“It just looked patently and totally unfair”

Bomani Jones, Game Theory on HBO. He is joining us now.

Bill Maher's real-time is the pregame show. Not bad, Bo. Congratulations. I like the new hair, except I remember you when this was how you did it. Yeah, you've been through all the fates. You were here before this was, this is the new old, old, new.

I don't know which one. You were there before I had to go. Well, that's true. It was by choice.

See, but it's always by choice. I mean, I thought I just caught it early. Like I thought I was thinking like I caught it early when I did. I didn't quite have to do it, but it was probably a good idea. Now it's just kind of like, okay, this is just the way to go. And it's, it's an easy look, man. It's mornings are so easy. I don't have to worry about it. I shaved this more. It took like two minutes.

I was done without the door. So last night, how do we put that in perspective? It's I mean, it's just a blowout. It's a total mismatch. I likened it to Tiger Woods versus the field at the open in 2000 when nobody was under par except him.

And he was 15 shots better than the field. Is that fair? Yes, I do think that. I mean, it would be different if TCU had beaten Michigan through some form of trickery, but they didn't. They just won, right? They, they, they played against a top notch team in the semi-final and they just beat them and they came out in this game and just got absolutely destroyed. It just looked patently and totally unfair and I don't think it has anything to do with TCU. I think that there are probably 125 teams in the country who put them in that same game, maybe not lose 65 to seven, but lose in that same ballpark. I don't think there are very many teams that would have played a close game against Georgia. Well, we don't have, I mean, our recent history of college football national championship games, there's not a lot of competitiveness.

Last year was the closest Georgia and Alabama. The others are all, you know, basically three touchdown games, maybe even more. We have a couple of 28 point blowouts in there. So is there something about the game that just doesn't lend itself to competition? No, I think that we're at a place where there are three programs that are hitting shoulders above everybody else.

I think that's Georgia, Alabama and Ohio state. And what that usually means is two of them have to play each other. And so they played right. So they get to play the hard game while, you know, like Alabama, Michigan state game, for example, where they just got to kind of walk over them, right? Like that, that team that gets the one kind of gets to cruise through and maybe that's an advantage.

I'm not sure. But an example of a blowout though was 2018 when Clemson blew Alabama's doors off. But this is, I don't, I think something that's worth considering and I don't think it was a huge factor in this game, but there's going to be a physical toll that comes from playing these playoff games. And I do think that a team like TCU, for example, had to dial it up in a way to win that game against Michigan that Georgia doesn't have to do. And then what then Georgia is just physically superior to them at every position in just about every way. They're much better built to play two more games of football than I would say that the other team would be.

Yeah. Last year, Georgia's best defensive line only had to play like 40% of the snaps because they had so much depth and that's really what we're talking about is a team whose twos are probably better than TCU's ones, especially at the point of attack. And that's really where they won the game. I mean anybody could have rushed for however many yards they wanted to rush for. I mean the numbers are just insane. 254 yards in the ground. Uh, I mean they, they was, it was almost a point per play.

They had like 70 plays and 65 points. It's just insane. Look man, do you realize how good you have to be? Not just for you to win two national championships with Stetson Bennett as your quarterback, but to make Stetson Bennett look as good as he did, right? Like it's not as though Stetson Bennett has looked like he was along for the ride. What I think has happened with him is something that's kind of a broader observation I've had with quarterbacking over the last couple of years where you look at a dude like Carson Wentz who used to be able to do it and then just suddenly can't like it's, it's, it's, it's golf. It's all these other sports where you just lose it in your head, right? Like you have to be able to just go back there and be like, Hey, when that dude makes this step, I'm going to throw the ball and it's going to be there and it's all going to get done. And then the second those guys start questioning themselves, it all just falls apart. And for Bennett, he figured out these dudes are always going to be open.

I am always, what in the world do I have to fear back here? Like, it's not like you look at him and be like, wow, there's a level of physical talent that we underestimated. And Baker Mayfield, right?

Former walk on. And we did underestimate his arm, right? His size, but he had an elite college arm. Bennett doesn't have any elite college traits except for he makes them decisions.

Bang, bang, bang, throw. Yeah. Let me, let me fold this into a quarterback conversation about quarterbacks, especially in the NFL, because what we're finding out is that over time, the college game does a poor job of getting these guys ready for the NFL, a terrible job at doing it.

It's not their job to do it. So I'm not even mad at, like, I'm not sure Trevor Lawrence is going to be great. He's got all the physical gifts, right? But I mean, I watched the game against Tennessee and I thought he was mediocre at best. That's probably giving him a break.

That got him into the playoffs, got him for the first time in however many years. But when we get to the NFL and these brilliant defensive coordinators see enough game tape, they take away those crutches. So Carson Wentz, maybe he lost confidence, but I think defensive coordinators just went, all right, this is what he's going to do because this is all he can do at this point. They just don't grow as quarterback.

How do we fix that? Well, I think people need to realize that maybe there's a reason why they didn't throw the ball all the time back in the day. And the reason that they didn't is that it's really hard. There aren't that many people who can do it. Like when you think about how much of this game is built around passing and built around quarterbacks and there's never enough good quarterbacks to fill out the league, right?

There never is right. Like the brains have evolved because the thing is, if you do find that elusive guy, then we can take the game to the place that it is reached and you can do all these incredible things. There just aren't that many of them. And I don't, so I think part of his development, but I also think that what it takes to be an NFL quarterback, there just are never 32 people on the face of the earth who are capable of doing it. No, there's no question about it. Although San Francisco in their mind found three, they started this, they started the season with Trey Lance. Jimmy Garoppolo is competent enough to keep it between the ditches and let their defense do it. And then Brock Purdy, I don't even, I can't even explain Brock Purdy, but it's given them a conversation about Trey Lance because of the way Brock Purdy's played the last month or so. Yeah. Well, see, the thing to me is that Brock Purdy can do this then. Oh yeah, we have nothing to worry about with Trey Lance. That's the conversation that I'm having is that if we could get the last dude drafted and make him and he can make it happen. I think we can figure it out with the guy. We traded three first round picks to get by the way that trade, what a terrible trade.

Yes. Even if he turns out to be Steve young, that is a bad trade. He wasn't ready to play day one, which I think you need to be. If you're going to trade three first round picks for him, he may have been hurt this year, but still you didn't get anything out of him this year. And then the dude that you got with the last pick in the draft got it done, which then says, well, why did you need to trade third three first round picks to get a quarterback? I don't understand anything about Kyle Shanahan as it relates to his tasting quarterbacks and his decisions. Like, remember, this is the dude that passed all my homes and Watson.

Yeah. So he thought he was going to get Kirk Cousins. Well, Kirk Cousins, how well Cousins is competent.

I don't think he's great, but he's competent. And if you were, if you ranked the quarterbacks in the league, it's probably a top 12 quarterback. I guess I mean, it speaks more to the league. Yeah.

I'd have to think about it. But what's so wild is this is the year that people want to give him credit. Any like he's been statistically so much worse than he's ever been right this year.

He has not had it at all, but they nosed out all them games. And then suddenly, like, we are silly. That's just what I think about when all of this comes up is wild. We are silly.

Yeah. And the NFL makes us all dumb. I mean, it makes it because whatever happened last week is what matters the most.

We don't, we don't really think about this, the season as in a, you know, in a 17 or, you know, 18 week chunk, what just happened that basically shapes everything we think about. Jerry Jones basically said today that he's not worried about, you know, Mike McCarthy doesn't have anything to worry about and he's not worried about his offense. If you're Jerry Jones, wouldn't you be worried about your offense? When Zach Dak Prescott threw the same pass twice in a row, the first one didn't get picked and then he tried it again.

And it did do. He's one of those dudes that when it looks bad, it looks bad early and it looks terrible. But he's also one of those guys that when it looks bad, it looks bad early in the solution always seems to be, well, just keep on throwing the ball.

Whenever he's bad, I'm like, wow, how many passes is that? It just keeps him to go for it. Like I thought the thing he said about McCarthy though, was they said is why is, you know, will this game basically be some referendum on McCarthy? He said, no, he had a bigger sample to evaluate from, which was true, but I did not take that to me that Mike McCarthy can't get fired. Now, one thing I do think though, about Jerry's Jerry's not quick on the fire tree.

He never has been about that. He's not going to fire Mike McCarthy. If they lose that one, this is going to be the quarterback they have if they lose that one, but they do need to be worried about the offense at some point.

Yes. Like this, this is, this is a, this is a thing. They should be running their offense like Tennessee runs their offense when it's going well. Utilize Pollard and Ezekiel Elliott all game long and then just throw off that they've got weapons. If the problem with Dallas is that they want it, they have these, these shiny these shiny objects.

You got the CD lambs of the world. You want to, you want to use them before I let you go? First of all, what do we have coming up on game theory next Friday night after real time? Next Friday, we're going to take a look.

We're going to have a little look at LeBron James and his 20 year career. I don't want to tell you exactly how we're going to do it cause that would ruin the fun. But we got that. We working on a few field things. The man on the street stuff we did last season. We tried to figure out new ways to do that. Give you a little bit more, but I feel like everything that I've had my hands on so far going to next season is a legitimate improvement of what we were doing this season before. Like we, you know, the first season we didn't have any idea what we were doing. Now we know what we're doing so we can figure out what we actually want to do.

How has the show evolved in a year? Well, what we're going to try to do is for lack of a better term, more me. Like one thing that we did with this, I've never done anything that was really like scripted. Like even the TV stuff I've done with only small exception, not teleprompter. Like that's not the game. This show was very much so teleprompter and it's hard to, it's hard to do the teleprompter if you've never done it before and not get yourself caught up in reading off of the teleprompter. But if we're being honest and for people, you know, people here, you've been following me for years, there's nothing that we can write that will perform better than me just going off the top of my head. You just can't do that on television.

Like you just can't make a show like that. And so we're trying to figure out the ways to make it more so that I can just go rather than try to go with something that we came up with or that somebody came up with for me to say, just let me cook. Did you think about calling it the one hour lunch break? The 30 minute, the 30 minute lunch break, 30 minute coffee break, decaf break at 11 o'clock Eastern. All right, real, real quick.

Um, you did a piece on Dion and the HPCUs, which I thought, and it crystallized it for me and a lot of people who I think watched it because with Progressive's name, your price tool, you can find options that fit your budget because giving you options is the right thing to do. Oh yeah. Like when I hold the door for someone, sure. It may be weird if I don't time it right and they're a little too far away and oh, now they're running and we're both asking ourselves, is it worth it to run instead of just, you know, letting them open their own door? But still it's the right thing to do. So get options based on your needs with Progressive's name, your price tool, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and third party insurers comparison rates not available in all states or situations.

Prices vary based on how you buy. If I get this right, your opinion is that the emphasis on sports is not what HPCUs and I appreciate you having your mom on, but she should have been on longer. How do you only give mom, what, 90 seconds? Was it even 90 seconds? Hey, I didn't have a vote on that. All right.

That seems I wanted more of your mom on the show, but is that a fair assessment from your point of view? Yeah, that sports team is a luxury. Like this is not a luxury property in these schools. These are not luxury entities. The tens and hundreds of millions of dollars is going to take for one school, let alone all of them to get up to the level of competition that we talk about.

There's just a whole lot of other stuff that needs to get done first. And that when I started getting backlash about what I was saying about Dion at every turn, especially most recently, I'm like, so what if they were good at football? Right. Who cares? This isn't a big deal at all. Like, hey, I know they did a little better this year, but go over there to Duke. I don't care if they good at football. Right.

It would be nice. I don't care. Right. You know, it's by the way, central beat him in the, in the bowl game. And I w we talked to, um, the head coach before the game and I asked him about matching wits with Dion and it was just a phone conversation, but sometimes you can hear the eye roll and I could hear the eye roll because I don't believe he had a lot of respect for Dion as a coach.

And I'm, I'm not saying that he should have had respect or shouldn't have had, but he did, but it was clear he did not. And it's going to be a test when he gets to Colorado about the actual coaching. Like he had a talent gap in a swag that you, no matter how open the portal goes for him, they going to get on the field with USC and it ain't going to be like with Jackson state played all corn. It's just not, no, it's, it's well, although in the pact, first of all, Southern Cal is not going to be there very long, right?

Southern Cal and UCLA are leaving and who knows who else is going to be left in a few years if somebody else decides to leave a congratulations on the new time slot. And, uh, I hope, I hope Bill Maher, uh, invites you on his program. Hey man, we're going to try to make that work. I appreciate you as always, man.

I'll talk to you soon. You got it. But Monty Jones at Bemani underscore Jones on Twitter. And now another no brainer money saving tip from progressive. That doesn't sound good. Shredder's jammed, but I think I fixed it. Try shredding these $50 bills. That seems like it's working better. Try another 400 bucks. Instead of using money, use regular paper. And here's a better tip from progressive on how not to waste money. Don't pay too much for car insurance drivers who switch and save could save hundreds progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates potential savings will vary.