Shawne Merriman, Former NFL All-Pro Linebacker

We don't usually start the show out with the guests, but when we're told that our pal, Sean Merriman, is going to invade our New York City studios, if we don't say that we're going to bring him on, I'm afraid that he's going to tackle me, or maybe just beat the crap out of Hickey.

And of course, the former Pro Bowl linebacker does a great job with the Lights Out Extreme Fighting League, and they have a big event coming up on August 26th. Sean, great to see you. How you been? I've been good, man. How about yourself?

Well, I'm doing fantastic. I actually want to start you off going back to your college days. So I know you're from Maryland and you played your college ball at Maryland.

Why was that? Because I would imagine a guy that goes in the first round, not everything's handed to you, but you could have gone to a bigger school. Yeah, you know, look, I had I had offers from just about everybody in the country. For me, it was it was more I want to stay home in my own backyard, right? My friends, family, coaches can still come to the games.

And also, too, I've you know, I had this inkling that, you know, in the Washington, D.C. area, the media is big in Washington polls, Baltimore Sun. So I was like, I'm home. This is this is it turned out to be one of the best decisions I made, because for me, you know, to have that base there, my story where I like when I went through going up, it just it gave a lot more motivation to like the kids that grew up, how I how I grew up, because they got a chance to see me firsthand basis.

So I had to trust me. I was tempted to take that visit to Miami because I got my name in late after I verbally committed to University of Maryland. I Miami was coming to my high school basketball games in Washington to play basketball and trying to commit me to get me to go to Maryland.

And it was it was tough. I didn't take a visit. I took no visits at all because I didn't want to go anywhere, man. But Maryland was Maryland was home and best decision I made.

Give me the Sean Merriman basketball scouting report. I feel like you were a bruiser down low in the post. Yeah, I was. Hard screens.

Yeah, hard screens. In fact, I got into basketball because I kept filing out of everything. So I mean, I got the football from filing out from basketball, but I was all county, all state. You know, we grew up playing the same AAU programs with Kevin Durant, Michael Beasley, Nolan Smith. You know, a lot of a lot of guys, we all came to the same AAU program. So if I had to compare my game, I would say Ben Wallace. Right. I was the same way. You know, something like that.

Ben Wallace. Definitely drop 1214 or you give you 10 boards and blocks and elbows attack a file, you know, just just one of those type of games. So sometimes when people stay home, it's a great thing. Other times, there's a lot of distractions. Yeah, with everything that staying home kind of provides you the good and the bad. Do you think that better prepared you for the NFL?

Yeah, a hundred percent. And for one, yeah, I grew up in the Prince George's County, Maryland, Washington, DC area. So I grew up in a time we was really rough there.

So it meant a lot to me to be able to stay home and see that. But I've already went through those obstacles and trials and tribulation. I've went through it.

So what at that point? I wasn't anything new. I think well for me, it was a total opposite.

Like my grandmother and my felt like they didn't play. Right. So if I started to get out of line, I got to call off my grandmother. Like, hey, you better get your act together.

Right. So it kind of it worked out in my favor for the long term, man. But I still work with the University of Maryland a lot. I think I think the world of Coach Loxley and what they're building over there in Maryland. I tell kids all the time.

If you're home, stay home. That's how Miami and they built their dynasties, Ohio State. They built their dynasty, Michigan.

They built their dynasties by getting their top recruits, top players from that area to stay home. So Maryland kid, you get drafted in the first round by the Chargers. What's that first reaction when the Chargers give you that phone call and you know where you're going? Well, initially I was I thought I was going to the Cowboys. So because I went down the flu and met with Jerry Jones and and Bill Parcells.

Actually, Demarcus Ware in his Hall of Fame speech, he brought he brought that up. And so I knew that if I wasn't going to the Cowboys, I was going to the Chargers already. The first time that I've even seen palm trees in person was when I flew to San Diego before the draft. A little different than Maryland. Yeah. I mean, you know, for me, I've seen palm trees on TV.

Right. But in the movies and, you know, we come in and we're flying over the ocean and I'm seeing palm trees for the first time and I'm like, what is what's going on? It's like a movie. And I remember my visit and I'm about to take off.

Are you looking at over the ocean and everything else? And I'm thinking in my head, please draft me, draft me here. Like this is where I want to go. Like I don't want to go. Because I think the red, the red skins were up a couple pigs before that.

They wanted me to stay home. Cleveland was calling. I was like, oh no, I don't, you know. No offense. No offense. I mean, I'm like, you know, San Diego, Cleveland. I mean, come on.

I think that most people would would agree with me there. So I knew that San Diego was going to be the place that I end up getting drafted. And you walked into a team with a lot of talent.

Was that intimidating right away? Because I know, I don't think Junior Seau was there anymore. He left the year before. But, you know, when you're a linebacker going to the Chargers, everyone's going to naturally say Junior Seau, Junior Seau. Yeah, no, 100%. And look, if you walk into a locker room with a Danny and Tomlinson, Philip Rivers, Antonio Gaze, Lorenzo Neal, Jamal, I mean, just go, Donnie Edwards, Randall Godfrey, Keenum McCardell.

I mean, we had so many like vets have been around for a long time. So you're not intimidated, but you know, the expectations are high, right? And you can't get anything past Lorenzo Neal.

Oh, no, no. Lo Neal wasn't letting anything slide. Matter of fact, Lo Neal, he kind of took me out of his wing and I was working out with Lo Neal. By the way, he was in his 12th year and I'm in my rookie season.

And that guy has the craziest motor. And I had and I tried to keep up with him. You know, we'll have to work.

We'll work out every day after practice. I'm like, dude, this is in his 12th year. Like how?

How is this possible? Still going. So yeah, Lo Neal was a was a different beast. Sean Merriman here with us. And those teams, they were fun. Obviously, you wanted to win a Super Bowl.

You wanted to get there. That didn't happen. But there's a lot of times in the NFL where you have great teams that just don't get the job done. And you guys had some really good teams with the Chargers. Yeah, and you know the unfortunate part about that because we base everything on rings championships, right? Which I understand. Well, for quarterbacks and for coaches.

For quarterbacks and coaches. No one else. Yeah, no one else. But I think that when you start talking about some of the greatest teams of all time, we had that. And we won't get mentioned up there with, you know, most of them because we didn't win a championship.

Right? So it's like the greatest team that never won a championship. So that part, I do feel something about. Like when you walk away from the game like, man, I wish I would have gotten in. Like at that part, especially when you're going to do, you're working with other former athletes, right? A former NFL guys who got their rings, their jackets, and you're kind of, you're sitting up there on set with everybody and you're looking around like, I got a ring on, but it's not the one that they're wearing, right? And so, you know, you look back at those teams like we should have won one, if not two.

And that part still kind of bites at me a little bit. And I know this just being a Patriot fan. The year where you guys were 14 and 2, and I'm sure you're tired of talking about this Sean Merriman, and you guys basically had the game one, right?

Brady gets picked off. And then you had the Troy Brown punch out where the fumble goes out. That was just one of those moments where that was the team. That team was a great team.

Yeah. I thought the winner of that game was going to go to Super Bowl now. It didn't happen because the Patriots end up choking to the Colts a week later. And you know, we've always had success against the Colts, right?

Always. And so that was the more frustrating. And I believe that the Chicago Bears went to the Super Bowl that year.

And I'm like, we would have ranchers, everybody. It was just, it was something about the Patriots that we, they capitalize on every mistake we've always made. And you know, I like, when people ask me, I try to throw teammates under the bus. I'm like, but it's hard not to talk about it when somebody bring it up because we did have that, we had that game in the bag. That game was won. And from that point on, this is in 2006, I knew from that point on to never give Tom Brady the ball with two minutes left, right?

Like he just can't have possession of the football with two minutes left in the game because we know what he'll do with it. Were you still there for the AFC title game in, what was it, 07? Against the Steelers, right? No, against the, it was Chargers. I played the game, yeah. Where Phillip had the torn ACL.

All of us, all of us. Being at that game, and you know, I was there, I was like 15 rows off the 50 yard line. I was a lot smaller at the time, obviously, I was a kid. Patriots didn't even play a great game that day, but everyone was hurt for you guys. We walked in, you know, I had a knee, Antonio Gates had a foot, LT had a knee, Phillip had a knee. All of our, all of our big guys were hurt, were banged up. I mean, literally crawling into that week.

Phillip actually had a partially reconstructed ACL surgery that week, just his sculpt, just so he can play in the game. And so we were all beat up and I don't know if you remember how cold that game was. It was like 11, 12 degrees outside. In fact, it wasn't cold for the home team, but you come from the charges. For us, we were freezing. You know, I've almost gotten a fight with Nate Kading for taking up the heat, the heat on the side, like you're a kicker.

Come on. I said, you got to move. It is freezing out here and he's over there hogging up the heater. And I literally picked Nate Kading up and I tossed him.

I said, dude, I'm taking his heater. That's amazing. But yeah, so, you know, even, even then, we felt like we had a shot. I think that game was like 21 to 12, 21 to 14, something like that. I felt like we had an opportunity and they just, they just had our number. You guys had a fun team. Yeah, when I look, when I think of the Chargers and write someone that didn't grow up as a charger fan, you know, as a kid on Long Island, Sean Merriman's here with us. A lot of people would go to school, Antonio Gates jerseys, Lydani and Tomlinson powder blue jerseys, and then your Lights Out dance, everyone loves a good celebration. Heck, if you play now, you would be a TikTok superstar, not only an NFL superstar. Yeah, well, you know, I was just talking to somebody about that and, you know, see some of these guys with big social media following, like Odell Beckham and stuff like, I mean, that Lights Out dance would have been probably everywhere in the world if they had social media back then. And for me, it meant a lot, man, because when I was growing up, you know, I emulated that Deion Sanders, his dance. And, you know, I used to do Merton Hanks. I remember Merton Hanks dance back in the day and he did all these guys.

And so I always said, you know, when I get an opportunity, I'm going to create something to make people feel like how I felt when I was a kid. And that's how the Lights Out dance kind of came about. And what was neat about it is usually think of celebrations. It's wide receivers. Like I remember Ocho Cinco with all the props. Joe Horn with the cell phone to have a linebacker do that. That equally just as frustrates you because if you're a quarterback, you get rocked by Sean Merriman and then he stands up and does the dance and you know, everyone's sending that out everywhere. So what's funny about that is I used to have, you know, I had friends with the other teams and they said, dude, the coaches told us today that they're doing everything to make sure you don't dance. It was, they used to walk up to me before the game and they said, I'm just, I'm just letting you know. It was some time they had a, you know, cut out posters or printed posters and they would slide them under the offensive line's door of me doing the Lights Out dance. That's amazing. And they just said, we're not, he's not dancing today.

And I look at him like, oh, yes, I am. Trust me. When you look at this Chargers team now, you've been around for a little bit, just like your teams, they have so much talent and last year they finally make the playoffs and now everyone's wondering, can they get the job done? Do you see a lot of your teams in this Chargers team?

A hundred percent, actually. And it's probably the first time I've seen in the last several years of them being as close as we were doing those mid-2000 teams. If you look at every position on the field, it's very comparable. Now, I love Austin Eckler, but you know, he's not LT, right?

LT was different. You don't have a 350 pound monster like Jamal Williamson inside, but you got, you know, nice rotating guys. You got great two outside linebacker pass rushers with Joey Bolsa and Khalil Mack and myself and Sean Phillips. You know, you got even a step up back that we had Eric Weller, now you got Derwin, right? So look across the board and how this team is built.

The tackle with Rashawn Slater, we had Marcus McNeil who was no slouch, you know, when he was healthy. So just look at the team and I said this before and I'll say it again. If they have an opportunity to win a Super Bowl, it's going to be right now with this group and they got about, I would say a two or three year window to win one with this team that they have right now. And the two concerns I have, health, you can't control it, but we saw the injuries run rampant last year with them. And then it's the coach and Brandon Staley because until he gets the job done, this is a guy that is super duper aggressive and he's going to live and die by that and it could come back to bite them.

Well, it has, it has, right? But one thing I'll say this and I like Brandon Staley a lot. And in fact, he, I was one of the first people he called when he got, when he signed on with the Chargers. And we had, he called me at night out the blue. I just answered the phone.

It was him and we talked on the phone for like 20, 30 minutes and he was talking about the importance of having some of the former guys who kind of made the organization what it was to come back around and be more involved. Which is nice. Which is, which is smart, right? Especially with the move. Which, yes, which is smart because at the end of the day, you know, I see the great, the really good coaches do that. The other ones, they want to change everything around, forget what happened in the past.

That doesn't, that doesn't make any sense, right? You want, you want the guys that people know, they're familiar with, they're respected, that built a culture around the organization. So he called. I think Brandon Staley's only issue was just some of his plate calling early on when he was younger, right? Like, you know, when he first came in.

Just being riskier, you know, maybe being a little bit cocky, you know, just having that young kind of feel like I'm trying to, I want to bring a different energy around here. And sometime it worked out and sometime it didn't, but I think that most people are going to harp on the times it didn't. When all the times it did, no problem.

Everything's good. The times it didn't, oh, I can't believe he went for it on that. I'm like, well, the other times it did. The biggest, the biggest move this offseason I think that they made, that no one's talking about as much is Kellen Moore, right? When you look at that Jacksonville Jaguars game and them getting put out of the playoffs last year, what did they do? They let their foot off the gas. They stopped throwing the ball down the field.

It was a dink and dunk. Let's play it safe. Let's be conservative.

And that came back and bit them. Kellen Moore ain't like that. Kellen Moore's not coming in there and playing this dink and dunk football and let's play it safe. He is throwing the ball down the field.

He's going to stretch the field and open the playbook up. So you being someone that was on those teams that were really fun teams and right with your experience, let's say you were still in that locker room. What do you give, like what type of advice would you give those guys so they're in the best position to get over that hump? It's so hard when you have a team as good as they are on paper to not buy in how great you guys are, right? We all, the players ran the team back when I played. Yeah, Marty Schonheimer was great. We had great leadership. We had Wade Phillips there, Greg Monunsky, John Pagano. We had a great coaching staff, but the players, we ran, you know, we had the voice of the team, right? If practice should be over, L.T.

is going to say, hey, RIT time, basically, we're going to play golf, right? We ran a team and so what needs to happen is the star players, the Derwin Jameses, the bigger Khalil Mack, Joey Bolsas, they need to step up and kind of show everybody else the way. Because even when I came in as a rookie, I saw Drew Brees and Lorenzo Neal and all these guys, how they went about their business. And I was literally in the back like, okay, he did this, Lo Neal goes and hit the gym at the practice around 3.35.

So I was watching them. And so what needs to happen is those guys need to lead that organization and team and show the rest of the young guys how it's done. Did you know Sean Merriman?

Because I know he leaves and he was already a Pro Bowler, Drew Brees, but he goes on to be one of the all-time great quarterbacks. Did you guys know how great he was? Yeah.

When he went to New Orleans? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. But you got to think too, I was 25 or 30 feet away from when it happened to his arm.

Yeah. I mean his arm dislocated, his shoulder did and it sounded like a tree branch breaking, like a thump. You heard it. And I walked, he walked over to the sideline because his arm was out of the socket and you just, you've never seen anything like that before and I watched him put it back in. I also seen Drew Brees working during the off-season with Todd Durkin in San Diego, which I used to train, meet him, Darren Sproles, a couple other guys who go and train with him, and I watched him not be able to throw a pass five yards. Then three weeks later, he's throwing 15 yards. Three weeks later, he's throwing 30 yards.

Three weeks. So I watched this consistency of him getting back there. There is no one in the world that would have guessed that Drew Brees would have came back and performed the way he did after the injury he had.

It's not supposed to happen. But I got an opportunity to see it during the off-season. I'm talking about like, there was no cameras around and people had to leave when he started throwing a football because he couldn't throw five yards. And then it became, a few more weeks later, he started progressing and I'm talking about like a serial workaholic, like crazy.

You just watch it during band work hours and this and that. He wouldn't stop. No one, I got a first-hand look at everything, but for the most part, if you knew that injury he had and see what he accomplished and how he finished, that's next to impossible to do. No one else could have done that other than Drew Brees. Sean Merriman here with us.

We'll talk about Lights Out Extreme Fighting in just a bit. Last time you were on with us, you talked about how going to Buffalo was such a great experience and for you personally, the way the fans embrace you and to see that culture was just so unique. Last year, everyone knows the story of DeMar Hamlin and I was on the air that night on Monday. I assumed the worst, just like everybody else and it was one of the scariest things you've ever seen on a football field to now see videos of him running around at practice. Catch the interceptions.

Interceptions, taking it to the house. That just got to make you feel so good. It does, man.

It does. And then also, when I talk to what I call normal, like my friends, I call normal people, right? Because when you play football, you're not normal. So you're wired a little different. And you know, my normal friends were saying, why did he go back and play football? Like he almost died.

And I said, well, because that's how we're wired. Yeah. Well, he's not going to stop playing after that. He's going to go back to doing what he loved doing and he's not going to walk away because some of those guys feel like they quit or they got defeated. And so just the mind and the mentality that's in a football player, the guy that we almost watched on national TV die is right now catching interceptions in training camp. And so it made me feel, it made me feel good, too, because I understand the psychology that goes back into the reason why he went back and played. That's what makes him happy.

That's what he wanted to do. But to see the city of Buffalo, I can't say this enough. And when I go and talk to other people about my time in Buffalo, like you, I can't really put it into words because I it was I was blessed to be able to experience it.

You watch it on TV. You see the Bill's mafia and I'm doing the crazy stuff in a parking lot and all that. But until you walk on the street down Chippewa downtown or you go somewhere and the guys are just walking by you and saying, hey, what's up? Lights like you a third, second or third cousin. I mean, it's it is it is unbelievable how they make you feel like family there.

It's crazy. So my sister and my cousin both attended a university at Buffalo, SUNY Buffalo, and I would go visit them. And on Saturdays, my cousin would wake up and he would go to garage sales to like buy things. And it was just such a Buffalo thing and every garage sale because he did it ever since.

The people would treat him like he was family. And I always go back to it. Buffalo, it's it's family, it's food and it's football. Right. And and what's better than that? Yeah, nothing, nothing. And, you know, like I said, I was scratching and screaming not to go because they were on seven when I got when I got a release and released a wave than when I got there.

But Buddy Nicks, man, he was not letting up, you know, at the time the general manager. He said, I don't so I don't care. We're bringing you out here no matter what. That's great. I'm like, Buddy, I'm not coming. I'm like, I love you.

I'm not coming. And so I think you see that now that Zach Martin is getting fine. What, twenty five, thirty thousand a day or something like that? I think fifty. Fifty thousand? Yeah, fifty. They told me twenty and I couldn't wait to get there. Fifty thousand. He's getting five fifty thousand a day. And I'm like, I can't stomach that.

There's nothing that's going to make me feel good. At the time when I did it, they told me it was going to be twenty thousand. Twenty, twenty five thousand a day. And I told him, I said, look, what time you got sitting in that jet?

Right? I'm getting on a plane. I'm coming because I'm not, I can't stomach losing twenty, twenty five thousand a day. So tell me about all the latest with this Lights Out Extreme Fighting League that you're running. You guys got a big event coming up Saturday, August 26th. Yeah, we got a huge event in San Diego. First time, first time I'm going to San Diego to have a fight. This is going to be really cool because it's going to be outside, outdoors.

We got like drones flying over the mountains. We got some really, really cool stuff. And we'll be live on FUBO, August 26th. So if you guys don't have FUBO Sports, get it. We just broke it in top five or top ten now. Most watched on FUBO Sports.

Appreciate it. And they got it. They got a bunch of great, like it's a great platform. FUBO's a great platform because of all the capabilities it can do. They got international soccer and all this stuff.

And then you look up there and it's like, oh, Lights Out. How did you guys pop up, you know, pop up here in these numbers? But they've been great to work with.

And it's just fun, man. These next up and coming superstars that won't have a chance to fight in a lot of other places, be seen, be promoted, progress their careers. Some of these guys want to go to the UFC at some point, which we don't have a problem with if we can't pay them. Like, well, I'll drive to Dana and those guys myself. But we have the next up and coming superstars of the sport with Lights Out Extreme Fighting. So how'd you get involved in this?

Because sometimes guys leave the NFL and they don't know what to do in life. We were talking about it, right? You had some opportunities at WWE, but how'd you get involved with Lights Out? Yeah, I actually started training back in 2005-2006 with our buddy Jay Glazer.

He introduced me to Randy Couture. From that point, I just started working a lot of hand combat during the off season. I want to get better at the outside.

It's an outside linebacker and pass rusher. I didn't think nothing of it, right? Fast forward, I ended up falling in love with the sport. I'm like, okay, I'm kind of, I'm kind of good at this thing and I started getting better. So every off season I started training with more and more MMA guys and I would start bringing some of my other guys.

I even got Lydani Thompson in the ring a couple times. Did you really? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. How was LT? He can go. Really?

Yeah, LT can go. Okay. I always, I joke around and say, you know. I'm actually surprised by that. I love LT. Yeah.

But I'm kind of surprised. I'm not expecting to be a good MMA fighter. I got him in the boxing gym with me. LT can go.

He can go. And so I ended up launching Lights Out Extreme Fight in 2019. I was fortunate enough to work with, you know, I was at the NFL Network, WWE, and with the production crew, the production team. So I understood TV production and how those things go. You know, working with different casinos and venues and I knew it.

And so it was, it was a right time and right opportunity along with just me being around this space of 17 years. So now we're at FUBO, FUBO TV. We just broke into the top five or top 10 or something like that. I think it's top five, but it won't tell me. Broke into their top five and it's been fun because we're showing Canada, France, and some parts of Spain. And so I know that whenever we air stuff and I start getting followers from like France or Spain, I'm like, okay, they don't watch American football out there. So I know they must be watching. You know it's working. I know it's working to fight.

So it's been cool, man, to watch it grow as it has. So for you, when you started to get involved in the actual fighting, you talk about, right, you have that NFL mentality of if I could dominate the NFL and be a big personality, it's probably easy to get into the fight game. Are you ever humbled in that moment where it's like, okay, it's not as easy as I thought? Yeah, I had a, I had a 185-pound wrestler. NCAA D2, 185-pound wrestler take me to the ground and I couldn't get up. And you were shocked.

I was, I couldn't figure it out. Did he do the Lights Out dance? No, he was just, he was talking to me the whole time he was down and it was frustrating the hell out of me. And I'll get up, I'll find a way to find a way back to my feet.

He would take me back down again. I mean 15, 20 times, I could not. And I just, I walked out of the gym that day and I felt so defeated. And I couldn't understand how this 185-pound guy took me down.

I got him by 80 pounds, right, or close to it. And so that, that part of it, the discipline of me, the me wanting to get better, it just, I started doing it more until I figured it out. And I think that, look, I think that every former athlete should pick up some form of combat sport when they're done. I just had this conversation about a couple months ago with Brian Cushing. Brian Cushing is, he does jiu-jitsu.

He's also, he does jiu-jitsu. And so we have more and more guys that are kind of venturing off to this combat sports space. You're not going to get the guy that played 10-plus years, right?

You won't get him, but you're going to get some guys who had a decent career, played five, six, seven years, maybe. That still have that itch. That still have that itch to go and compete.

Those are the guys we're looking to transition because now there's money in the sport. When I retired in 2013, I remember asking another organization who bought a half a million bucks. They looked at me like I was crazy. Like, what? You never had a fight, a half million bucks?

I'm like, now they're throwing you a half million bucks because they know that we're going to sell pay-per-views. And so the model has changed a little bit. So you got a guy with a decent name, right? He came out of Alabama, Ohio State or whatever, right?

Played a little bit in the NFL. And now he's training to fight. He's going to get more eyeballs than the average Joe that's kind of starting out in the sport. So now it's easy to transition some of these higher tier guys. And you clearly have to have the skills. Yeah. But it's also the entertainment value in selling the fights where someone that had a personality like you, I'm sure it helps.

Yeah, 100%. You know, obviously you got to promote and sell the fight. And then the third part of that is you got to fight, right? You got to actually be able to fight.

So it's a combination of all three. Put on a good show. Look, Jake Paul and they did his fight the other day. I wouldn't necessarily call that a boxing match. It was entertainment.

It was. And it was entertainment and entertaining for all 10 rounds. And you know that there's so much money in boxing. Yeah, it's a lot of money. And believe it or not, there's money in MMA if you match it up right with the right two people. There's, you know, there's guys right now. I know this training. I was about to sign two guys from the XFL, actually two weeks ago.

And they ended up getting called up to the NFL. Wow. And so I said, look, we'll be here.

Yeah. Go take that. Don't go take that opportunity because I know how hard it is to get that shot into the NFL. And I said, what are you guys ready? Well, we'll get going. Sean Merriman here with us.

I want to end you with some quick hitters here. Best NFL memory. 2006 Raiders game Monday Night Football.

I think I got them for like four or five sacks or something like that. When you're in a game like that, where you're just constantly on the quarterback, you just feel invincible. Did you just go to a different level? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, you're out to levitate, man. Nobody can tell you. It's nothing they can do at that point to block you because it's, you've already made up your mind that, you know, poor Robert Gallery that, you know, that day.

But yeah, when you get into a zone like that, it's not, it's nothing really anybody can do. Toughest offensive lineman you've ever had to go up against? Walter Jones. Wow.

Okay, that's a good one. That's a Hall of Famer. Who's the QB? You never seem like a real nervous guy, but a QB that when you were getting ready to prepare him, you're like, I can't sleep. Peyton? Not Brady.

No. Why was that? And people gonna, people gonna throw shots at me for saying this, but I think that Tom, I think Peyton Manning was the greatest quarterback.

Why is that? Well, it was his intangibles. I don't, look, I look at rings as a team sport, right? And that's why whenever anybody talked to me about Philip Rivers, I'm like, he's going, he should be in the Hall of Fame. You can't say he don't have any rings because we played on a team, right? Individually, Philip Rivers is the Hall of Famer. Peyton Manning had intangibles that Tom Brady just didn't, right?

And a stronger arm, the way he processed everything. What made Tom, in my opinion, and I'm playing them both, and I hate comparing, I hate doing this because I think that whenever you give props to one person, one player, you're saying the other one isn't good. And I'm definitely not saying that. I'm just saying that if, I would rather play Tom Brady as the individual, right? Not the team Bill Belichick and everybody else involved.

They're scheming, they're game planning. I'm talking about just the attributes of Tom Brady. Peyton Manning was better. And so it's just his way about it, the way he called plays, the way he would seek out a defense, know what you're doing, quick snap you, hard count you, knew it. It would tell you during the plays who's doing what. He would talk to you and tell you. You can line up in that gap where you want to and show you're not, you know, Sean, you're not coming there.

You're coming here. He would say that mid-game. And so when you're playing against somebody with that type of knowledge and that type of control on a football field, he would analyze from one wide receiver to this wide receiver all through the field and would tell the defense exactly what they're doing. And so in my opinion, Peyton Manning was the greatest quarterback. The thing I'll just say about that is you're not wrong in terms of the skills that Manning had and what he was able to do. But doesn't that make Brady even more impressive because when you're drawing up the ideal quarterback, people don't draw up Tom Brady and no one was able to stop him pretty much for 20 years.

Yeah. And that's another debate, you know, because there was nobody that competed like Tom Brady, like how he competed, his mentality to not want to lose and what he would do and the mindset he had to not lose. There was nobody on that level ever, in my opinion, who would just would not lose for nothing.

Right. So that I would give the edge to Tom Brady. But we're talking about just the physicality and what they were capable of doing.

Peyton Manning was capable of doing a whole lot more than Tom Brady was. Who's your favorite teammate ever? Man, we were so tight.

It's tough to pick. It's tough to pick, man, because, you know, one day I'll be with LT, one day I'll be low-nil, Jamal. Phillip Rivers used to, you would think a quarter, but Phillip would just come and sit in the middle of all the D-line and the linebackers. There was no set clicks where the cornerbacks hung with the cornerbacks or the wide receiver.

No, we were all pretty tight. And the last thing I'll ask you, so you have this lights-out fighting league. Let's say back in your day, in your prime, this was around, you could fight one player. Who would it be? Anybody. Anybody. Doesn't matter who. Yeah. Yeah. There's not one guy in particular that you're like, oh, I had some good battles with him. I'd love to see him again. I'm trying to think of an old lineman. I hate it.

Pretty much all of them. I would say John Runyon. He's my boy now. Oh, John Runyon? John Runyon. We were actually teammates. I was his intern back in Philadelphia when he did radio. Big John Runyon. Now he's a big job in the league. Yeah. Yeah.

Now John's a man. But yeah, I would, maybe him. My boy Richie Incognito probably, we're pretty close. That would be a great fight.

You against Richie would be wonderful. Yeah. I think people will want to see that.

All right. So before we let you on out of here, once again, you have the big event coming up on Saturday, August 26. Lights-out, extreme fighting. If people have not watched this yet, what's your message to them to give it a try? You're watching the next up-and-coming fighters of this sport.

They are laying it on the line. Everybody that's fighting there, you can tell they're stepping in there with a mission to get further in their careers. Whether that's UFC or whatever, maybe a bigger deal with us. There's a different type of energy with lights-out, extreme fighting that we bring. And you can tell it during a broadcast.

You can tell it and the people that come there. We'll have probably close to 2,000 plus people there at this fight. A lot of military also will be there at this fight as well. And so we have the next up-and-coming guys.

We have the next up-and-coming superstars of MMA. Well, continued success. I always appreciate your perspective when you join us. Once again, make sure you check it out.

FUBO TV, Saturday, August 26. He, of course, is Sean Merriman. Sean, thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me on.