The Bill Simmons Podcast
So Long, Rodgers, Plus a Football History Deep Dive With Cousin Sal and Chuck Klosterman
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What topics are covered in the Steelers-Texans game recap?
The Bill Simmons Podcast brought to you by FanDuel Sportsbook. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, which has the Rewatchables, a movie podcast that I host. We're putting it up on Tuesday this week. We did What Lies Beneath, so go check that out wherever you get your podcasts, including a video on Spotify.
Coming up on this podcast, Cousin Sal and I are going to talk about the Steelers-Texans game, the end of Aaron Rodgers' career, what this means for the Patriots this weekend, and a whole bunch of football subplots. And then... BS Podcast Hall of Famer Chuck Klosterman is here, and we are going to have a wide-ranging, really fun conversation about 100 years of football. That's all next.
We're going to take a break, and then Cousin Sal. The Bill Simmons Podcast is presented... by FanDuel. FanDuel's got it all. Same game parlays, quick bets for jumping in live. They have your way. Go check out your way. You can build the bet that fits your play, your way. Plus don't miss out on the NFL playoffs. One of my favorite times of the year, all month long.
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The voodoo has run out, Cousin Sal. No longer will we have Aaron Rodgers in the playoffs. We might not have him in the NFL. His career ends on a pick six. I don't know if that's the bigger storyline of the game, that that might be it. Is it Mike Tomlin might be done with the Steelers, or is it, whoa, Houston, let's take them seriously.
What is it for you? Oh, I don't think it's Houston. Let's take them seriously. Because the last 25 minutes of that, you were licking your chops. You loved that Houston was coming. I mean, you'd rather have the Steelers, but that Houston team was kind of a disaster aside from the defense, right?
Yeah, I don't want to end up on the Houston bulletin board as a Pats fan.
You did it with the Chargers. It worked.
Well, the C.J. Stroud performance. I mean, we had the Houston's defense outscored Pittsburgh 14-6. The defense turned it up.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Aaron Rodgers' potential retirement?
And so we did.
So I went 0-5 too. And my record in Ringo 107 now is 40-55. I went two and four with my picks, but somehow went 0-5. And now it's like, I want to go the other way. I want to make history. What's the worst record I could buy? This season is now a throwaway. I have years in the past where I've done well. I just didn't have it this year. It's fine. It's like the Chiefs.
Chiefs have done really well in the past. They had a shit season this year. I want to see how bad this can get. I'm not changing my process. I'm not doing the George Costanza and going the other way. I'm just going to keep it going and see what I end up with. Because we did terrible in over-unders. We did terrible in the Springer 107, or at least I did.
And it's like, I just want to throw this shit year away. I'm going to come back next year like Rocky and Rocky IV. I'm going to be lifting logs. I'm going to be, I'm going to go on vacation with my wife and my alcoholic buddy, whoever that is. Just go to Russia. Yeah. Multiple alcoholic buddies.
Yeah.
Oh man, there's a joke both of us want to make.
I'm not going to do it. Yeah, so many jokes. We should do 20 minutes on this.
But yeah, I'll be back next year and I don't care how bad it gets this year.
Listen, 11-0 is great for the playoffs, right? There's 11 games. Now there's 12. 12-0 is the best you could do. Oh no, it's 13-0. 6-4-2-1. Yeah, 13-0 is the ideal. 13. Okay, so 13-0 is the best. But yeah, but 0-13 is the second best thing you could do. I mean, that's pretty remarkable.
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Chapter 3: How did Houston's defense perform against the Steelers?
Marks was good. The problem with Marks, and I had him on both fantasy teams... he would just be out of the game. He would have a good first quarter and he'd be like, whoa, what do you mind? And then all of a sudden that was it. You never saw him again. He actually played the entire game this time around. So we think the odds of neither of them coming back to Pittsburgh, what would you put them?
Rodgers and Tomlin. Now I'm going to get confused.
For neither of them coming back. They're both gone. Uh, so I would think it's minus.
I would say that's like minus, minus one 25 range.
Yeah. Yeah. Right in there. I probably contradicted myself here though, but yeah. Right. One's a fairly, one's like minus three 50 and one's like closer to even. Yeah.
So if I'm Tomlin, I, I want the Atlanta job. Yeah. That job's still open. They're interviewing people. As we've discussed many times on this pod, I thought that team was legitimately talented. They shot themselves in the foot. They lost a bunch of dumb games. They have a really good nucleus. They're in a weird division that I don't think is good.
And he could switch conferences, start over, give them that kind of energy you need when you finally have a good coach again. And that would be my preference for him. Giants would also be fun.
My hot take for 26 was one of them, aside from you eating pizza in three weeks, is that Tomlin does go to Atlanta. Oh, interesting. What about this? Baltimore?
You like the NWO move? This is what Billy Gill was pushing.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the Texans-Patriots matchup?
I miss seeing him in the freezing cold. That's good. So Steelers had 175 total yards today. But this is a weird game. We're going to remember it as 36. I genuinely thought the Steelers were going to win up until that 50 yard pass. And as soon as they went up 10, six, I felt like the game was over unless they Steelers could pull their garbage, whatever.
Right. I mean, we were at one point saying, geez, CJ Stratton, just take a knee and punt, right? Because it was that bad for Rodgers and stuff. And that was probably around the third quarter. But yeah, then he completed that pass. It was like game.
Our buddy Hench texted us that his initials stood for choke job. I loved it. He took a break from his 1778 takedown of the French.
He made up for four hours of American Revolution talk with that one punt. Good job by you.
It was pretty solid.
What are you thinking? Forget about the line for a second. I'm ready to move on. I'm ready to move forward. Are you more confident before this game, the opponent, the next game, or after the game now?
I watched the Pats game again. Mm-hmm. So we came on right afterwards. We're going live on Netflix. Yeah.
By the way, are we on YouTube today? No, no. We're still on Netflix.
Oh, good. Yeah. All right. Yeah, we're right next to that Jon Bernthal show with the His and Hers. Oh, yeah. Which is, I got to say, a little bit on out of time with Denzel Washington's Corner. I don't know if you saw that movie from 20 years ago. Yeah, yeah. The real ones, no. It's a little on the corner. I still enjoyed it. I support my guy Bernthal. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: Why do Americans prioritize the Super Bowl over elections?
But people still watch the Super Bowl more than they watch the election results. I mean, there's no comparison to this in other countries, right? You know, soccer is the sport of Europe. In many countries, it's almost like their combination of football, basketball and baseball and hockey altogether. And yet we would never see in Europe
You know, in Norway, that 93 of the 100 most watched events were a sport. I mean, people in Japan love baseball. It would never be a situation where 93 of the 100 most watched Japanese broadcasts are baseball. Like this is like America is different in a lot of ways.
Chapter 6: How has football evolved compared to other sports?
This is one of them, you know.
Well, it's funny that football has evolved perfectly as the decades has evolved, whereas other sports have not. Like I think about tennis and no fault of tennis, but the players just became more durable during matches, right? You have these matches that are like five and a half hours, five hours, four hours and 48 minutes. And it's kind of like the players out
grew the sport in some ways where I actually think they, they could probably think about changing the rules. I'm not sure anyone wants to be there for five.
That was always McEnroe's things like make him go back to wood rackets.
We, or make it like four games a set or something. But so I, I used to love tennis more than I do now. And I, now I watch Wimbledon and I'll watch us open and that's really it. But for the most part, I don't want to spend five hours watching a tennis match.
Although this is a, this is another thing that sort of complicates this conversation. I mean, could tennis find a way to become more popular in the way that baseball found a way to make some real changes and become... I mean, baseball is a better experience now on TV. The last World Series is evidence, you know? Yeah.
But yet something like, you know, tennis or track or any of these things, like... they don't really need to be this thing that 80 million people care about. Like they can be their own thing and then kind of evolve in their own way. But now football can't do that anymore. Football can only get bigger. The NFL can only expand and that's what makes it fragile.
That's why like, you know, at the end of this book, I talked about this idea of how, you know, football can kind of collapse. Right now, that seems insane. Right now, it seems more likely that football would swallow up every other sport. And that's all we would have. But nothing works that way. People change. The world changes.
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Chapter 7: What impact does coaching have on football performance?
And it was the only part of your book that I disagreed with vehemently. Really? So you agreed with the part about Tom Brady and Jim Thorpe.
No, it was just when you talked about how commercial money, not to spoil it, but commercial money was going to go away and they wouldn't be able to replace it. I actually think they're always going to be able to find a way to replace the money. And you're already seeing it now. You never could have predicted the streamer stuff. They'll keep making the schedules longer.
They'll keep selling these one-off games. And I just think as long as the ratings and the interest are where they are, the money's going to come from however people consume it. And what the real thing we've learned is that people, you mentioned this earlier, it's more fun to stay home and watch all the games than it is to go to a game.
It's the only sport where you can definitively say like, why would I go to the game? I'd rather watch it because it's more fun to watch at home.
There are many reasons to go to a pro football game or a college football game, but one of them can never be, I want to see the game better. That will that can never be it. The two things I want to say before we move on to this, though, it's like the thing you say about how as long as there's interest in the sport, they'll find different ways to pay for it. That's possible.
Like, you know, it's I think certainly in the way we are now, let's say advertising disappeared tomorrow.
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Chapter 8: How will NIL and transfers affect the future of college sports?
I think that the NFL could sell these games a la carte.
But why would advertising disappear, though? It's never going to disappear. People are always going to have to tell other people about their product.
But here's why I would say this. The reason I think that at some point the idea of commercial advertising particularly is going to disappear is Because we don't have any proof that advertising works now. The only thing we know about advertising is that it can introduce people to a product that they've never before experienced.
So if someone has never had a Budweiser and they see a commercial for Budweiser, it introduces that into their life. But if they see a thousand Budweiser ads, it's not necessarily going to make them want to drink it more. So advertising is already a gamble. It's just the best thing that we have if you're a company or a corporation.
It's a little tautological, too, because it's like, well, we advertise a lot and our company is successful. So we put more money into advertising and it stays successful. I think that there is going to be a realization in the future that advertising is a lagging indicator of everything.
And that the amount it costs, not just to create ads, but to pay for them, to pay whoever, Fox or Prime, whoever is showing them, isn't worth it. And that's going to be a sudden sort of sea change, right? There's going to be this sudden realization that what these platforms and these networks are paying for this sport It's not going to work.
Suddenly, there's going to be a collective bargaining agreement, and the amount of money is not going to go up. for covering the NFL. It's gonna go down. And there's going to be a work stoppage. And the bigger thing here, Bill, and this is the key point, is that I think the human relationship to football is already starting to change.
And 40 years from now, which is two generations, the average person, their only relationship to football will be it's an entertaining distraction that's on television. And if there's a work stoppage, they're not going to care. If there was a work stoppage now, people would lose their fucking mind. They'd be like, what am I going to gamble on? What am I going to do on weekends? How do I live?
When the strikes happened in the 80s, and football wasn't as big as it is now then, but it was big. And people were like, we want these games back. We need these games back. I can imagine a time in 50 years when this happens, and the kind of person who consumes football does not have a hard time living without it. And that's what the thing that we cannot possibly, it's hard to visualize that now.
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