John Breech, Pick Six Pod/CBSSports.com

Welcome back to John Breach, CBSSports.com, one of the super friends of the Pig Six Podcast, and what a great time to talk about the National Football League, which actually this past weekend looked like they were going to play good football finally, which is really good. I thought this was a borderline really good week, which we haven't had too many of. John, how you doing, man? I am doing fantastic, and you know what, it is a good week once we figure out what the heck roughing the passer is. Adam, what is it? Tell me right now.

Well, here's the thing. I said this the Friday after the Bengals and Dolphins played, and I thought, okay, we're spending a lot of time, as we should, talking about concussions and why Tua was even on the field when he clearly was concussed the week before in the, I guess, the win over the Bills. He should not have played. He should not have come back in that game.

So we spent all that time. And I just wondered, how come we are not talking about the fact that Tua was whipped and slammed to the ground? And I said, I swear, I said that Friday, if that were Tom Brady, the flag would be out before Brady hit the ground. And actually, the Grady Jarrett roughing the passer penalty on Brady wasn't even close to being as bad as Tua being whipped to the ground.

And of course, it came out. And Arthur Smith, he looked like he swallowed like chewing tobacco. He looked like he was going to throw up on the sidelines. That was bad.

The Chris Jones one was bad. But replay is going to solve it all, John. Yeah, this feels like a situation ahead with pass interference where you bring replay in and the refs are going to just be like, eh, it's a subjective call.

I think I was right. The play stands on the field. But I do think replay could have helped last night's situation where you say, all right, the defender literally had the ball in his hand. How can he be called for roughing the pastor? That's that's he got tackled by Derek Carr. Derek Carr should have been credible tackle. They're not not Chris Jones being called for roughing the passer. So I think last night's situation was a little different than what we've seen. I realized they always want to err on the side of safety when it comes to the quarterbacks, especially after what happened to Tua.

Right. They should have some sort of mechanism in place to stop the, you know, to fix what happened with Chris Jones. Because if you force a fumble like essentially he's not allowed to recover, it is what the NFL rulebook says, which was just seems a little ridiculous.

Yeah, there's a lot of things I think. But your point really was that replay is not going to really solve this issue anyway. The Panthers had an issue.

I'm not I don't really want to talk a ton about the Panthers, although I am going to ask you about it in a second. But the Panthers in the opener, there was a roughing the passer call, a blow to the head called against Brian Burns on the Browns final drive that really led to the drive and the loss to Cleveland with replay in place. They get that call, right. They overturned the roughing the passer call.

And maybe Matt Rule is five and oh, and among the I'm just kidding, of course. But, you know, it would have worked in their favor. But what's going to happen is what happens in every sport. If we do that, we're going to nitpick every little single thing. We're going to call more roughing the passes, not less.

Do we want more? Yeah, you know, I think one of the problems is and I think somebody from NFL media pointed out this morning is that, hey, there's actually been fewer roughing the passer calls this year. There's only been 28 through five weeks. But the problem is I can think of four off the top of my head that were horrible calls. You mentioned the Brian Burns one, obviously the Grady Jarrett and Chris Jones.

There was another one earlier this year, last week. And so that's four out of 28. That means 15 percent of the time. And that's just that I can think of the top I had.

I'm sure there are more. So when your rest are butchering a call that is a 15 yard penalty and completely change the complexion of the game, but they're messing up 15 percent of the time, that seems like a problem. If it was a home plate umpire, we'd be absolutely losing our minds.

All right. So you guys jumped into emergency podcast mode when the Panthers fired Matt Rule. What was like the general consensus of all you guys over there, including Will, including Ryan, including others, was it a good idea for Matt Rule to even get year three based on what we saw in year two? I think that David Tepper was just telling himself, you know what? There is like we're not going to fire this guy after two years.

He's trying to build something here. He doesn't have a franchise quarterback. Let's see what he can do. They've made a lot of smart offseason moves in the sense that, hey, they rebuilt this offensive line. Hey, Christian McCaffrey is finally going to be healthy.

And so you don't want to have Matt Rule there building all of that up and not get to see what he can do with that. And, you know, like you said, you look at the first game against the Browns. That's a game they probably should have won and got hosed over by a bad call. The second game against a Giants team that we now know was good also was a very winnable game.

And then they dominated the Saints. And so if this, the entire season easily could have gone a different way and you know, you cracked the five and Oh thing, but it's not too crazy to think they could at least be three and two, maybe even four and one, if the ball would have bounced a few different ways. So, you know, I don't think it's Tepper looks horrible for letting him have year three. And I, you know, he cut the cord when he had to didn't let this go into mid season or into December. So I don't have a problem with how Tepper handled this.

I think it was a mercy firing. I wish he would have said it. Matt rules are really nice guy. We wa I, I am forced to watch Panthers football.

They are unfortunately no better today than they were when Matt rule took over. I have a question about Josh McDaniels and, and I don't know. I mean, maybe it's just because I don't like him. I didn't like him in Denver and I've read enough stories about what he was like behind the scenes, but he seems to me to be a guy who's constantly trying to impress his dad. And I don't know if I mean Bill Belichick in this regard or just dad in general, but he seems to try to galaxy brain a lot of things I didn't get trying to go for two with four and a half left. He ended up getting another possession.

I know, I don't know. Am I, am I digging too deep on Josh McDaniel? I mean, I kind of liked his aggressiveness, especially considering you're playing the chiefs, you know, they're going to score and you know, they went forward on fourth and one early in the game, got that 58 yard touchdown to Devante Adams. And when you look at, I think there's just too much being put on him going for two in that situation, because if you offer two and you don't get it, you know, you're down 30 29 and you have to get the ball back. So your defense has to make a stop. If you go for two and get it, you're up 31 30, but your defense still has to make a stop. And if you kick the extra point and it's 30 to 30, your defense still has to make a stop.

So at some point your defense is going to have to stop the chiefs. And personally, you know, I get that he would rather be in the lead with his defense trying to make that stop. So, and you know, I think he probably wanted to put a little bit of pressure on the chief's ticker, because if you're up 31 30, the chiefs probably get in the mode where they're going to be playing for a field goal. And you look at the chief's kicker did he miss the 41 yard field goal. He missed a 37 yard field where they got called back on one of the weirdest penalties I've ever seen.

And then he had an extra point hit the upright. So if you're Josh McDonald and you feel pretty good, if you're up one point, you know, going into the final five minutes of the game. So I didn't hate the call.

I understand, I guess why people didn't like it, but in that situation, I had no problem with him being aggressive. So the answer is yes, Adam, you are allowing your personal biases against Josh McDaniel's to cloud your judgment. That's fair. Yes, it's 50% that.

I won't go all in because it does feel that way some of the times in some of these calls he's making. It's fine. It's fine. Look, I make no bones about it. I mean, the show is, you know, at least half about, you know, my personality and who I like and dislike. And I like you.

So I say nothing bad about John breach. A CBS sports dot com pick six podcast. Super friend does Brandon Staley split sixes in Las Vegas because his own wide receiver who was hurt, Keenan Allen tweeting from his couch was like, what are we doing when he's going for it?

Basically near midfield with about a, what is a minute or so to go where they're trying to run out now? They end up winning the game anyway because the Browns super kicker missed a 50 some odd yard field goal. But that hit. But Brandon Staley says that their relationship is now stronger. To me, that is a more fascinating situation. And this is where I feel like analytics get complicated because, you know, there's all these numbers out there that said, well, this is he should have gone for it because that's what the percentages said.

But there is like this psychological aspect that you don't see. And it's the fact that in Keenan Allen is a perfect example of this, that he did not want his coach to go for this. If you go for this and fail and your team loses, that's where you start to lose the locker room. And we saw Marcus Peters wanted to punch John Harbaugh last week in week four after they lost that game to the bills when he didn't kick the field goal to take the lead in the final minutes.

And then the bills ended up winning 20 through 20. And so that's this situation. If the Browns win this game, Brandon Staley, I don't know if the players let him on the flight home. And so you just see this, like the players understand what the coach is doing to a point, but it's, if you're saying, Hey coach, we only have a two point lead. If we fail on this fourth and one, this guy can take a 64 yard field goal. They're already in field goal range. We can't do this. We got to punt. And the Browns didn't have any time out.

So yeah, that, that was a, an interesting situation, especially when you have a star player like that, just call out his head coach. All right. Final thing for John breach of cbssports.com. And this goes to how many really good teams are there? Are the giants really good or do they have a really good record?

Yeah, I'm not so sure. I don't know if I would qualify them as really good, but they're an NFC. You don't have to be great to get to the playoffs. You know, like, I don't think they're a top three team in that conference. Granted, they just did beat the Packers. You know, the Packers spent the entire week complaining about being in London, but you know, like you look at their other wins, they beat Justin Fields and the bears, a team that doesn't know how to throw the forward pass and they beat the Panthers and they kind of eat out a win in week one against the Titans. And so, you know, they haven't done the Packers game was impressive, but besides that, haven't been overly impressed by what they've done, but you know, good for them.

They're four and one. And if they beat the Ravens on Sunday, then I will put them in a really good category. Adam, that is what I promise. All right. We're going to hold you to that promise.

Here's the thing. Even if they don't beat the Ravens, the rest of their schedule over the next really eight weeks is very manageable. I heard somebody say, I don't think the Giants are going to make the playoffs. The Giants are going to be in the playoffs unless they become utterly incompetent over the next two months, because the schedule just does not allow for them to lose a lot of games. If they're well coached and it does appear that they are well coached, they're going to win a ton over the next two months, whether they beat the Ravens or not.

Four and one now. I just don't see a way they don't win. Guys, I don't know how they avoid winning 10.

Yeah. And that's, I mean, you do, you mentioned the schedule, you have Jacksonville, Detroit, Houston, you still have to play the commanders twice. I mean, there's just so many winnable games. Uh, it would be absolutely surprising if they don't get to 10 wins. Cause at this point, all they have to do is go six and six. If they play 500 football the rest of the way they get to 10 wins and that should get them in the playoffs. So yeah, I absolutely agree with you.

I do think the Giants, that is a team you would want to bet on to get to the playoffs right now. John breach, cbssports.com at John breach on Twitter. I thank you very much, man. Uh, go podcast. I'm sure you guys are doing a podcast later. So, uh, just, uh, drop, drop my name to will. I said, hi. Definitely. I will let him know. Thanks for having me. Take care. John breach, cbssports.com.