Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Green left, twin, Z-Short tight, pass 37, Buster Nudge, Y-Floody, Sting, X-Spear kill, 33 tight and left.

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Yeah, I didn't know, Nate, if you would want to even be seen with me at this point on camera at all, frankly, after what I said.

Why? You came after my career? Okay. You said, My career Career, there's no need for someone to explain. We do not need this in this world right now. There is enough sports out there, sports media to consume. We don't need that niche bullshit, Nate.

So Okay. It's something that I am going to have to do some work to clarify what my actual intention was when I went and co-hosted Dan Leventard's show in Dan's absence and said stuff like this. Can I express an observation about how we've evolved at talking about sports? Because we've gotten to a point where jargon, where being confusing and extremely technical has become mainstream. I just want to know when we decided this was a thing. It's not often where I have to text a friend or someone who I considered a friend and be like, just FYI, this was not about you. Because I felt the walls closing in. I really did.

I saw the quote. I actually listened to the whole thing. I know that's a foreign concept for a lot of people. I was listening to the entire clip. You grinded the tape. I did grind the tape.

You grinded the tape.

The audio tape. But I did grind it and I listened.

I think Dan Orlowski is really good at what he does. I think he's the guy who is probably the best at the telestration and the breaking down and the dissection. But it just feels like a lot of people nodding at something that they think they should be impressed by as opposed to actually knowing what's happening. It's like you're a nerd that came to sports, and now you're like, Sports are too nerdy. I just think we fetishize-I know what it is.jarget. I became a An anti-intellectual avatar, which is a weird position for me, specifically, to be in.

There's a Pablo's Dictionary account, isn't there?

Yes, PTFO Dictionary. You dummy. All right. So if today feels like a national holiday, it obviously should, because the Kansas City Chiefs are hosting the Baltimore Ravens in an NFL regular season game, which means that the biggest and most popular television show in America, by far, is back. And the fact that it is the biggest and most popular television show in America is, of course, obvious by now, but it's still stunning to me. Because I would argue that nobody watches anything more that they understand less. Because jargon, when it comes to how we talk about football, has truly never been more mainstream. Among not just coaches and players, but fans and broadcasters, we have never heard as many people, I would submit, trying to speak in literal code. And some of this is a function now of the Internet and that fragmentation of media. But it is everywhere, as you will see this season, turning jocks into nerds. And now nerds, apparently, into jocks, which I was accused of being while co-hosting the Levitard show this summer, leading to articles and headlines and people accusing me of being, quote, anti-intellectualism incarnate, end quote. Or as respected quarterback's coach Quincy Avery called my general position, quote, quite possibly the weirdest take from a really smart person, end quote.

And so what I wanted to do today was call up a really smart football guy who might have been threatened by my position, Nate Thais, an NFL analyst at Yahoo and the NFL Network, who himself is a former NFL Scout and a college quarterback, and also the son of Mike Thais, the former head coach of the Vikings. And I wanted to start by playing Nate, who also has a couple of other key qualities that we'll discuss. This clip, this clip of Future Patriets quarterback, Drake May, interviewing with the Giants on HBO's Hard Knocks, because this is the thing that triggered me in the first place.

Dundolph and Wright. Dundolph and Wright, 72. Tundra, Float, Angles. Gundalf and right, 72. Tundra, float, H-angle. Gun Dolphin, right? 72. Tundra, float, H-angle. Yeah, so Tundra stands for what? 200s. 200s, and what does float stand for? It's got the corner of the out. We call it a flag. We end up saying corner flag, but it's flag. And the angle is an angle. You got me on that? Easy stuff. Then you use Rita to the right, Linda to the left, it was a flip formation. Good? Rita to the right, Linda to the left. 72, five man protection, slide to the will. If the strength of the formation is right, what formation is that again? Yeah, good enough and right. Yeah, right. He's there. The will's over there. The line would slide there. We'd say 72 Rita.

72 Rita. Got you.

Let's say this before you go to the next- My cynicism is that so much of this stuff is just like terminology karaoke. Can you sing the song? Can you say the words? But as someone who knows the notes, who has sung them himself, what does that mean? Translate that for me, please.

Well, gun is shotgun. If you don't say gun, you're under center. Dolphin, a D word means two by two, meaning two eligible Both the receivers are on each side of the formation. There's three by one, which are T-words, so trips, trio, triple. T-words are three by one, tells different guys the line of anywhere. So D, Dolph and right. Right tells the tight end, the Y, that he's going to the right. The Z always follows the Y, so the Z and Y go right. Then X is always opposite of the call. The X receiver goes opposite of that. Dolphin probably tells him because it's two by two, the F, which would be the slot receiver, goes into the slot away from in the call. So that's just formation. Seventy-two. So again, this comes, they use numbers for the protection. So the seven is a type of protection. The two means it goes to the right. And usually you tag the running back. So 72 means that the back is going to be aligned to the right, and his protection is working to the right, or his route is working to the right. And this looks like, to me, five-man protection based on just how the drawing was.

So 72 means five-man protection, running backs working The offensive line work opposite of that. When he was saying Rita and Linda, that's what he was saying, too. Linda means offensive line call, sliding left. Rita would mean sliding right. Then we get into the concept. Because it's two by two, you generally have to tag both sides. You tag this two-man concept on the left and this two-man concept on the right. Depends on the offense, which one you do first. This one, they seem to be tagging the X side first, so it's float. And you hear him talk about it a little bit. He goes, Well, that's corner So corner-out. Flag is a different term for corner. Float, flag, out, float. And so that's probably how they came to that. Ivan in an offense is float's a formation and not a play call. So again, it gets in the different offenses. Tundra means Tundra means two under. You hear Drake talking about that. An under route is a five yards in in or a cross route, which is exactly what it sounds like, three to five yards, and you run across the formation. And they said H angle.

Angle is the run-back angle route. And then even Drake says that one's pretty explainable.

That It's just fucking insane, Nate. What I appreciate is the degree of difficulty. I do not underestimate that. What I am suspicious of is the way in which people are faunting over this without knowing anything. I think they're more like me. There's a lot of people who are just like, Oh, this sounds good. I'm like, Shouldn't we move past the whole being the... I know. It's Jonathan Lipnicki and Jerry Maguire. It's just like we're all marveling at the kid with the big vocabulary. I'm like, We should probably also strive to know why this is so impressive beyond the fact that it's hard.

Football, more than any other sport, is going to have a ton of jargon because of play calls. And there's no universal term. And there's infinite ways to do things. Yes, there are rules for formation and different things you can do, but you're drawing lines in the sand. So you have to have some universal terms. All right, is the second outside step inside. What would we call that? Slant. Okay, that's pretty universal. Everyone knows what a slant is. But what I've noticed is a lot of people have gotten their hands on real deal playbooks, Kyle Shannonham playbooks, and they're easy to get, actually. It's pretty shocking for me entering media to realize how easy it was to get my hands on some playbooks.

Some black market PDF. Oh, yeah.

The black market. Yeah, black market nerd for sports, for football is pretty good right now. It's booming. Business is a booming. But when going through that, I understood where it's fun learning a different offense. And I think this is what's something that's been misconstrued a little bit with football, even, is that there's more than one way to do things. And I think sometimes when a thing happens with football, a play happens, I'm one of the biggest persons that does this is goes, hey, this is what this is. This is what that play was that just happened. You just watched on Monday Night Football. But what I have noticed is people use the term, the nickname for it, which if I've always found, if you need a definition for the definition, you need to use the word to describe the word, that doesn't work. That's not going to make anyone smarter. I feel like we got to a point where it's like, I recognize that play from Shana and it's like, that's a leak. And it's like, okay, cool. It's a cool touch down. Why did it happen? Why did they call it? There's a Rick and Morty line that nailed this.

Rick makes a joke, and he said, Man, that guy is the Redgrin grumbled to pretending he knows what's going on.

You agree, huh? You like that Redgrin Grumbult reference? Well, guess what? I made him up. You really are your father There's children. Think for yourselves. Don't be sheep. And so the two of us, I will disclose my psychological priors here, right? So I'm the son of doctors. And when I listened to that stuff, and I did not go into anything resembling medical school, spoiler alert, dropped out of the first intro to biology lecture, knowing I could not hang with these people. Listening to Drake May, though, it reminded me of physicians who will say the Latin words for body parts as opposed to what a patient might understand, as if to keep it from the patient's understanding. Nate, the reason why you are my preferred translator here and my guide into jargon is because you have a, I think, specific set of both skills and also inherited psychological traumas, perhaps, from the way you grew up. For people who did not listen to your previous episode with us, which was one of my favorites, about your relationship relationship and your roommate experience with Russell Wilson at Wisconsin, as you say, you were a quarterback there. I want to go back in time to when you first learned jargon, and if you could explain it in the context of your family I would especially appreciate how your brain came to caught into all of this stuff.

So my dad was a longtime coach. My uncle was a coach. They both played in the NFL for over a decade. My uncle played for 10 years. My dad played for 14 years. They both got into coaching. I have another uncle that's a current college coach at the University of Kansas. I've been around it. And for me, it was just one of those going to practice, you hear the terms? I was a ball boy at seven years old. I'm reading a script, basically, how they put out practice. I used to have to spot the ball. But then I started learning what those terms meant. Seattle meant double slants. Seattle on a defense means something different. Seattle for a different offense means something completely different. But because I learned that at seven, nine 2011. Then I got into my high school offense. Then I got into my college offense. I got to two colleges, one at UCF and at Wisconsin under Paul Crist. They called the same things two different ways. Because I've been exposed to so many different ways to call a million ways to skin one cat, I just realized that. I was around this football stuff, and I realized different people call the same thing, different ways that I was like, oh, that's cool.

Why do you call it that? I'm trying to let people know how sometimes these intricacies, these little minor things matter a lot and are really cool. Why does something happen? How did that happen? And for me, I love learning about things. I love reading about things. I love microhistories on something. I'm reading one of freaking salt right now.

By the way, you reading a literal history of salt does, again, fit with the tenor of what we're trying to discern here. But I also want to point out that it is, in fact, really cool when smart people can nerd out about stuff in a way that builds a connection that wasn't able to be or wasn't encouraged to be showcased, certainly when I was growing up, consuming media. I want to establish the polarities of football coverage because historically, when I was growing up, Nate, mainstream football coverage was so vibes-based. It was about does this... It was clutchness-purity tests.

But We've never, ever said Payton Manning and thought immediately clutch.

If I say MJ, clutch. If I say Jeter, clutch. If I say braided, clutch. If I say Montana, clutch. If I say was who wants it more. And all of that shit, of course, is reductive. And as a guy who also enjoys, and this is why I think I became somebody who people felt betrayed by, as a guy who also enjoys analytics, I also know the other end of the equation. The other polarity is jargon in a way that gatekeeps. For me, it does remind me of another one of your interests, which is another reason why I want to have you on here, which is you also love board games.

I do. Disgustingly so.

How would you characterize your love of board games, Nate?

Obsession. Border Line. It's everything... I didn't realize how much I like board games. I played like many people got into Catan in the mid, early mid-2010s.

The settlers of Catan.

Just Catan now, though. Oh, is that right? Yeah. They dropped the settlers up. It's just seal. Just Facebook. It's cleaner. I really like competition. I really like puzzly stuff and trying to figure something out, maybe make it most efficient, have some strategy with it. And board games just clicked for me. And then all of a sudden, I got into that, started going, what other games can I get? And then I realized there's a whole world of modern board games out there. Board game geek, I highly recommend for a lot of people. But I own probably about 100 games, and I try to... Jesus Christ. I know. Some of them are like party games. No, That's not a hack. Guessing games, monikers, these things. But then some are a little more deaf war games. There's one game I have called 1960, The Making of the President. It's a two-player game. One person's JFK's campaign manager, one person's Nixon's campaign manager. It's like tactics war game. You'd love it. I do.

I'm interested in that.

I know, but it is something that I love rules as well, and I love definitions, and I love, and I think that's why I like rules because it says, Well, you can do this with this. And the most brilliant games, there's one game I love called Carcasson. There's other games where I love when they give you two, three rules, and then they leave it up to you. They say there's only a couple of rules you have to follow, but how creative can you get with those? That's where those games click for me because that's like, wow, there's creativity in some of this stuff that maybe other people haven't thought about with some of the strategy and everything.

Right. But this all sounds like football to me now. The desire-Strategy, jargon.

Yes. And the desire to have people to want to play with you.

The social aspect, and this is where I'm trying to figure out, okay, how do we broaden the net of understanding? I do think the first step to broadening the net of understanding, to lifting the gate or lowering the drawbridge, whatever my torture metaphor of choice happens to be, I do want to establish for people who are not initiated into the very basics of the vocabulary here, Nate, how complicated it can get.

Yes.

How do you begin to explain how hard it is actually to be fluent in all of these dialects?

I grew up around it, and a lot of it is just a Rolodex. It's I'm going to say, I've heard other people using this, and I clicked for me. And it's hard for me to go, yeah, you can learn that in a year or six months. You can learn some things and learn a lot of the definitions and all those. But it's hard to just use it fluently. Like a a native speaker. And I'm a native speaker. And again, not trying to hype myself up here, but this is just how it goes. But it's like if someone learns Spanish and then hola, adios, gato, you're using all these words, but you're not just going to go, I'm not going to go into Mexico or Spain and you go, gato, gato, gato, hola, hola, la, adios, adios. You guys got what I meant, right? That, to me, as a native speaker, sometimes when I see jargon getting thrown out there, especially football jargon, I'm like, okay, I'm not going to call you out, but it's like, you're not using it right or you're using it right but wrong.

It's in the right- You forgot the enye, you forgot the accent mark.

So many people go, oh, McVay is great. But why is he great? What does he do specifically once the now the person could go to the bar and he's one % smarter than his buddy? Because he didn't just say McVay is great. He says, Actually, they run like a power run here. That's pretty cool. Boom. Oh, my God. John is so much smarter than Mike at the bar. It's that balance, though. It's the ones that have to explain it and the ones that do or don't want to keep that, do want to explain all these things. But again, it's just that it's not always perfect. It gets a little edgy, and it gets a little of its... Up its own ass a little bit.

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So the up its own ass part. I do think there is something to being in awe of what you don't understand and respecting it as an order of magnitude that is different from your capacity to translate it. And there is one, I just I just want to play one clip because when I talk about performing difficulty, I think about how Drew Brees basically sounded like a Sotheby's auctioneer at one point. You might recall him talking to Mike D'Ricco about Sean Payton's offense.

There's some very long plays. There's a lot of verbiage at times.

Give me one.

It could be green left, twins, E-Short tight, pass 37, Buster Nudge, wide fluty, sting, X-Spear kill, 33 tight and left.

Just It's a matter of translation, Nate. When he says that, do you understand it?

Yeah, most of it. I can translate it. Because even in football, there's different translations. There's different dialects. I've never been in a Sean Payton offense, so it's not a literal, but I could tell you it's a doubles lap to be like a two by two formation. D equals two by two, meaning two eligible receivers on each side. He had a kill play there, and I think the last play 33, I didn't hear the term, that's a run play. 33 is a run direction and the first three is the type of run and which back sometimes you could go to the two back or the three back. All football terminology is, is to get everyone lined up.

Even the term kill play. I just want to clarify that for the layperson. That means what?

You package multiple plays together and the quarterback, based on the defensive look, goes from one play. That's the first play called, and then you kill it, kill that play, forget it, to the next play that's called in that huddle. So you go like, sword, kill 34, Bob. I'm just making up ones. But it's just the first place to pass, there might be a look, might be a certain box count, might be a certain defense we're looking for, might be, oh, shoot, we can't block Micah Parsons on this place, so we have to run it away from him. It could be any of these types of things. But again, different translations. I call it kill. Other places call it alert. Other places call it can, meaning you have another play in the can.

What I think about is not just, okay, out of my depth, again. I also wonder if all of this is deliberate. It feels like you're describing a system that is almost daring you to misunderstand it or to confuse it. And is this because the point is to speak in code? Is the point so that you can't actually understand it if you were to overhear it? Or how do you explain why the language evolved this way?

Well, Sean Payton is a great example right there because his play calls are going to be really wordy. It was a lot easier when it was just a standard run play. I write 35 That's a lead zone play. And with that play, that's it. We have no shifting emotions. Now everybody's shifting emotion in every play. Those need words. You have to tell this player to go to the left. And that's before we might even get to the formation. Then we get to the formation. Now we got the guy shifting emotion. Now we got to give the protection call. So that's another word. Now we got to give the pass concept. That's another word. We might have to give the cadence. Maybe we do this on two. That's another word, another verbiage. So you might just be telling one guy to shift across the formation, it'll take 14 words to get there. The millennials have taken over as all these guys, they understand, hey, let's not go crazy here. Sometimes it's those coaches showing off like a Sean Payton going like, look how much I know.

That's what I was going to ask.

I figured Old West Coast guys, yes, it was absolutely to show off. I heard about these old Raiders coaches. They would keep their play calls from one week to the next. So by the end of the season, they would have 800 play call sheets that the players had to know. And you're running 60 plays a game. Yes, you need a menu, but you need more of that. It used to be, and I really believe it's a big way to show off. But then you get into Mike Leach, who just goes right 92, and that's it. That's the play call. So again, it's different ways to do it. But NFL is complicated. That's why you need more words. It's just to get everybody lined up perfectly.

Right. So hold on. So the broad theory of why it's so complicated to call a play is because it's actually the simplest version that a lot of coaches can come up with. That's the origin story. That's it. Directions for everybody. I need to say this quickly because there's a time pressure. How often is it that the non-quarterbacks are up because of this very jargon problem.

More than you think. And that's what's frustrating when you literally tell the person what they're doing and they still mess it up. But more than you think. And I would even say in college, I'll be lower on some guys because I can realize that they're maybe short on a route, that they're guessing on some stuff. But NFL is pretty good. The coaches will get through to the players. Players, it's their job. And so by that level, you have to have a certain threshold of intelligence. But most times when something looks wonky, it's because a receiver was wrong.

So to go back to those coaches in the West Coast offense, right? So I should point out in the history of, in my personal understanding of NFL media coverage history, history. John Gruden, who is a practitioner, of course, of the West Coast offense, the most public face of it when it came to being a broadcaster. It all started with Spider 2, Y-Banana.

Take a six-step set up, and you're throwing the ball to the fullback on Spider 2, Y-Banana.Y-Banana, 8 to 10 yards, depending on how clean he gets off. Today, we're going to run him on a corner route. Strong right slot.2 Z-right. Z-right. Z-right. Spider 2. Spider 2, Y-Banana, Z-over. You're going to call it like it's your favorite play you've ever gotten in your life.

It's, Oh, man.

Strong right slot, Z-right. Spider 2, Y-Banana, Z-over.

I remember this because it was like the first burst of jargon that went viral.

You're right. Yeah.

It was a meme because he was teaching Marcus Mariota, and Mariota sitting there, and Gruden begins to, again, in a way that was fun, was nerding out about his favorite play. To you, Spider 2Y Banana, when you see it as now this cultural artifact, the patient zero of the term that everybody would begin to almost repeat to themselves as a part joke, but also a demonstration that I'm in the club. I now know what this is. What is that play in your mind? How do you explain it? Is it funny that that became the thing?

Yeah, it is because it's like a short yardage play. You'll have a corner route, which is a high angle route, a flat route, which is a short route to the sideline flat, and then a route coming over from the opposite side. It's a safe play. It's funny for me that he says that's his favorite play because it's like, oh, yeah, everyone runs that. It's like a gamey play. You usually run it for younger quarterbacks or because it's just simple to read, boom, boom, you look to one side, one, two, three. But I think also that It's like one of those always works because you usually call it the two-yard line or you call it third and one. And usually, you're hitting that flat route. You're not even hitting the wide banana. You're hitting the fullback on the flat. So it's like a quick hitting, a little first down.

And you're saying that the banana, the wide Banana isn't even actually the thing that you mostly are using in it.

No, it's not the- I've been living a lie. If you threw it 10 times, I'd say you throw the banana once or twice.

It's only taken me about 20 years to understand what the fuck was happening in that viral clip. But I want to get to something that a friend of mine, Seth Wickersham, quoted for me because I was talking to him also. He's an excellent football author, journalist. And he reminded me that Bill Paulian once said something to Michael Lewis. Bill Polian, the famous GM of the cults, Michael Lewis, of course, author of Moneyball. What Polian told Michael Lewis was that if you wanted to know why a play worked or didn't, he would talk to every starter and every coach, and he still would not have clarity. I want to get to this notion, which you've alluded to before, which is that intention for the play seems like an underrated part of decoding what's actually happening here. What were they trying to do, which isn't discernible based on just the film and even the full dictionary of terms available to you.

When you look at a past concept in a play, and I think this is where, too, is that that's why when you learn the why, it's not always the result. There's so much in the process of football that a lot of it comes down to timing and anticipation. Those are words that get thrown around way too much. But in a passing game, everything's tied together. And I know we think of discipline as training and hard practices, but discipline as far as rules, then I think people realize. And I think that's, again, why I try to emphasize where people are like, well, why didn't you just throw it to this wide open guy? It's like, well, physics is the quarterback is looking to the right, the receiver is all the way to the left. Well, why didn't you look left? Because of this coverage, this concept. Again, you have to get five steps to explain that. But I feel like if you just get one more step, then it just, okay, maybe I won't understand that just because the guy is wide open, why didn't the quarterback throw to him? Because there's so many rules, I think that's where I have fun with it and trying to break it down.

And that's also where the cool things come because then you see defender's breaking rules. I'm Micah Parsons. I'll refer to him again. They call them betterbies, which is you better be right. Meaning a defender has to be in a certain spot, but he's gone, I bet you're going to... Jj Wall used to do this all the time. I bet you're going to run right here, so I'm going to knife inside and go rogue. I make the play, people go, Wow, what a hell of a play. If I were coaching a high school footballer, I'd probably be ticked off. But then that's what makes Micah Parsons cooler is because you understand the rules that he just broke. This comes down to the board game thing I said, where you get three rules and you can stretch them differently. That's what makes it cool. That's why Mahomes, I would never use Mahomes as teaching tape. He breaks rules. He does stuff that no one else can do, but he also understands the rules. And that's also an underrated thing with him. So I think that's what I really try to find joy in it. I do find joy in it.

Personally, I try to share it is that when you see those little things and go, well, that was cool. And that's why it's so cool, because even if the guy didn't make the sack or the guy didn't score a shutdown here, or it's just a five-yard rushing play, there's some little cool things that happen to make that five-year. It's because of all these rules that are getting broken or not broken, or if there is or something like that.

So much of the way that the language and the strategy has evolved clearly relies on human brains and mouths and the ability to perform a recitation under pressure and then actually do the thing that the is demanding. I wonder if this is ever going to change. Like technologically, Nate, right? Oh, yeah. Currently, just for people who, again, don't know, the quarterback needs to be the guy who tells his teammates, This is what we're doing. Because currently, there's no rule that allows a coach to put microphones and earpieces in everyone's helmets. But it feels like if you're designing football in the 21st century, that's a solution to help make all of this that much more legible. Yeah. What is your... Is that, as a coach's son, as a quarterback, is that something that you want, like some technological innovation there? Or no, are you in the mode of it's still actually better the way that it's happening right now?

I like how it goes right now because when you give some maybe coaches and stuff shortcuts, it long term leads to a worse product and worse ball because they're not actually learning. They're not actually doing what they're supposed to be doing. And maybe this is... I'm the oldest 34-year-old you ever meet. And maybe something that is just some curmudgeon in me going like, No, this is how we always did it. If you're no huddle, because the XFL did this a couple of years ago where they had the communication to all the skilled players. The offensive line did not. That could lead to some weirdness, some walkiness, to some, I think, some tempo abuse, no huddling, and everyone lines up and just goes, goes, goes, puts the defense at a disadvantage. I like having a lot more pressure on maybe the quarterback and the play car and the teachings that they have to do, as opposed to maybe giving them a crutch a little bit to where they all can just hear the play call. I think some of that, too, some of these OCs are terrible on the headset, and maybe I don't want them talking to the receiver because they get emotional.

That's a big thing. That's a real big thing with coaches.

It's usually-Explain how common it is that a coach would be so mad at you that he would be inarticulate.

Way more common than you would think. It depends on the coach. I mean, let's see how Same way a delay games Harbaugh and the Chargers get this year. Maybe that's part of it a little bit. I mean, Paul Chris, who is very calm on a game day, I think it would be, I was the backup quarterback, so I was the one signaling plays. Thank God no one else could hear what he was saying sometimes because a lot of those players would be like, this guy hates me. Because if something bad happened, he would let out just an express, like just, This guy can never catch a ball. So I don't want that because I know how some of these coaches are. That's another thing that I think it's misconstrued is it's like, oh, get the play call. It's simple. We already heard how long the play call is for a coach to a player, player reiterate to the other players. I just think that I like that. I want to keep that going. So maybe it's just the oldness of me.

Right. So some of the degree of difficulty here. It sounds like also in your voice, I'm detecting a, you enjoy the masochism of it on some level. The challenge. I think about in Major League Base, there's a system called Pitchcom now. It's a proprietary push button player wearable transmitter that allows players on the field to communicate plays to each other without using any physical signs or verbal communication. Every player wearing a receiver actually hears the same instructions in their very own chosen language. And so there's the ability to actually speak literal foreign languages. Spanish and everything you have. And be fluent in the foreign language of calling a baseball game. For you, I feel like there's a loss of romance there. There's a loss of a certain lure when it comes to the shortcut.

A little bit. Rule bending and finding ways to be best at the rules given, I do like those aspects of sports. There's abuses of systems and everything, especially in baseball. But college football, there's more people that steal signals than you would think, as far as because they don't have the headset comps. They're working on it right now, which I think is huge. Yeah, that's a big thing, too, where these teams everyone's like, Wow, this office coordinator is brilliant. It's like, Yeah, they steal every play. I would be good, too, if I knew what was coming.

But even that, right? I like it. To decode a very basic thing, it's like, Why do college football coaches have on the sideline? Oregon did this famously.

At the University of Oregon, signs have made their way onto the football field. Coaches created a new signal board play calling system this past spring after concerns the Ducks' hand signals were compromised last season. What we have on those boards, each four coordinates means something to our guys. One picture will tell us the formation, the play, and the snap count. And all eleven guys in the field know what we're going to run.

Why do they have a poster board with four quadrants on it? It's because they're anticipating in the way that football is also a tactical, almost military campaign that someone is trying to break their code. It anticipates stealing, actually.

Yeah, it does, because that's what you do. These guys, they got to change it up, and they'll have 40 dummy signalers. But again, I like that. And there's another part of me that goes, yeah, you're cheating or, yeah, you're gaming the system. You're not really doing true football, but that's the game. Those are the rules given. You have to signal the play. How do you do it best? If you're worried about it, go to wristbands.

I do want to salute those, Nate. Who can do two things. They can nerd out with their fellow Dungeon Masters, right? And they can also explain the rules to be. And I think about stuff that you've done where I'm like, What I really love... So you interviewed, again, one of the big protagonists in the football intelligence discourse in the last year or so has been C. J. Stroud. And so C. J. Stroud is somebody who we actually did an episode about through the lens of the S2 exam, which if you did not watch the episode, was a test that was controversial because C. J. Stroud had a very bad score on it. And there was a back and forth about, did he actually try? Was he actually just failing a cognitive assessment test? At, I believe it was the Super Bowl, you sat down with C. J. Stroud. What I loved watching, even though I did not understand, again, the vast majority of it, was you were in the position of almost of exam Proctor.

I just want you to talk about your process here against two men. I can run it through or if you want to go out here.

They showed a lot of two men in the fringe, also with quarters.

When you see the Stroud stuff, that was impressive even for me.

I really I've seen the nickel, and I'm thinking he's going to back up and play combo, which is just they're going to play like a mini cover two in the sense of quarters and man, the outside guy. That's what I originally thought. I snapped the ball and I see this mic I'm looking at this mic, and I also see this backside wheel cross-cut. I'm thinking it's some type of man at this point, but I couldn't tell which type of man. I didn't know if he would have dropped in and played Lerke or if he could have dropped in to play Lerk. I really had to see it true and through.

Lerke is one robber. Exactly.

That's how we call it. We have to translate.

It's like spanglish every time. All quarterbacks in the NFL are going to be pretty impressive. Even that Drick May clip, some people are like, Every quarterback can do this. It's like, yes and no. I can go on the board and draw that all up. Once the bullets start flying, yeah, maybe not so much. That's where the impressive stuff comes in. But with Stroud and why I found those plays or why I wanted to show him those plays, it wasn't a breakdown. It wasn't a huge gain. One was a first down on third 10, and one was like, he beat a blitz on another one. Right away, he just grabbed the pen. He was like, Yeah, I'm going this. Because I could tell he was like, Yeah, this was good stuff, wasn't it?

This front side might go, this backside will go, and the shell didn't really change. It's hard to see all this at once. It's like I'm seeing it in segments. You don't say.

Right.

Then I see this front side might jump really hard inside. So when he jumps hard inside, I'm like, Okay, I probably have two men here. So my read was one, two, It's back to Dawn on this inside mini glance, as you can say. Then I have a now route as number two coming by Rob, and then a China for late. Down here, D'Amico isn't against going for a first dance. Really, right here. I'm looking for a completion.

This is my big takeaway from the only monocultural institution left in America, which is the NFL, which is football, broadly speaking, which is that you guys are so much fucking nerdier than the popular of what football players are supposed to be. I love it when you guys let your freak flags fly. It's cool. I like it. This weird, again, all of the jargon on some level, I appreciate it. But now we've gotten to the point where it's been so mainstreamed, where there is an opportunity to explain why it's impressive as opposed to why it's jarringly complicated in a way that maybe He initially felt impressive. It's the thing of like, okay, I'm interested, but now can you teach me? Do you want me to sit down at the table with you and play this weirdly elaborate board game that only you guys understand, that I thought I'd been watching, but actually really didn't understand this entire time?

I think you finally had to come on the show to connect that. It makes so much sense. I like board games because I truly like when I see the light bulb go on for people. I think there's I have 16 cousins on my dad's side. I would say 10 of us have been coaches or teachers. It's just what we like to do. But I truly like to see that light bulb come on. That's why I like teaching board games. And I also think it trains me with some of the football stuff. But also, some of that, I don't want to be too mean, some of the players are boring. Some of the players have basic takes, but not with football. And you get them talking about their actual expertise and their actual interests. Totally. And you see passion. You see, rather than give them the same answer, they don't want to be here. They want to be working, working out. There's a diet for football. There's a diet for sports. It just can't always be sugar. So sometimes you need some veggies and fruit to make it all a little bit better. Sometimes with flavor, it could be deep fried.

As I said, look, if nothing else, I want this show, Pablo Tori finds out to be a show where we melt cheese on your broccoli.

That's exactly it. As someone that went to Wisconsin or I GA to Pit, too. Fries in your salad. That's what as they like to do in Pittsburgh. Let's put some French fries in your garden salad. That's what we're trying to do here.

God. Nate Tice. Thank you for letting me sit down at the table. I was a little afraid to ever show my face out again.

Thank you for hopping over that gate that I set up. I appreciate you joining me at the table. Thanks so Pablo.

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark Media production. I'll talk to you next time.

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