Trey Wingo| Former NFL Talk Host|Host of Alternate Routes

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Additional terms apply. It's a place where friendships are forged, football is revered, and food is enjoyed. Solo Stove, the perfect flame for the big game. Trey Wingo and I worked together for years at our previous network. Had not crossed paths in over a decade. And so to be able to see him in person, give him a big hug, and then sit down and talk to him about his latest venture. Yeah, awesome. And he's actually gone through a bit of a metamorphosis in his career as well, so I asked him what it was like to get back here. You did it so long as part of the rat race as an NFL host.

Is it calmer this way? The fun part about this for me is I see so many people like yourself that I've worked with over the years and I haven't been able to stay in touch with. That's the fun part. The rest of it is, it's a lot. It's funny, I flew in last night and obviously Vegas is Sin City and watching all the puns, Pepsi, the soda sponsor, it's Sip City. And then there's Aviation Gin, it's Gin City. So hey, all that stuff is wonderful, I'm just here for the game and to talk about the fun stuff and all the other stuff doesn't matter. It's just seeing people that you love and that you respected and have worked with all those years and then just talking about football. You're going to not believe this because I keep getting the same reaction.

It's my first time in Vegas. Really? See what I mean? Wow. And to see it like this is pretty incredible.

Yeah, I mean this is the city that's probably more equipped to do this than any other city on the planet. So it's nice that the NFL has finally decided, thanks to the Supreme Court, to embrace sports betting. You know, I'm old enough to remember when Tony Romo was told by the NFL he couldn't have a fantasy football convention in a Las Vegas hotel because it had a casino. Well, the Raiders are here now.

We're here now. The draft was here. Eventually all four major sports in this country are going to be in Vegas because it just makes sense. There's always this line about the NFL rigging things, which I think is ridiculous because it never follows any kind of plan or prototype. Well, this one, the crazy conspiracy theory, was the color of a logo of the Super Bowl. Oh right, exactly. Well, the Ravens aren't here, so pfft.

It was pre-scripted and they let the cat out of the bag. But at the same time, though, the idea that the NFL is partnering, like many other leagues, with gambling sites or different ventures, does that change the perception, do you think, with fans? If it does, I think it's a flawed argument. And the reason I would explain it is, you know, nothing has changed in terms of how the NFL tells the players what they can and can't do. Like, you still can't gamble. You still can't do that.

You still can't do all these other things. And they've amended it slightly, but the rules have been in there since way before they were in with Las Vegas, so all these things haven't changed. It's just that they're seeing, you know, companies and sports books buy into the NFL, and the NFL's like, we will happily take your money because that's how you become a $22 billion a year industry. And isn't Roger Goodell's stated goal $25 billion a year? That is correct.

Oh, he's almost there. Yeah, and let's be honest, the other thing about commissioners, we all think of them as some sort of benevolent grandfather of the sport. No, commissioners work for the owners.

They do. That's his job. His job is to work for the owners, and he does an incredible job of representing the owners very well. Do you think he's a good commissioner?

I do, for a couple of reasons. I think there have been three pivotal commissioners in the history of the NFL. Pete Rozell sold the league. When, you know, the first Super Bowl wasn't called the Super Bowl, it was the AFL-NFL World Championship game, it was on two networks, and they couldn't sell out the LA Coliseum. My dad worked that first Super Bowl for Life magazine, and he said it was the biggest nothing-burger he'd ever... They didn't even file a story. He went to cover it, and they didn't put it in Life magazine.

Didn't even put it in. So Pete Rozell sold the league, right? And then Paul Tagliabue came along, and a lot of people thought Jim Finks, who was a former GM of the Saints, was going to be the next GM. But Paul was a litigator, and he knew that there were going to be some labor issues. Paul was a really good lawyer. Paul stabilized the league legally. Roger's a politician. He's a salesman. And that's what he's done. So you had the salesman in Pete Rozell sell the league. You had the lawyer stabilize the league legally. And then you have Roger to be the PR front for when things go bad, this is how we're going to fix it. And that's why we have the totality of the NFL sort of involving us all the time in everything that they do.

Oh, everything. It never goes away. Super Bowls ends, and then the next thing we're talking about is free agency. March Madness used to be college basketball. It's now signings in the NFL.

That's true. That voice. It's Trey Wingo.

It's after hours here on CBS 4 Tradio or on Radio Row. I feel like it's been probably 15 years since we've seen each other. Probably. But as you were talking about, it's fun to have those reunions. Did you see Mike Golick as he was here too? Saw Golick, saw Stugatz, saw Merrill Hodge, saw Mark Slaereth, just a million people. You know, just a million people. And that's the fun part about this because we all go our separate ways, and then we all convene wherever the Super Bowl is.

And you just get to see old friends again, and that's fun. You're still talking. Yeah. Got it.

No, stop. You got a brand new show, and you're part of kind of this branch out where it's not just terrestrial anymore. It's not just network TV. Your show is Amazon. Yeah.

Amazon and Wondery podcast called Alternate Routes. The whole premise of the show is we take one moment in sports, a flashpoint, if you will, a pivotal thing that happens, and flip it the other way. Like we're at the Super Bowl, right? What happens in Super Bowl 49 between the Seahawks and the Patriots?

Oh, no. Second and one, right? What happens if you give the ball to Marshawn Lynch instead of throwing it inside your fourth best receiver in Ricardo Lockett, right? I'm going to say the Seahawks win that game because he's going to score. And then suddenly Pete Carroll becomes the first coach in the history of football, in the history of football with multiple championships in college and multiple Super Bowl wins. No one else can make that claim.

No one. That changes his legacy forever. What does that do to Tom Brady? It would have been 11 years since his last Super Bowl win. After winning his first three, he and Belichick would have lost their last three. Does he get kicked out for Jimmy Garoppolo? Who was drafted that year to replace Tom Brady?

And has Bill Belichick ever achieved GOAT status by winning all these other Super Bowls? It changes everything dramatically. Fascinating. And we have all these points.

One of them is one of my favorites, and I probably shouldn't say this, but I'm going to anyway. 1979 NBA draft, the Lakers and the Bulls had to flip a coin to see who would get the first pick in the draft, which was Magic Johnson. Lakers won the coin toss, they draft Magic Johnson.

What happens if the Bulls win that coin toss? Magic goes to Chicago, where you have Artis Gilmore, whose numbers were almost identical to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's at that time. Does Artis Gilmore go on to become the greatest center and the highest scorer in the history of the NBA? Does Magic Johnson run Showtime in Chicago? Does Pat Riley even exist as an entity in the NBA because his claim to fame was taken over by Paul Westhead after he was fired and making the Lakers the Showtime Lakers? And in fact, in a really weird scenario, we played it out so far that if that had happened, Charles Barkley, not Barack Obama, would have been the first African American president. It all makes sense if you listen to the podcast because things go crazily the other way.

As a massive history buff, that is incredible. It sounds like so much fun. How do you do it?

Do you chart it? Well, yeah, one of the things that the theory goes, the Bulls would not have been able to draft Michael because they would have been winning with Magic Johnson. So he goes somewhere else. Charles Barkley goes somewhere else. In this situation, we have him going to the then Washington Bullets, now the Washington Wizards, where one of his teammates would have been Tom McMillan. Tom McMillan, after becoming a great NBA player, went on to be a congressman. Charles Barkley's interest in politics would have gotten lit a little faster, probably becomes governor of Alabama, then runs for president, becomes the first president of the United States as an African American. Are you going to do the what if Travis Kelce never gave Taylor Swift the friendship bracelet and never talked about it on his podcast and how things would look different for the Chiefs? Correct.

What, what, what? Call me crazy. What if the Bears had decided to move up and draft Patrick Mahomes instead of Mitch Dravisky?

Or here's another crazy one. What if the Bills had said, no, we're not going to make that trade? And they would draft Patrick Mahomes instead of Josh Allen, even though Josh Allen has been remarkable. There's so many things that play out in the Bills.

Maybe finally win a Super Bowl and all this angst in Western New York is resolved. There's a million different ways you can do it. What if Bartman didn't catch that ball? Oh, stop. Oh my gosh. There's a million of them.

Well, what about if David Tyree didn't catch the ball in his helmet? Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All of these things and you take out the tentacles. It's like a sliding doors thing, butterfly effect in sports. And we just, we see how far we can take it. So how many episodes have you plotted out? Or at least you've thought of at this point? I think we have 30 or 40 already that we've already sort of going.

But the whole point is to do this forever and ever, world without end, amen. So, uh, it's, it's really fun. It drops. The first episode drops March 5th on Wondery Plus, and then a worldwide reference you ever get your podcasts on March 12th. It's Kevin Frazier and I, who I worked with again, and the guy I used to work with at ESPN, we're doing it together. It's just going to be a lot of fun routes, alternate routes, and in Canada, probably alternate routes, but that's a separation. Kevin is the host of the NFL honors yet another way that the NFL has turned into this prime time spectacle because it never used to be that way. And now they've got it on a made for TV event.

Like the draft is now two weeks long instead of just being four days. Correct. Where else can they possibly expand?

Well, think about it. I mean, they've already, they just announced that there's going to be a Friday night opening night game in Brazil, you know? So, and that gives them a little chance, whoever takes that train to come back and get going. The other Roger Goodell stated goal has been, I want to have a team in London as soon as possible. Now I think that's practically impossible, but I think if you put a whole league there and then teams went over and played three games, you know, cause the old rotation, the old, uh, uh, world league of American football had like four teams in Germany and the numbers in Germany for all the games that have been played over there have been amazing. Put one in London, put three teams in Germany, have your own international division. They come over to the States, play four weeks in a row, and then people go back and vice versa. That makes more sense to me than having just a one-off in London. That doesn't make sense. Do you think that will affect player choice and free agency? Whether or not they want to go, don't want to go? Cause that's quite a feat.

I would agree. There's a lot of logistics that go in with that. And you know, people say when a guy's traded, well, why isn't he playing as well as he did in his old team? Because his life has been uprooted. If he has a family, if he has kids, they got to sell the house. They've got to find a new place.

They got to put kids in new schools. We look at these players, and this was the way I sort of approached it with the draft. We look at players as inanimate objects, as widgets, if you will. Oh, we need a tight end.

Pull this here, plug this in here. Well, no, it's a person. And a person is not something that you can sort of manipulate that easily. There's a lot of other things that come along with humanity that factor into how you perform. So I always tried to make that sort of my philosophy with the draft is these are players, but they're also people. And that's a big part of it in free agency.

All that has to be factored in with how you're going to do this. Trey Wingo, love The Voice, being able to be in person again here on Radio Row. Tom Brady, damned if he does, damned if he doesn't when he gets into the broadcast booth, which blows me away because he is the most popular quarterback of all time.

You've done broadcasting a long time. What counsel wisdom would you give him if he says, hey, Trey, I'm a little nervous about this? A, he wouldn't be, and B, he wouldn't call me.

And C, I would say is just do your homework, right? Like I feel bad for Greg Olsen. Greg Olsen is wonderful at this. He's amazing. He's very good.

I think he's as good as anybody else in the business. And I understand the splash higher with Fox. And I understand that. But there's a lot of reasons ex-players don't want to go into coaching because it's a grind. It's a grind. If you're going to do this, prepare, you know, prepare. And I'm not saying he won't, but just don't take it lightly.

I mean, it's a real opportunity to connect with people on a real way. And that's what I love about what Peyton did. I think one of the reasons Peyton and Eli are doing the thing they're doing is that they realized if they wanted to really analyze games as a, as a color guy in a booth, you know, Peyton is all football all the time. He wouldn't be able to get through half the play before the next play is starting. Right. And on the Manning cast, he doesn't have to worry about that.

They, they sort of go through whatever and then they react to the next play as it happens. Well, you can't do that in a traditional booth. So all I would say is, you know, you made quarterbacking a craft treat the broadcast booth the same way.

That's what I would say. Did you ever think there would be so many athletes, not just getting into broadcasting because you mentioned Mark, you mentioned Merrill, Ron Jaworski, we could go on and on, but the podcast realm where it's almost direct to consumer trade. They don't have to go through another outlet.

It's this is me and this is my property. Yeah, our phones are international broadcasting centers. That's what they are. You know, and, and people, I mean, there's a reason ESPN, TNT, and Fox just combined together to stream everything.

Jim Gaffigan by the comedian who played offensive line in college at Georgetown had a great line. He said, all these streaming services, they should put them together and call it cable, which is essentially what we're doing now. It's essentially what we're doing because there's so many different outlets out there.

So yeah, I mean, you have to be more nimble and you have to find a way to go where the people are. What did Rogers say about the streaming Peacock game? He said, we fish where the fish are. And that's where the viewership is. And he said the demographic of the people that stream that Chief's Dolphins game on Peacock was 10 years younger than the average man that watches on free TV. Right.

I mean, they are ahead of the curve, that's for sure. Okay. So before I let you go, one thing, well, two things you and I have in common, our previous network, right? Our career. But I will die on this hill. Wins are not a quarterback stat. It drives me berserk.

And I know for a long time that was in your bio on Twitter. It drives me crazy. Yeah, it's unbelievable. He's only on the field half the time, and that's in a good game. Yeah.

The easiest way I can give it to you. One of the greatest playoff games of all time. Two years ago, the divisional round between the Bills and the Chiefs, right? With 13 seconds to go, Josh Allen puts his team in front. Sean McDermott makes an egregious mistake and kicks it out of the back of the end zone, just saving time on the clock for Patrick Mahomes and Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelsey in two plays to set up a 47 yard field goal. Yet that game goes down as a loss for Josh Allen. What the hell did he do wrong?

What the hell did he do wrong? There was a game. I want to say it was 2013 or 2014 Steelers Ravens week 17. Whoever won the game won the division. Joe Flacco led the Ravens down in Pittsburgh at the end of the game. Go ahead, touchdown with like a minute 40 to play.

Did his job. Steelers go down and score with almost no time left. That was the you know, they had the Immaculate reception with Franco Harris. That was the Immaculate extension with Antonio Brown. Joe Flacco gets credited for a loss. Why?

What did he do? Look, I'm not saying you need you don't need a quarterback to win. Of course you do. But you know, David Tyree has to make the helmet catch. San Antonio Holmes has to catch the corner route from Ben Roethlisberger.

Otherwise, it's an incomplete play. Teams win games. Teams win championships, but you better have a dude. You better have a dude playing quarterback. Well, so now you've got me thinking about your new show. Yeah. What if that's a great question.

It's like a Paul Harvey, the rest of the story. What if it's not the Chiefs who win that game with the 13 seconds to go? They go into overtime. It's the Bills. Are we not talking about Chiefs dynasty?

Josh Allen, the Bills finally have a Super Bowl. He's the one maybe. Well, he's I think he's getting married, right? But he's the one who's dating Taylor Swift.

I don't know all these various ways that things could change. Exactly. Okay, here's a crazy one. In the Chiefs first ever AFC Championship game of the five, they hosted in a row after the 2018 season. Yep. They picked off Tom Brady with a minute twelve to play in that game. Game ending play. Oh, I know what you're talking about. D Ford lined up.

Yes, he did. So in that case, are we talking about a team that's going to six straight Super Bowls, which has never happened? I mean, like there are millions. This is so great.

Take one thing, flip it a little bit and see how crazy you can be. Yes, no, that is a podcast or a show that could go on forever as in forever. Okay, so I know I follow you on Twitter. Yes.

But now without the blue check marks. It's ridiculous. So remind people where they can get you. At Wingo's, W-I-N-G-O-Z, Trey dot Wingo on Instagram. And I'm also on Threads, which I enjoy.

It's it's a it's a more civil place as social media goes. And when does the show start? Show starts March 5th on Wondery Plus. And then we go worldwide on March 12th, wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, it's so good to catch up with you again. This is a lot of fun. Thanks so much.

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A peanut butter M&M's production. In a world where Super Bowl winners get the world's admiration and a fancy ring, but the runners up get nothing. One retired cop returns. That's one retired quarterback. Read the script.

Oh, sorry. One retired quarterback returns to claim what's his. Um, that's claim a ring with diamonds made from M&M's peanut butter, but you're on a roll. The ring of comfort coming soon to a Super Bowl new you.