Don Van Natta Jr.
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Don Van Natta Jr.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Pablo Torre Finds Out · What NFL Owners Don't Want You to Know, with Don Van Natta Jr. · 7 Feb 2025
podcast
Absolutely. The story would have been very, very different if Hamlin wasn't brought back to life by those incredible paramedics on that field. I wrote the story, Pablo, that the league wanted to keep playing after that ambulance left the field in Cincinnati. Joe Buck said on the national broadcast,
And it was the players. It was the two teams. It was the Bills and Bengals, their coaches on the field, who said, we're not playing. They told the NFL, we are not going to do what you want to do. You talk about how powerful, all-powerful the National Football League is.
That's one of those occasions where from the field, literally from the ground up, the players made the decision of whether there was going to be more football that night.
What does that tell you? It tells me that reflexively the games must go on, no matter what. No matter what. The thought of Roger Goodell and Troy Vincent, who was in the command center that night, is we got to continue. This is a horrible moment. And no matter how the players might feel about it, they're being paid to play. The games must go on.
We absolutely should. And, you know, maybe Mark Cuban was 10 years too early in his prediction, but there's no doubt that football on Christmas, on a Wednesday, if we go to 18 games, if we go to 16 games overseas, and that window every week starts at 930 in the morning, look, there's going to be a lot of people that are going to love every minute of it.
It's the one sport that is truly built for television. And it's a communal experience. The last one left, arguably, in America. And then on top of it, it's hardwired to nostalgia. So many of us, right, grew up watching football with our dads or our moms or our brothers. And it has this stranglehold on our emotions.
And so we check at the door any concerns about DeMar Hamlin and what happened that night, about the fact that, okay, maybe they are being a little too hoggy. And there's, you know, teams playing three times in 10 days, as we saw this season. And again, we don't like it intellectually, but emotionally, we're there. Emotionally, we're all in. And I think they know that.
And I think that's what, quite frankly, Pablo— Why Roger now looks so confident when 10 years ago he was the deer in the headlights is that he knows it and all the owners know it. No matter what happens, the game is almost, it feels like, indestructible.
Yeah, Dee Smith. Yeah, addictive, indestructible, and so far that bet has paid off.
It's great to be with you, Pablo. Thank you. See you in 10 years.
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