1-3-24 After Hours with Amy Lawrence PODCAST: Hour 1

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Call 562-314-4603 for complete details. Hey, hey! How did you do? Your first day, for a lot of you. Your first day back to work? First day back to school?

If you're in one of those places where school started right up again, the 2nd of January, I hope you survived. I gotta tell ya, I did not wait until last night to get back on the radio. This is our third show of the week. It's actually our hump show, middle show of the work week. But I know I was hearing it from some neighbors and friends, and now is what they were telling me, trying to get back into that familiar routine post-holidays. I also got at least one text from a friend who, a college friend of mine, who said she is desperate to get back to being healthy.

And I feel that. After the holidays where cookies were everywhere and sweets were everywhere, we still in my house, crazy as it is right now, have moose munch and cookies in the freezer and even cupcakes left over from the wedding. Now those are frozen. Bob and I are going to eat those on various anniversaries. So we did bring some home on purpose. But there are still so many sweets everywhere. Candy, all kinds of stuff that we just can't, at this point we cannot eat anymore.

We gave ourselves the week between Christmas and New Years to eat whatever desserts we wanted. But it dawned on me today, I have not done actual exercise in three weeks. Now we were moving boxes, packing a house, loading and unloading trailers and vehicles. There certainly has been activity, meaning we went kayaking while we were on our little mini-moon, we went horseback riding, we also hiked 8 miles. I guess we did get some exercise, but to actually go running or ride my bike or lift weights, yeah I haven't done push-ups in three weeks.

Well I get married and it all goes to hell. Anyway, so yeah, for those of you who went back to work or school on Tuesday, January 2nd, maybe you're feeling the same thing. It is time. I was out of my routine for too long and it is time.

But yeah, around the holidays, end of the year, if you stockpiled vacation, or you were away, or you traveled, or maybe you stayed home and had people travel to you, like Producer J's family. It is tough after an extended period to get back into that routine that can be so helpful to us, right? It helps us to stay healthy, healthier.

Obviously if we work, we need that job and that paycheck to make sure our bills are covered. The routine is good. It's almost like when you go bowling and there are the bumpers on either side, for those people who are not relatively skilled at bowling, there are bumpers that keep your ball out of the gutters. And I feel like that's what this week is about. The bumpers are back up on the bowling lanes and it's time to get serious again about our routines. Being healthy, getting back to work, that was the case for Bob on Tuesday. Now, I would like to say that I'm back into my familiar routine, but not yet, for a couple reasons.

Number one, I haven't yet slept a full day since getting back on the overnights and there's just been a lot of chaos with the house and three pets. So, we are trying to not be too hard on ourselves. Actually, it's me. Bob's not hard on me or on himself. It's me. I put so much pressure on myself looking around the house and there's boxes and piles and stuff everywhere.

And so, I'm doing my breathing as much as possible. But really, that's not why I didn't sleep on Tuesday. Penny had to go to the vet. Guess what?

Guess what Texas gifted us for the wedding? Penny has fleas. My poor dog. I do not know what else could possibly happen to that dog. So, we went to the vet on Tuesday and we were there for an hour and a half. It was the longest vet appointment I've ever been to. They did an x-ray. They did blood work.

Yes, it cost me an arm and a leg and this year I didn't have my fantasy football winnings to pay for it. Anyway, they were giving her an exam because Penny does have melanoma. She has cancer and they're not sure where it spread and they wanted to do a full exam regarding her lymph nodes and her lungs and then also because she's diabetic and has been two years on insulin, they were testing her blood sugar. So, all of that to say, we were at the vet for a really long time.

One of the techs was in the room with me and Penny and the doctor. And as she leaves the room after helping the doctor with the exam, she comes back right away and says, look what I found. And there's a flea on her finger. And then the flea's alive, by the way, so the flea somehow bounds away and she doesn't know where it went.

She couldn't even kill it. Anyway, we weren't sure if that came from Penny or it came from another dog because it was a really busy day at the vet and so there were a lot of dogs barking and having a grand old time out in the waiting room. So, the way, and I didn't know this, but the way they do it is they start combing the dog. Now, Penny has pretty thick hair, so they start combing the dog to see if there's any flea dust because that's how you know. It's a little bit like mice poop. When you see mice poop or flea dust in your house, you know you have a problem. Anyway, it took them quite a while, but they did eventually find some flea dust on Penny. So, the fleas came from Penny. Like a dummy, when I left for Texas on December 13th, it never dawned on me that in Texas the fleas are still very much active because they don't have, well at least where my mom lives, they hadn't had a hard freeze.

There's still plenty of bugs. I don't treat Penny during the winter in the Northeast because there's no need to. There's no fleas. And so, it never dawned on me to treat her when we were leaving for Texas, so that's my faux pas. She went on wedding day. She was not with me. She went to a local, it's like a mini ranch of sorts, and the owners take care of various dogs, including my mom's dog.

And so, Penny was there with Gracie, and the two of them were running around having a grand old time. Well, I'm sure all those other dogs were treated for fleas, but not Penny. So, apparently poor Sweet Pen came back from Texas with fleas. Yeah, that sets off a whole chain reaction of events because Sugar has never been treated for fleas.

She never goes outside. And I only have one cat now, so I don't treat her. So, I had to right away order Frontline for the dog and the cat, and thankfully our newest dog, well the newest dog in the household, is treated. Who knows whether or not the fleas are in the house. We haven't seen any dust, and I guess the case that Penny has is not real serious.

They were able to treat her right away, so maybe it hasn't turned into a flea infestation, but if it has, that's going to make this whole moving in process a whole lot more complicated. You want to see me reduced to tears on the air? That might be it.

That might be what does it. Anyway, all that to say, welcome to 2024. Happy New Year to me. Thank you, Penny.

I'm in a glass case of emotion! Thank you. Yeah, I hadn't even seen her scratching at all, or biting, until just yesterday. I saw her nibbling on her arm, or her, you know, like not her paw, but like up behind her ankle. And I thought, that's weird, she never does that. But again, still never dawned on me, because, yeah, she never had fleas. Ever.

And Sugar never has either. And, oh dear. Please, please just send us all of your flea prayers. Now will a flea move on an animal when it's there?

Like you said she was scratching at her paw area. Does it stay in that area? Will the next day will it move out the body?

Yeah, it can jump on and jump off. You know, so fleas are obviously very adept at leaping and jumping. And so it could, yeah, usually fleas multiply pretty quickly, that's the issue. So, right, maybe she got that flea, or maybe she was just scratching because it itched right there. It did take, like I said, it took a minute for them to find another flea or signs of fleas on Penny. So they weren't sure initially that it was her, but they did find some. But I haven't noticed her scratching, I haven't noticed her biting, except for that one time yesterday. So maybe they caught it before it got to be too bad. The issue, of course, is that, like I said, there's other pets in the house and Sugar is not treated. So they did give Penny a quick dosage of something something to be able to kill what was on her. And then they also put a front line on her just to make sure that she was treated.

So that was something I was not prepared for. The good news is there's no sign that the cancer has spread to her lungs or her lymph nodes. So, yeah, my tank of a dog is still chugging along. Poor thing.

Can you imagine, at 14 years old, my dog has fleas for the first time. She just wants to relax. Poor thing. She was so tired when we got home, too, because, as I say, between the car ride and the actual appointment, it was a two hour odyssey.

And that's way too much for Pen. Not to mention, she was not interested in getting into the car again. Right. She just went on that 18 hour car ride. She crushed it, by the way.

Well, she did. Yeah. Round trip. 3400 miles.

So, right. So she she's a road trip pro. But I tell you, by the end, she was not ready.

She was done or just not ready to ever see a car again. Poor thing. Yeah. So it wasn't really a Tuesday that was typical. And it really wasn't about me.

It was more about Pen. But yeah. Thank you, Texas. I'm a terrible dog mom. It's after hours. That's not your fault. Well, I mean, I didn't put the flea on her, but I also didn't prevent her from getting them.

I left her exposed, Jay! Well, like you said, there would be no reason for a flea to ever be where she normally is at this time. It was a freak thing. That's true. It was a freak thing. But I just it could have been prevented. I just never thought of it.

You know, I would have never thought of that either. Well, good thing Moose doesn't travel. No, Moose doesn't go too far. Tried to take him on a walk last night. He did not even want to go. It was too cold.

Doesn't even even when it's warm. But even last night, he was by the door, by the door. He wants to go out. He wants to go out.

All right, Moose, let's go out. Take him outside. Open the door. He stares at me like, what are you doing? I'm like, you're the one who's by the door who wants to go out.

I don't know. Is this front door or back door? This was the front door. I was going to take him on like an actual real walk down the street. That would have been really nice of you.

He looked like he wanted to go. I was, you know, hanging out. I was like, all right, Moose, I'll take you. Let's go. Looks at me. He goes, what?

Stop. What are you doing? So he's worn out for the holidays, too. Didn't you have other visitors, family members with dogs? And so Moose was just running around with other dogs.

And I thought of you actually. Now, it wasn't an English bulldog, but when I first got into the waiting room at the vet, there was a, it was a French bulldog. And he probably peed all over the floor.

Like, as in, it was enormous. I don't know. He was nervous. But like normally dogs that are nervous, they piddle.

They don't. I mean, he, he started a flood in the waiting room. And the poor, the poor. So it was an older couple that owned him. And the man just kept apologizing. Like, I'll clean it up.

I'll clean it up. And the vet tech's like, no, we got it. It happens all the time. We've seen this before. Right.

We were prepared for this. Don't worry. I would do the same.

I'd be like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I'm so embarrassed. I'm so embarrassed. Give me some paper towels.

Yes. So as I say, it was an afternoon at the vet. There was no sleeping after that because I had to drink coffee just to get to the vet. And poor Penn, she's a disaster. But still wags her tail, still loves her mama, still goes on her walks and still eats everything in sight. She's lost three more pounds, which is crazy because she eats a lot. But that's part and parcel with the diabetes. So they're keeping their eyes on everything related to Penny and all of her biometric chemical systems.

Just mostly she could survive anything. Absolutely anything. It's After Hours with Amy Lawrence here on CBS Sports Radio. We have a programming announcement.

Are you ready for this? And I will put this on Twitter, A Law Radio, as well as on our Facebook page. After Hours with Amy Lawrence. At some point we'll do this. Coming up on the next edition of After Hours, the wedding story. Wedding weekend.

You all have asked. We've put it off for a couple of reasons. Number one, I didn't want to tell the stories without producer Jay here. So now that he and I are back and there's no significant humongous football games on Wednesday evening, we will do a good portion of tomorrow night's show.

So Wednesday night into Thursday morning about the wedding. Also, we were thinking that Marco Bolletti was supposed to be back tonight, but he's not here. So we're not sure if he got moved to another show.

Sometimes that happens if someone's sick. Marco is the first person who moves or if he ended up needing another night off. We don't exactly know what happened to Marco.

Some of you who listen to CBS Sports Radio on an hourly basis. Well, you may know what happened to Marco if you heard him earlier in the daytime on Tuesday. But we do not know what happened to him.

So for that reason, we're waiting. We're hoping that Marco will be with us on After Hours tomorrow so that he can be part of the story as well. Because as a longtime friend of mine, Marco and I have been working together since the network began over a decade ago. He and I are friends and he's invested like I've been invested in the birth of his kiddos. So we really root for one another and support one another. And I don't want to tell the stories without him because he always has some side commentary.

He's the peanut gallery, if you will. So anyway, we will use tomorrow night show to share the stories from wedding weekend. Now, here's the thing. I am not. I am not. Is naive the right word? Probably not. I am not dumb enough to believe.

That's also not the right word. I recognize that we'll just we'll start over fresh. I recognize that not every one of you listening cares about my personal life.

I understand that many of you. Couldn't care less that I got married. Don't have any interest in hearing the stories. And that is OK with me.

I do not need you to be invested in my personal life. If all you care about is hearing me talk about sports. Great.

This is your fair warning so that you can find some other outlet for your sports talk. Come this time tomorrow. Will we do the entire show for hours on the wedding? No. But will we spend half the show on the wedding?

That's a distinct possibility. And I am only offering this again for people who don't want to hear it. I'm just I'm letting you know. Spoiler alert. I'm letting you know that tomorrow night is wedding night. But I'm also letting the rest of you know because the questions have persisted.

Right. So many of you want to hear about the wedding. You want to hear the stories about the travel, the family. Some of the different elements that I teased in our Ask Amy videos on our YouTube channel.

In fact, I keep getting questions about the song that I used to walk down the aisle. And so there are some great stories that I want to share that I've had to hold back on because I didn't want to give away too many details before we actually went through with the ceremony and the reception. Here's the fun part. The things that went wrong. Oh, dear.

Did things go wrong? Let me just tell you. And so I laugh when people. Well, I laugh now because before the wedding, people said to me, you won't remember anything.

It'll be a total blur. Well, I wish there were some things that I could forget. Anyway, so the important things were perfect. OK, so our priorities at the wedding were things like the flowers, which despite the delay courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service and despite the time crunch, the flowers were absolutely perfect. In fact, they're now in the house, in our house.

We brought them back with us to New Jersey. The family and friends portion of the wedding, meaning the people that we wanted to be there, that made the celebration more than we could have asked for. It was full of joy and it was so much fun to celebrate with the people that we love the most. However, there are some very interesting stories and aspects of the wedding weekend that I wasn't expecting.

Number one and number two that I think you will find amusing. So this time tomorrow. It's the wedding show. Tell your friends or warn your friends to stay away because you couldn't care less. I am not offended by that. I recognize that many of you, you just want to hear about football. Great. Well, we'll get back to football on Thursday night. By the way, there is no Thursday night football this week. And so we'll be talking about games that will kick off on Saturday and then Sunday week 18 wraps up. We'll have the full playoff picture by Sunday night.

And obviously Monday is the college football national championship between Michigan and Washington. So we do a huge football weekend coming up and we are going to talk about it, obviously going to talk about it after the fact. But again, many of you have asked.

I want to make sure that I share the stories with you because I think you will find them entertaining. And also because many of you are invested in my personal life from Grammy, Helen, to my nieces, to my mom and her husband. And now obviously this odyssey of ask Amy walks down the aisle. And so that's going to come up tomorrow night. Now we do have our first 2024 edition of asking me anything for tonight's show.

Not about the wedding. Please don't feel obligated. But you can send your questions to our show Twitter after hours CBS or my Twitter and then also to our Facebook page. Our phone number, by the way, for whatever reason, we've been fielding a lot more phone calls over the past couple of while going back to last week when I returned. And then even earlier this week, we'd love to hear from you. 855-212-4227.

That's 855-212-4CBS. Producer Jay actually said to me, should we take questions during the wedding show? And so I'm going to leave that up to Jay because he's the one who will have to field the questions and pass the questions along or decide if the questions should be via phone calls.

So have you thought more about that? I would like to take a couple of phone calls if they're deemed worthy, I think, if they can get on. That'd be fun. Who deems them? I guess it would be me. It would be you.

You are the gatekeeper. So I'll take that task on. All right. All right. So producer Jay is saying that come tomorrow night for the wedding show if he believes that the calls are worthy. That's his word of being on the air and the questions are interesting and unique, then he may in fact allow you to join us on the air and to ask a few wedding questions.

All right. So that's coming up tomorrow night. Again, it's fair warning for those of you who don't give a crap. But for those of you who have been anxiously awaiting, as you've told me, tomorrow night is the wedding show and we will, of course, repeat this announcement. We'll put it on blast. Repeat this announcement over the course of the hump show.

In the meantime, send your questions to Twitter and Facebook and then our phone number as well. Good. It's good to have you with us. I. Yeah, I'm feeling a little bit upside down. Just getting back into a full work week.

Maybe you are now as well. So we will navigate it together here on After Hours with Amy Lawrence, CBS Sports. At Hyundai USA dot com call 562-314-4603 for complete details. Says here that Graybar is a distributor. Yeah, we support electrical and data com projects all over the country. So you can get me the products I need, where and when I need them. Yeah, thanks to our national logistics network. Any industry? Yeah, construction, industrial plants, schools, hospitals. So you could say Graybar is much more than a distributor. Yeah, you could say that. When you need a hand powering, connecting or maintaining your operations, join the thousands of professionals who rely on Graybar to help keep them up and running.

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Get six times longer lasting freshness, plus odor protection with Downey Unstoppables in Washington. You are listening to the After Hours podcast. Getting you to the good half of your week. It's The Hulk Show on After Hours. We still have no idea what's happened to Marco. We hope that he is OK. He's got a bunch of kiddos who've been going through some some different health challenges.

And for that reason, the household has been struggling with infections and viruses and not feeling well. And so I hope that's not the case over the holidays, but that we will see him very soon. It's After Hours with Amy Lawrence on CBS Sports Radio, on Twitter, A Law Radio, also on our Facebook page named after the show. If you've never found our YouTube channel, that's easy to do as well. And we're glad to have you with us on this middle show of the work week, which means you get to ask Amy anything coming up for the first time in twenty twenty four.

So good to have producer Jay back with us. We are relatively fascinated by this situation with Charlotte Panthers owner David Tepper. And I know the NFL has weighed in and fined him three hundred thousand dollars, which you can say obviously it's a veritable drop in the bucket for a guy as rich as he is. What's three hundred thousand dollars to a guy who and I'm rounding up here is worth twenty one billion dollars. Twenty one billion dollars.

What is three hundred thousand? Nothing. But it's a statement by the NFL indicating that no matter who you are. Whether or not you own a team or you're a fan who bought a ticket, you can't be throwing drinks at other people in an NFL stadium. OK, so I appreciate that the NFL is making a statement about this and saying you may be David Tepper. This may be laughable to you, but we will fine you and we will make a public example of you because you can't throw drinks on a fan.

Even if you do own the team. And Tepper was called on video from his suite. So he has a suite or most owners, if they want to travel, obviously have suites. And this was in Jacksonville.

Where. He was upset about what he heard from fans. And so he ends up throwing his video, throwing his on video, throwing his drink at Jaguars fans from the suite.

And you can see it's very clearly him and it's very, very clearly a drink. Tepper did release a statement on Tuesday saying, I should have let NFL Stadium security handle any issues that arose. I respect the NFL's code of conduct and accept the league's discipline for my behavior. He called his conduct unacceptable, which is true.

This is not so different from what the Titans owner received going back. Gosh, that was even before we were here on CBS Forge Radio. His wasn't throwing a drink.

You may remember that Bud Adams, well, he he used his fingers to make a gesture that we wouldn't do if this was TV. That still gets blurred out on TV. It is. To me, just a reminder that Big Brother, quote unquote, I know Big Brother is often used to refer to government. Big Brother is always watching. In this case, though, Big Brother is. The American public who always has a cell phone trained on you, always. It's it's crazy, but it's become a thing with law enforcement where law enforcement are really any type of crime solving unit. They now are constantly looking for cell phone video, social media posts and videos, and a lot of times they can use.

Not just the videos of other people at a particular event where maybe a crime took place, but also social media posts to kind of piece together what happened. At any given time. Again, where there's a group of people. You really especially if you're an NFL owner in a crowded stadium, you're really never going to get away with anything like this.

But of course, as. The owner of a team who's worth as much money as he is. He has to know at all times that there are cell phones or whether it's video or photos being taken, that there are video cameras, all that kind of stuff. I understand he's frustrated with his team. I understand he hates losing. Although I do believe that he's part of the problem, not part of the solution, at least at this point. The way that he's hired and fired coaches recklessly. The way that he's kind of taken these stabs in the dark.

Going with and I'm not saying Matt Rule wasn't a proven coach, but at the college level, it's a risky move to bring Matt Rule to Charlotte. We know that he is. Involved. Now, is he Mark Cuban involved?

Starting to seem more like it. He's definitely involved in the decision making, and that's his right. He's the owner of the team. If I was the owner of an NFL team, I would want to at least be informed. On every decision, every big decision.

And probably would give my input if it was my money. But David Tepper seems to have a very quick trigger. He's already fired three head coaches in season, which speaks to his frustration with the losing. And just the fact that he hasn't been able to get the team pointed in the right direction. And since he took over, the team is awful. And I'm not sure it's getting better after you fired your coaches in season.

And I'm being somewhat tongue in cheek. It's not getting better if you're firing coaches in season and constantly changing quarterbacks. I know David Tepper's a big fan of Bryce Young, even though the reports were out there that Frank Reich, the former head coach, who was head coach for all of 10 minutes, that he wanted C.J.

Stroud. Now, there's no guarantee that C.J. would have had the same success in Charlotte that he's having in Houston. You can't change one piece and not change everything else.

The variables would be different, right? But if David Tepper is the one who insisted on Bryce Young, though he's tried to set the record straight there, and saying there was a consensus about it. But if he's the one who wanted Bryce Young, he probably feels even worse. So we know he has a quick trigger. We know he's impatient. We know he's frustrated.

He's angry. All of that can be true, but it doesn't give you the right to take it out on fans who pay tickets to be there and are just being fans. Now, it's different if a fan attacks you. Not that you should throw a drink on them, but it's different if a fan attacks you or if a fan is heckling you personally. But that doesn't appear to be the case in the video. The fans were just kind of doing what fans do.

Drunk or sober. Jay likes to heckle. So maybe David Tepper would have thrown a drink at Jay. But regardless, the fan wasn't doing anything to threaten David Tepper.

I don't even know if he recognized that Tepper was up there. And the image that we get of Tepper is he just can't control his temper. Tepper has a temper. It's Tepper's temper. A temper tantrum. Yes. A temper tantrum.

That's awesome. Which makes the whole statement after firing Frank Reich even more ironic. Remember, we laughed about this at the time when he was trying to explain that he doesn't actually have a quick trigger, nor does he throw temper tantrums. I do have patience. I'm just not... My reputation away from this game is one for extreme patience. You know, there's no reason why that doesn't come here too.

It does. Now, that patience comes with good performance and things that you want to see progress be made on different aspects. I have extreme patience. In fact, he went on, if I remember correctly, to tell the story of how for his other companies, employees stay for decades. They get there and they never leave. Sounds a little bit like prison.

But okay, a temper tantrum. Oh, that's the winner. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. So yeah, I get it.

And I didn't do the math on this just because it wasn't that interesting to me, but I did read it somewhere. That the $300,000 fine represents not even 1% of 1% of his wealth. But the NFL has to do this. And owners shouldn't get away with this type of thing, regardless of whether or not the fine can be written off as a business loss.

It doesn't matter. The NFL can't allow an owner to get away with this. And while he didn't commit a crime of any sort, really, I don't know if the fans are going to come out and say, I'm going to sue David Tepper for emotional and mental distress and damages. I feel like he could.

Yeah, he probably could in this day and age. But still, Tepper needs to be accountable, needs to be held accountable, needs to be publicly disciplined for this. And so the NFL did what the NFL had to do.

All right, coming up, I can't believe this narrative is surfacing again. Just so you know, it's not only directed at Jets quarterbacks. It's After Hours with Amy Lawrence.

You are listening to the After Hours Podcast. Rudolph gets the ball. He throws quickly down the near sideline for Beckins. Caught it off the shoulder.

Down the near sideline, 20, 10. And he high steps into the end zone. Touchdown, Pittsburgh.

66 yards on third down and one. I think Kitty's availability is less in question this week. I anticipate him being available to practice. That being said, we're going to leave the ball in Mason Rudolph's hands.

He's done a good job and we've done a good job in the most recent two weeks. This is After Hours with Amy Lawrence. The voice of one Mike Tomlin. Steelers Radio Network and it's an interesting turn of events. A twist here for the Steelers as they're still alive for the playoffs. Heading into week 18 of the NFL season.

It's After Hours with Amy Lawrence on CBS Sports Radio. What we now know is that even though Kenny Pickett is cleared and is allowed to play. He will remain the backup to Mason Rudolph going into week 18. Now the Steelers need help. Right now they're sitting in the 9 spot in the AFC. They need other teams to lose so that they can slide up into a wild card spot.

So these are just some of the ways the Steelers can get in. First of all, they have to beat the Ravens. If they win at Baltimore on Saturday and the Bills lose. Or if they win and the Jaguars lose or tie. If they win and the Texans and Colts tie. If they tie the Ravens, the Jaguars lose, the Texans and Colts doesn't end in a tie.

This is crazy. This is why I don't go over tiebreaker scenarios or all of the various dominoes because after a while it gets exhausting. It's a fight.

It always is a fight. Now one more way the Steelers can get in. Jags a loss, a Denver win, even though Denver's not part of the playoff picture. Texans and Colts doesn't end in a tie. So there are, no joke, five different ways the Steelers can make it into the playoffs.

But if they don't win at Baltimore on Saturday, those options are limited and highly unlikely. But Mason Rudolph has helped to spark the offense in a way that we hadn't seen for nearly two years. He's still QB one now, and I'm thrilled for him.

The guy has worked hard. He's remained there in Pittsburgh, meaning that Mike Tomlin is comfortable with him and relies on him. He's seen multiple offensive coordinators to this year. And yet when his number was called, he was ready to go. Now you remember they brought in Mitch Trubisky last year, even before they drafted Kenny Pickett.

And Rudolph was kind of left as an afterthought. And yet now he's earned the opportunity. And I love that he's taking it all in stride, but he's got to be thrilled. It means another great opportunity to play a game. Very excited. Obviously, we have a lot to play for. Just focus on having a good day of prep today, having a good week of practice.

All we can control is our performance and whether we win or lose. We've got tunnel vision on that, and the rest of the chips fall where they fall. Last week, Kenny Pickett was inactive. This week, he will be QB 2 behind Mason. But just like the rumors and reports, I'm using my air quotations, about Zach Wilson of the Jets not wanting to play again after he'd been benched for fear of injury. I guess it's not solely a Jets quarterback where these rumors and these reports will swirl.

Similar type. The reports came out that Kenny Pickett refused to be the backup QB to Mason last weekend. And Pickett is not taking that line down. I saw reports out there that I felt like we were attacking my character and how I am as a person, not even getting into a player standpoint of it. There was no talk of me being a backup quarterback this week in terms of being a 2. If I was healthy enough to play and the trainers and coaches felt like I looked good enough to play, I was going to start and play. If they believed that I was not, which they believed I was not, I was not going to dress and suit up for the game. So whoever reported that, I don't know where it started.

It's kind of crazy what people will write and put out there to try to prove their point or help their standpoint or their careers and what you guys do. But you know, disappointed to see that without any proof or basis of it. So I guess Zach Wilson, you now have company on your island. I didn't believe the reports about Zach not wanting to play either and come to find out it was something to do with an agent of another player. Blah, blah, blah.

Who knows if it was Tim Boyle. I just know he got cut right after that. But here is Kenny Pickett saying, I don't know where these reports came from, but this is personal for me. It's an attack on my character that I would refuse to play for the team that drafted me simply because what? I'm ticked off that I'm not QB 1.

So he tries to set the record straight. As a competitor, you want the ball. I want the ball in the most crucial situations in the game. You want the ball in the biggest games of the season. And this is what you work for. This is what you do.

But, you know, one man's misfortune is another man's opportunity. So Mason played well when he got in there. I have a ton of respect for Mason, everything he's done and what our team has been doing. So now my job that I'm back healthy is to be the backup. If something happens, if he goes down, be ready to go and continue to support him the way I've been. His point is, I'm doing my job.

And to hear these rumors and these reports that someone put out there, I actually don't know where they came from. But someone floated out there that he refused to be the backup quarterback. He's saying that was never even an option. I wasn't medically cleared to play. I was inactive for week 17 because the athletic training staff, the doctors weren't comfortable with me playing yet.

He said I was either going to start and play or if they didn't think I was good enough, healthy enough, I was going to be the three and not dress. I do love, love, love being a sports broadcaster. And I do know that a lot of the times it's more personality entertainment driven. But my background background is journalism and news. And I take that very seriously. And while I have no idea where these reports came from, it is absolutely frustrating that there are people in my business that would make crap up.

So good for Kenny for setting the record straight. It's after hours, CBS Sports Radio. Call 562-314-4603 for complete details. Thanks to our nationwide logistics network.

Yep, Graybar does that. I'm Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed and host of the podcast We Can Do Hard Things. On We Can Do Hard Things, my wife Abby, my sister Amanda and I talk honestly about the hard parts of life. Join us and guests like Michelle Obama, Tracee Ellis Ross and Brene Brown as we have refreshingly honest conversations. New episodes are out every Tuesday and Thursday. So listen to and follow We Can Do Hard Things and Odyssey podcast available now for free on the Odyssey app and everywhere you get your podcasts.