about the actor playing this part as it was about the character she's playing. And the total, I have never seen, to me, Moore is committed to a lot of parts. I mean, G.I. Jane being maybe the ultimate, striptease being an ultimate part commitment. She's never been the strongest line reader. She's never been the most convincing when her, when, when she has to hit an upper register, like anger is not something like verbal anger, verbally expressed anger, but she can make her face twitch. Her eyes can do that. Like, um, you know, like they're, yeah, they're, they're like sizzling a little bit when she's, when she's suffering. Um, and, but her lower register, you know, you know, suck my dick. That line in G.I I mean, she can sell those lower register rages. But this was something new for me with Demi Moore, where like her physical commitment to the part had emotional stakes.

So you're bringing in your 40 plus year history with her movies and that became part of the performance for you. Uh,

yes. And I think that that might have fair. I get it. But if you're, I'm sorry, if you're my history. Yeah. But can I just real quick, like if you're an Iranian voter, do you care about 40 years? You don't, you're just doing best performance, which is- Right, right, right.

I went back to be more in General Hospital because I was watching General Hospital in the early 80s. That's where she broke in. Yep. Was with her through the Brad Pack years. It was amazing to watch her. It felt like she fizzled out and then became a big star. I think she was really underrated. Like we did Disclosure for Rewatchable. She's just great in that movie. She's just a 10 out of 10 smoking hot, incredibly confident, but I swear to God, I think the best scene of her entire career, you're going to laugh. And this is one of my, one of my takes that I'll probably take shit for it. I don't really care.

You're you, you're used to it. Go on. When, when

Rob Lowe breaks up with her in about last night oh and he says he doesn't love her anymore i honestly think that's the best acting moment of her career the way and apparently he ad-libbed it and it wasn't in there but the way she reacts to it you could just see it go through her entire body. I think she's had some really great acting moments over

the years. I was just about to say, Bill, there's so many moments like

that in her career. G.I. Jane's another one. Disclosure's like that. I think she's good in Ghost. I think in St. Elmo's Fire, she has a couple moments where you're like, I would run through fiery hell to get this girl to like me, right? Yeah. And she's a one-on where I don't even know. There's a little Kathleen Turner in there just because of her voice. um, she was drop dead beautiful in the eighties and then kind of transformed over the nineties. So we've been there the whole time with her. Um, but I, part of what I thought was interesting about this movie, cause you're right. It's a career retrospective of her. I actually feel her career should have been better. I think she could have made better movie choices when she had her peak. Like you think about even like making a movie like Striptease. That was like a paycheck movie. That's like what we get mad at some actors doing. Right. But that Striptease, wait, let's go back to 1990s. That's like, I want to work with my husband. That movie sucks. I don't like that movie.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, that movie sucks. You're throwing too much at me. I know, I am. You're throwing too much at me. Hold it, wait. Let's go back to Strip Teens. It, it, that movie was more than a paycheck movie. Like, it was, I believe, well, it did pay her a lot if memory serves. She became

the biggest, biggest contract. That was the biggest salary anyone made in Hollywood.

But it was also at the peak of her demeanedness, right? She had a great 1990s. She had, I mean, she was a top five box office draw. She was in Indecent Proposal. She's good in Indecent Proposal. I'm

not arguing the success. I just wish there were a couple awesome movies in there where she was going for an Oscar. And I don't think that was even on the radar for her.

I don't think she had that in her is the thing.

Like think about the Scarlet Letter. So that's where we disagree. I think I think she had it in her. You what do you think? I do. Because it's not like she didn't get the right part. What if she was the what if she was the prostitute and Leaving Las Vegas instead of Elizabeth Shue? You wouldn't have been that. Probably too

old. It wouldn't. No, she's too.

I mean, too old when they made that movie.

No, no. I think that that's not it. Because I bet you she and Elizabeth Shue are the same age. I think. Yeah, you're right. They probably are. I think that Demi Moore. And this is why she's so good in Ghost by the way I think that she presents as invulnerable right she's I mean her whole her whole thing when she became a real major movie star where people were paying money to see movies she was in was just about her toughness right I mean she's often the only woman in these movies. A few good men, she's the woman. Well,

that's her worst part.

It's her worst part. And maybe like her worst piece of acting because she's kind of seemed secondary to everybody else's priorities. And so, you know, Rob Reiner is a great director of actors. So I don't know what his side is.

Part of the problem is the mid 90s did not have a lot of great female parts. If you go back, even you look at you go back and look at the Oscars during some of those stretches. Like, could she have been Sharon Stellan's part in casino?

No. You

don't think so?

Why? I mean, I'm sure that, I mean, I can't say no. I definitely would have loved to have seen her play the part. I don't have an argument for why she couldn't have done it. Like, yeah, like cast her into Casino. I thought you were going to go with Basic Instinct, which

she really could have been too famous for. But she could have she could have been one of the disclosure was basically her basic instinct. Could she have been Annette Bening in American Beauty?

No. No.

So you think she's more limited than I do? I think I feel like there was more there. She also got married to Bruce Willis. They became a giant celebrity couple and they had three kids. So that probably hurt the output of movies she was making at some

point. This is why I want to go back to Mortal Thoughts. Because it's a great combination of the thing I'm identifying about her that I like, which is the strength with these pockets of vulnerability.

You

don't believe, and the thing about Mortal Thoughts is it's two women, Glenn Headley's the other woman, because Glenn Headley used to be a thing. Right. And a wonderful actress. The two of them in that movie are wonderful. She stuck with

Mr. Holland, even after he almost ran away with a 17-year Still stayed there with him.

Yeah, did it. Did it all. And this movie, Immortal Thoughts, I think is it Alan Rudolph directed this movie? Yeah. From 1991.

It's a Tubi classic. Tubi just is always trying to get me to rewatch it. I'm like, no, Tubi. No, not biting.

Bill, I fell for it.

You did? Tubi sucked you in? I have fairly recently watched. Tubi was like, just throwing the fishing rod at you. I

rewatched it. And there's more going on. It does not ultimately work because it's structurally, it should just go chronologically and shouldn't do all the sort of jumping around in time that it does um and but to me more we

don't have to spend 10 minutes on mortal thoughts there's

a struggle in here i know i'm just thinking through like what what is what worked for me and what the surprise was with respect to me more like there's a struggle in her, I think, as an actor where she's trying to figure out. Like what the what how to modulate the the shell that she sort of moves through movies with. And in a movie like Mortal Thoughts, I mean, some of what's required for that part, she's plays. She's playing a woman being abused by her husband. They conspire to kill him. I think I'm getting this right. Yeah. They conspire to kill him. She and Glenn Headley. And then they spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out how to get away with

murder. It's like a bad thumb and Louise.

It's, Oh, Whoa. You know, it's crazy. It's yes. And it came around right

around the same time. Yeah.

Um, and that was movie didn't work also because you don't believe them as New Jersey housewives or whatever. Oh, that way they had

their accents. Bruce Willis had a crazy facial hair thing going. It's like, come on, Bruce Willis. So what was your favorite Demi Moore performance before this movie? What was your number one? Because my favorites, I loved her in About Last Night, as you know, I think is the first modern rom-com. But I thought she was great in that. I thought she was great in Disclosure. I think she's great in Ghost. I

listen to you guys talk about Disclosure.

You don't like Disclosure. I don't

like that. I don't like it. I don't think she's good. It's not a good use of Demi Moore. I liked it. If you're just making

a random movie and you're just showing up for 11 days of shooting, it's it's a good one i

mean three straight guys talking about disclosure is just that was part of the gimmick i know it just was like i'm

like there needs to be she's go she's really good though ghost

i think is is the number one. That movie was a monster movie. Number one answer. Because that movie is, like, not so secretly strange, right? It's not just the supernatural parts. Well,

it taught us what happens when you go to hell. Goblins come out of the street and they pull you down. They shadow goblins and that's it. You're fucking in hell from that point on. They have the code. But

I also love what she and Whoopi Goldberg get up to. Yeah, they have great scenes. I love her disbelief that the thing that she's being told is happening is happening to her. I believe her as a woman named Molly, which, you know, that's a huge... That's a big deal. Yeah. And I just think that that movie is so, it's so much about Demi Moore's character and the movie's about her. And there's just, she's so soft in that movie. And the moments in which she has to, like, put a shield over herself, they work because you understand the movie has given you enough of this, like, this vulnerable, you know, woman who just doesn't believe that this magical thing that is about, that's about to happen to her, is really going to happen. I just think it's a, I mean, it's strange because in 1990, who were your best actress nominees? Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Joanne Woodward, Kathy Bates, who won, and Angelica Houston, I want to say, for the grifters. I mean, it's not like she was remiss. I mean, Julia Roberts took the movie star part, the movie star nomination

for those five people. Roberts, yeah, you had the five. That was impressive.

I

don't know. That was a loaded year. Jesus Christ. I mean, any one of those people could have won Best Actress. Holy shit. And then the next year was loaded, too. And then in the mid-90s. Nothing will top her turning on the lights in about last night because I think we've been in the dark long enough.

Oh wow.

That movie has some growner lines.