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NFL season is back, which means I return to my fascination with Justin Herbert’s football media reputation. Quoting friend of pod , following Herbert’s disastrous debut against the Arizona Cardinals:

It’s funny to me that the former narrative has totally overshadowed the latter narrative. Herbert-haters, a now growing cadre, tend to invoke the three playoff flameouts while ignoring the larger body of regular season evidence that suggests a lack of an elite baseline. Ironically, Justin Herbert’s status might actually be helped by his infamy as a postseason choker. The well-known knock conveys that he simply has to overcome one issue, as opposed to a few. “But he chokes in the playoffs” is a narrative hurdle more appropriately reserved for an all-time regular season performer like Peyton Manning. But Justin Herbert isn’t that. He just looks like one, in both superficial traits and superficial output. So, how did this happen, and what are Herbert’s actual faults?

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House of Strauss has followed the Fall of Nike since its inception, and it’s a rich topic because there are so many components. The more politically-oriented tend to see this crash as cultural in nature (“wokeness,” according to some), whereas the more business-minded focus on Nike’s disastrous “direct-to-consumer” rejection of retailers.

The failed DTC bid is the more tangible wound for Nike and thus more directly explanatory. I think it can be too tempting for some financial pundits though, especially among the controversy-avoidant, to wholly lean on this functional mistake. It’s a huge reason for Nike’s fall, obviously, but there’s clearly something wrong with that company’s corporate culture beyond nuts and bolts strategic choices. This week’s release of Nike’s widely panned Specter Edition NBA uniforms is yet another indicator of the company’s cultural rot. The people running this place just refuse to accept that sports fans like what they like. They keep trying to appoint a new customer rather than bend to the customer’s preference.

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What a discussion we have for all of you. Topics! Include!

• Why the Clippers’ salary-cap cheating felt like a “victimless crime” only because they failed

• Wos argues the 2019–20 Clippers really were the NBA’s obvious championship favorite

• Was Steve Ballmer’s Clippers tenure actually a massive failure?

• Why today’s sports world increasingly operates on “what can I get away with?”

• Lane Kiffin and college football cheating

• The Patriots’ alleged optical-illusion field-goal trick: clever gamesmanship or just cheating?

• How media relationships — not necessarily money — can buy an NBA owner favorable coverage

• Nike’s collapse: Wos argues the company sacrificed its brand to please Wall Street

• Why Sydney Sweeney has cracked the code for selling sex in an increasingly sexless culture

• Why Sydney Sweeney can seemingly never reach the point of cultural overexposure

• The class politics behind the backlash to LeBron James’ Polymarket ad

• Wos’ friends thought the NBC broadcast was going to bring up Dianna Russini

• Sex, sports media and the fiction that reporters and athletes never become attracted to each other

• How much face has Mike Vrabel lost?

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My exploration of LeBron James’ backlash-stoking Polymarket advertisement brings me to an accidental observation: LeBron is the Trend Closer. Sometimes, his influence has a hand in a trend’s end. Other times, he just has “perfect” timing as a late-cycle indicator. Either way, when LeBron jumps on a movement, it can correlate with that movement’s stoppage. Let’s explore five notable examples:

2019: NBA-China Relationship

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I wouldn’t say this Polymarket ad is the most controversial choice LeBron James ever made, but it’s certainly up there among post-Decision decisions. For one illustrative headline, The Big Lead says: “LeBron James’ Polymarket announcement sparks immediate fan backlash.”

I was taken aback by the scale and fury of the response because, as a comparison point, not many appeared to care when LeBron launched a DraftKings partnership alongside Kevin Hart in 2024 (Bron’s DK partnership has since ended). I looked back at LeBron’s DraftKings announcement, found one critical comment from NBA gambler and former exec Haralabos Voulgaris, but there wasn’t much more than that. The media and fans mostly shrugged at LeBron joining the sports betting gold rush of that era.

As someone who both accepted and backed out of a Polymarket endorsement, I’m interested in why these prediction markets are detested on a greater level than the sportsbooks. There’s a political valence to the backlash, too. Progressive journalists and content creators unload on these PMs in a way they wouldn’t with the books. I’m not saying they’re necessarily wrong to do so, but instead just observing and asking: Why are the gambling companies so much less controversial than the prediction markets these days?

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Some mornings, this newsletter has me thinking about Homer Simpson’s alcohol-fueled car fantasy. In his daydream, Homer’s at the gas station, pumping “one for you,” into the fuel tank and “one for me,” into his mouth.

What I’m saying is, there are certain “one for you” topics that really respond to current customer demand. You can call that “audience capture,” but I just see it as sensible curation. Plus, I’m a lot like the audience, most of the time. Thankfully, we tend to be interested in the same subjects, so “one for you” comes easily. Then there are the “one for me” topics that don’t really do numbers on my end, but happen to be an honest reflection of certain preoccupations, like 2023 House of Strauss Muse Brock Purdy. At the very least, these occasional flights of fancy let you know this site isn’t written by AI.

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Purdy mostly lives in that “one for me” category. I’m fascinated by his hotly debated career arc, but nobody looks to me as any kind of NFL expert. If I go on local radio and make some thoughtless guy-on-the-couch remark about the Golden State Warriors it can get aggregated as, “WARRIORS REPORTER SAYS,” even if I’ve long since retired from that life. If on that same radio station I unspool some 49ers theory I’ve researched for weeks, nothing will happen. And that’s just fine.

There are a couple of you, however, who reached out and demanded I write about Brock Purdy’s lofty showing in recently constructed quarterback stats. So I guess this piece is “one for us.”

Our guy has come out with QBERT and what do you know? Brock ranks first in 2026 “Adjusted QBERT.” The New York Times just came out with their own “QB Index,” cheekily introduced as “A perfect QB stat everyone will love, and no one will disagree with.” Purdy might be the main reason a lot of people will hate and disagree with the ranking: He’s tied for second in QBI. Purdy’s 9-game showing in the 2025 season also ranked him second in advanced analytics standby QBR, right behind Drake Maye.

Meanwhile, in the non-analytics determined rankings, Purdy rates much lower. In the NFL survey-based Mike Sando list, he’s 11th. In the ESPN survey-based rank, he’s outside the top 10. Kyle Shanahan buddy and booster Chris Simms ranks Purdy 17th at NBC.

As Alex Sherman of CNBC frames the forever Brock Purdy status conversation:

The Brock Purdy debate is the same every year.

{Reads through analytics, Purdy No. 1-3 in every advanced statistic.}

"I'd say ... fourteenth best quarterback."

If a quarterback is “overrated” in every advanced metric, perhaps he’s not overrated. He might even be plausibly underrated. So, before Purdy is fed to Myles Garrett and the REM-ready Rams in Australia, let me list the reasons for his general dismissal relative to production. A lot has to happen for a player’s numbers to be this out of alignment with his reputation. In this piece, I’ve comprehensively compiled all the factors.

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1. Draftism

This is the big one. Brock Purdy was, famously, the last pick in the 2022 NFL Draft. It’s all part of his branding, so it’s a sticky designation. “Draftism” is real, across sports. You’d think we could move on, but that’s not how it works. If you’re a late pick, NFL analysts look for confirmation of that prior. If you’re a top pick, NFL analysts look for confirmation of that prior.

2. “The Avengers”

I blame/credit HoS guest Nick Wright for this one. Nick branded Purdy’s surrounding 2023 Niners cast “the Avengers,” an embarrassment of talent riches that could plausibly explain the 262nd pick’s unexpectedly spectacular numbers.

Future Hall of Fame running back Christian McCaffrey gets most of the credit in this category. In 2023 MVP voting, CMC finished 3rd to Purdy’s 4th. The threat of McCaffrey doesn’t explain away Purdy’s historic success on 3rd down, but that narrative worked for a lot of people, especially since the 49ers had a down year in the 2024 season CMC mostly missed. McCaffrey has fallen off a lot since his peak, yet Shanahan still spams his usage, but I digress.

One 2023 narrative for Purdy critics was that he was “dink and dunking” to these superstars who’d then reel off yards after catch (YAC). Since YAC was known to be a calling card of the Shanahan offense, this made some superficial sense of an otherwise confusing phenomenon. It wasn’t statistically true then, and less is true today, but there’s always a lingering effect from an initial frame. Many of these roads lead back to “draftism”: We must make sense of a player who wasn’t supposed to be this good.

3. Shanny Ball

Speaking of Kyle Shanahan’s strategy, a lot of his offensive success is owed to a contrarian focus. Kyle wants his quarterbacks to rip the ball in that valuable middle of the field, interceptions be damned. I believe that all the NFL talk about this genius mysteriously “scheming guys open” obscures how the strategy really plays out: The QB throws the ball into highly-trafficked hell, and the numbers work out on balance.

As I’ve established, Brock Purdy’s main value proposition is uncommon success in that 10-20 yard “intermediate zone.” Brock relies on arm strength less than other quarterbacks because his specialty is a looping curveball that sails over the outstretched arms of linebackers. This throw is why current 49ers Defensive Coordinator Raheem Morris refers to Purdy as “the layer king.” The ball is “layered” to the receiver behind the linebacker and in front of the safety.

It’s a risky pass, even if Purdy happens to be the best at it. Brock has an extremely high 4.64 percent interception rate on these intermediate zone attempts. Based on old school turnover-avoidant football wisdom, he should stay out of that danger zone. But look at the numbers in totality. Purdy’s intermediate throw is completed at a spectacular 67.5 percent rate for a ridiculous 12.0 yards per attempt. While it’s accounted for 16 interceptions, that’s actually well worth it for the 24 touchdowns it’s also yielded. One reason Kyle “succeeds” with his quarterbacks is because he optimizes for what actually works — moving the ball down the field — sometimes at the expense of player reputation. The offense scores, Kyle gets praise for winning, and the quarterback gets crushed because people overreact to interceptions.

4. The Other QBs

Shanahan gets a lot of credit for Brock Purdy’s out of nowhere rise. Some of that is related to how other 49ers quarterbacks have performed. When Purdy went down in the 2025 season, the 49ers managed to go 5-and-3 with Mac Jones playing decent ball. Jones was less than elite, mostly because he can’t really move, but he was above average in suboptimal circumstances.

Mac, who made a Pro Bowl as a rookie for the New England Patriots, isn’t the most shocking of reclamation projects. Still, his winning record helped further the narrative that Shanahan controls these QBs with far greater command than he drives his Tesla.

Ever since Brock popped, there’s been a Shanny halo with quarterbacks. Even if former Brock backup Sam Darnold left the 49ers, Shanahan’s influence is partially credited for his success afterwards. Personally, I don’t believe that Darnold is such a great quarterback, though he’s commendably rebounded from past lows. The Seahawks were arguably the best defense of the last quarter century, but again, I digress.

More pertinent to the Brock analysis is Jimmy Garoppolo, who had similar limitations to Mac Jones, and crushed in basic quarterback stats like “passer rating.” Oft-injured Jimmy G fell apart after his 49ers run, validating the Shanny Halo Effect. I don’t believe Garoppolo’s prime years production (average, according to QBR) should be used as an indictment of a quarterback who’s since greatly surpassed that production, but as previously mentioned, I’ve little purchase on the NFL media conversation.

5. NFL Statistical Stone Age

As I’ve said, the NFL is our most complicated game, analyzed via our dumbest math:

This is charming, in a way, but also sort of insane? In other sports, we’ve accepted the idea that the “eye-test” is often bunk, and must be checked against statistics. As I’ve said, the NFL is stuck in a pre-Moneyball stone age. Because of that, people who know infinitely more about this sport than I do produce rankings that I’ve got good reason to doubt.

I don’t buy the excuses for why the NFL status quo must be so.

So why do I believe that chaotic, violent football shouldn’t be so different? Why do I assume that the most obsessive sports culture almost happens to run on unfalsifiable and thus untrustworthy confirmation bias?

My defense, in a word, is “baseball.” The Moneyball era revealed that the baseball professionals, for all their granular knowledge, had an inability to separate statistical signal from noise. The dumbed down version of this story is that baseball men assumed batting average meant more than it did and that on base percentage meant less than it did. Scouts believed in the ineffable quality of a “five-tool player” versus prioritizing what the athletes actually produced. So why would the NFL be any different?

How is this Purdy-pertinent? Well, he keeps crushing in advanced numbers that few in the NFL seem to care about. Again, as I’ve noted, interceptions are highly overemphasized in NFL media discourse. Sacks, which aren’t listed in the top line of a quarterback’s statistical playoff card, are underemphasized.

I’m not saying that the nerds have it all figured out and there’s now one solitary trustworthy ranking like QBERT. I’m instead saying that the advanced numbers tend to agree on Purdy because they’re all generally measuring the same quality: One’s ability to move the ball down the field as the situation demands. For whatever reason, football developed a lot of trusted data points that are almost orthogonal to that consideration.

6. Injuries

This is the most legitimate slight of all the issues brought up against Purdy in NFL media. He played 9 games last season, and got dinged up throughout the preceding 2024 campaign. His elbow was obliterated in the 2022 NFC Championship by then Eagle Haason Reddick.

One major reason for why Josh Allen is “Josh Allen” is that quarterback’s remarkable durability. Allen’s size and strength aren’t merely useful on the field. As with LeBron James in the NBA, his physical advantage doubles are armor. Allen hasn’t missed a single game due to injury since the 2018 season. He’s a tank. Brock Purdy is not a tank. It’s fair to have less belief in someone whose availability is in doubt.

7. “Physical Traits”

This overlaps a bit with the injury concern. You hear this knock invoked with Purdy and it’s true, to a certain extent. Brock has a mediocre RAS score of 4.51. At roughly six feet tall, he’s short for a quarterback. We don’t have objective arm strength measures, but the rep on Purdy is he lacks a cannon.

Purdy does, however, have one elite trait. For whatever reason, Brock has a super fast 1.61 second 10 yard split, even if his 4.84 40 yard dash time is just OK. This attribute allows Purdy to scramble away from trouble like, as tight end George Kittle puts it, a “Jesus Christ lizard.”

So those are my seven factors and I might even have missed a few. Let me know if there are any others. Happy NFL season, folks.

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It was a terrible college football weekend, nearly all blowouts. Also, even (and especially?) the media outlets whose job it is to hype this sport ended up devolving into open worry over it. ESPN’s College Gameday, located this week at the seat of CFB controversy at LSU, took to discussing Ted Cruz’s Protect College Sports Act, which includes a provision referred to as “The Lane Kiffin Rule,” aimed at stopping coaches from transferring midseason. LSU head coach Kiffin supports the rule that bans his own infamous move. I’m reminded of Stephen Jackson’s praying hands gun tattoo that exists because “I pray I never have to use it again.”

Nick Saban voiced his support of the PCSA, saying that the proposed bill is imperfect but “80 percent good.” Pat McAfee agreed, offering, “I think 80 percent is better than 0 percent because obviously it’s absolute chaos.” The analysts happily hosted Lane Kiffin while simultaneously coalescing around a position that future Kiffins must be stopped. Game Day somehow doubled as a celebration of both firefighting and arsonists. Once again I ask, before attempting to explain: What the hell is happening in college football?

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We begin with a quote from our guy Nate Duncan, reacting to Wednesday’s NBA announcement of severe KawhiGate penalties for the Los Angeles Clippers:

Maybe my favorite hilariously wrong argument in this whole Clippers saga: Steve Ballmer is really rich and sophisticated so he'd never do something this dumb. People really were saying that after Pablo's first pod dropped.

So I’m on this Ringer Rewatchables kick right now and I love their movie category of:

Vincent Chase Award: “Are We Sure This Character Is Actually Good at Their Job?”

My favorite example is another Vincent, John Travolta’s Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction. Travolta’s Vega has the aura of a super slick hitman, which is why his character remains iconic, but if you go through his track record, as Bill Simmons and company do, the ineptitude on display is staggering. And yet, colleagues treat heroin-zonked Mr. Vega, nattily attired in his back suit and tie, like he’s a valued employee, worthy of implicit trust.

In that vein, I wonder about the general competence of one Steve Ballmer, someone who should theoretically be hyper competent. He’s the richest NBA owner by far. He got the Intuit Dome built. And yet, as we sift through the Clipper wreckage, I ask: Are we sure this character is actually good at his job? Did the 9th richest man on the planet mostly just get lucky?

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I think you know what this podcast is about. Amin Elhassan of gives an insider’s perspective on the reporting that led to the Clipper Death Penalty. We talk about the media reaction to and through the news, including why ESPN reporting misdirected people as to the NBA’s ruling.

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On Wednesday, the NBA shocked many in the basketball industry when it gave the Clippers an effective Death Penalty over its Kawhi Leonard scandal. The Clips were sentenced to a loss of five future first-round picks, plus some other penalties we’ll get into later.

This is now both a big NBA scandal and a fascinating sports media story. On August 17th, ESPN published a multi-bylined article titled, “Sources: NBA has no evidence Ballmer funneled money to Leonard via sponsors.” A lot of people are asking me about this piece today, seeing as it misled many, including myself, into thinking the league was about to go light on Steve Ballmer’s team. Last night, I endeavored to figure out just what the hell happened. There are paradoxes on paradoxes. For one, the NBA’s outside law firm findings are arguably more damning than ’s famously skewering investigative work into how the Clippers benefited Kawhi Leonard outside of the salary cap. We were girded for soft-pedaling right up until the moment NBA commissioner Adam Silver dropped the axe.

So, why was the basketball world’s expectation so out of step with a result that now makes a lot of sense?

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This week brought a lot of 10th anniversary Colin Kaepernick protest retrospectives in sports media, which then inspired arguments over who he was/is and what he meant/means. My interest is less about the man himself who, whatever you think of him, appears to have done what he did absent cynical expectation of fame and Nike endorsement. I’m more focused on how so few people still care about his movement, one that grew into a massive, even international, cultural obsession. It makes me wonder: Did so many of my friends, colleagues and peers ever care? Do people care about the core of anything these days?

DeRay Mckesson (remember him?) helped launch the Mapping Police Violence project in 2015, and the project still publishes annual reports. In 2020, nearly every major institution and celebrity made a big show about fighting racialized police violence. According to the MPV data, following all the 2020 protests and riots, police killings have trended upwards. It’s harder to track demography in these matters, but Black people as a share of those killings appears not to have gone down. This somehow feels like the quietest historical footnote to the arguably loudest social movement of my lifetime. How?

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