Hey everybody, it’s time again on BLEAV and PodClips, Fred and the Fantastic. We’ll talk about this, that and everything in sports. Laura’s off, Mark’s off. But Art Sorce, of course, former kicker for the Rams and the Trojans, he runs Galaxy Sports, will be with us. And again, we’ll talk about this, that, and anything in sports, and Art, how are you feeling this Friday afternoon?

A little chilly here on the eastern seaboard. It was minus four this morning. We have not gotten above 32 now for 11 days. And according to Bernie Reno, up in State College, where the Weather Channel is, we’re not going to get over, over 32 degrees till mid-February. Wow, so I’m thinking the Caribbean, I’m thinking Southern California, anywhere, maybe even Arizona. But Florida, you know, the iguanas are falling out of the trees because it’s snowing in Tampa Bay, so you never know what’s going on down there.

Art, in a couple of sad notes, Lou Holtz in Hospice. Talk about Lou Holtz.

You know, Lou Holtz, to me, one of the great figures in American football coaching history, I mean, as a player, I would have loved to have played for him because he would give you that story. Get you pumped up. He was one of those motivating kind of guys. I mean, if you met Lou Holtz, he’s probably 5’9, 5’10, 165 pounds, probably carried the water bucket, you know, at his high school in East Liverpool, Ohio, but the guy was just a football fanatic, a great man. And I just, I hate to see people, I want to see people live long, healthy lives. But I always get real sad when I see people putting, you know, being put into homes and things of that nature. Because I want to remember him as the quipster. I mean, he was great, just a wonderful man. Valvano’s in that same place. You look at guys like Dick Vitale, you know, and even coach Corso, it’s sad when you see him. But, you know, the alternative doesn’t make a lot of sense either.

Do you think Terry Bradshaw is going to survive much longer on TV?

You know, I think the right people at Fox love him, and I think he has personality. You know, they’re kind of taking responsibilities away from him, they, you know? I noticed that they hustled Jim Nance down to do the AFC Trophy presentation, and then they had, I believe Strahan, do the NFC presentation. So they’re starting to, you know, cover for him a little bit. But I’d like to see Terry continue, but it’s his call. I mean, he is 77 years old now, it’s hard to believe that. Terry Bradshaw, I can remember being on the sidelines with the Rams and the Steelers at the Super Bowl in 1980. And watching him, you know, fire ’em off to Stallworth and Swan for touchdowns to beat the Rams. A lot of people don’t remember. The Rams are winning that game with nine minutes left, 19-17, and they got beat 31-19 on two bombs.

I remember, believe me, you know, you talk about 77 years of age, you’re 128, you’re doing this show. So how do you do it? I mean, you got to take some legal medicinal products to answer these questions.

I try to laugh my way through life a little bit, Fred. I used to get serious and take everything to heart, and now I look at it and go, you know what? That doesn’t surprise me because one thing I know about life is Murphy’s law is prevalent, and, believe me, as long as you understand that, you can be prepared for anything. But I do try to keep the noodle loose, you know, I take a little bit of Prevagen, I like, I like my Asian ginseng early in the morning, gets me going, gets me up and out and about. I do try to do a little bit. I’m into vibration therapy. Fred, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about it. But vibration therapy is what they do for the people up at the space stations. You stand on a machine, and it vibrates your body, and cellularly, it’s supposed to invigorate every cell in your body. Because I mean, when I get on the treadmill and go up and down the hills, I’m usually out for the next two days. So that’s a little too much. But I have noticed that the vibration therapy, you can look this up, folks, it’s great stuff. A lot of people don’t know about it. It’s a key to the whole factor here.

I do that kind of therapy on my legs, and I have lumbar stenosis on my right spine. To tell you the truth, it doesn’t work, but for me, but hopefully it works for everybody else.

Have you ever actually stood on the machine, and have it?

I have, I have.

Okay.

We have two of those machines, I’ve got a machine that goes around my belly, I’ve got, every doctor I go to sells me another machine. So it’s. And none of them have worked on my back.

You know what, Fred? They’re better than taking all the pills they got. You know, big Pharma out there selling us everything. And if that doesn’t work, they take this, and then you’ll have to take that to combat this. No, thank you, I’ll just I’ll do the best I can. We’re going to laugh, we’re going to be in pain, but you know what? Like I said earlier, the alternative doesn’t make much sense either.

You know, in another very sad and ironic note, did you ever see the, Valentine’s Day is coming up in a couple of weeks. Did you ever see the movie Valentine’s Day?

Not the one Valentine’s Day massacre with,

No, no, this was like everybody was in love with everybody on, Jen Garner, Jen Garner was on it, and a lot of famous people in 2010. In fact, what’s her name, the singer with, anyway, it’s a really good movie and,

I’ll have to look it up because,

Valentine’s Day,

I get every network there is. You know, I mean, we pay millions of dollars a month to be able to watch what we want to watch.

OK, so, in the movie Valentine’s Day, there’s a, an actor, Eric Dane, who plays a football quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams, who announces to the world he’s gay. That was part of the movie. That was a big part of the movie; Julia Roberts was in it, and everyone else. Remember, now, a football quarterback for the L.A. Rams announces he is gay. We find out yesterday that Eric Dane has ALS.

Oh, no, what is he, like, in his 30s or 40s?

I think in his 40s, he was on Gray’s Anatomy, he was a very good actor. And you say to yourself, OK, a football player percentage-wise, a lot of football players have come down with ALS, but the chances of a non-football player, and a person who hasn’t been in physical activity where he got hit in the head and the back or whatever the case might be, I don’t know, one in 10 million, or whatever the case might be. That’s got to be the worst possible way to pass away.

Well, you know, one of my, one of my favorite people of all time, my dad’s second wife, his, his, her nephew ran Coldwell Banker real estate in Southern California, eventually became Buffett and all that, he wound up with that disease. And it starts from, you know, your feet going up, and I mean, to watch this guy, he was a brilliant track star in high school, All-CIF 5000 meters, just incredible, incredible athlete with four kids, a family, very successful. And it happened to him in his mid 40s. It was just, just, yeah, I hear you, Fred.

All right, we’re going to come back, take a break right now, come back, talk about the Super Bowl next week and how the Rams are not in it, all straight away on Fred and the Fantastics, Art and Fred straight away, right about now.

Hey, welcome back, everybody. It is Fred and the Fantastics, Art Sorce, and Fred. You can email us at [email protected]. And Rams are not in the Super Bowl, as you know, it’s Seattle against the Patriots and Seahawks, a four-point favorite. Art. This is on the coach; this has to be on the coach. Coach fires the coach a month ago, and special teams coach. And then he makes a bad mistake, letting a rookie return a punt. He makes a mistake at the end of the first half, not trying to control the ball. Seattle takes the lead, the Rams can’t get it back. And it’s got to be on McVay. Your, your thoughts.

Well, you know, when the quarterback has the kind of games that, that Stafford had in two games and in Seattle, thrown for over 800 yards, seven touchdowns. You know, it comes down to special teams and defense, and they both failed the Rams. And I think McVay made probably three or four mistakes the last two games: one against the Bears in the divisional playoff; one against the Seattle, two in that game. And before the half, he had a little bit of a faux pas, and then, of course, he didn’t understand, you know, did he want to burn? Two timeouts to check and see if Cooper Kupp had got the first down on the flare pass out on the near sideline? You know, there’s three parts of football, Fred. And unless all three come together, like Seattle played a great game, all three, you know, defense, offensive, special teams. And I think sometimes it’s the details. Because in big games you can see three or four seminal plays, and if you don’t, you know, capitalize on those plays, you’re not going to win the game. And to be honest with you, I think you know the self-serving genius stuff, you know? For Kyle Shanahan, who I think is blown four Super Bowls with the lead. And then you look at McVay, who probably could have three Super Bowl victories right now. And he has one, you know, Belichick has six that still don’t get you in the Hall of Fame. I don’t know what it takes to get in that. Oh, that’s right, you got to be a friend of a friend of somebody, you know, that’s how you get in there. I think they pitted Robert Kraft against Belichick there. But to answer your question, Fred, the NFL. Sammy Darnold, you know, Stafford is going to be the MVP, but Sammy Darnold proved to me that this guy is really for real. And I noticed that the GM of Mensa got fired by the Vikings today. Because, you know, there’s a lot of things going on in the NFL that I don’t understand. But the referees this year have taken the cake, in my opinion, there hasn’t been a gain anywhere where it hasn’t been some sort of a call. And then you look at Peyton in Denver not going for the field goal in the first half to give them a 10-0 lead. So it does come down to coaches. And sometimes the arrogance of an NFL football coach can get in the way of what the right thing to do is.

All right. Seattle is a four-point favorite. And again, we’re taping this Friday afternoon, so next Friday you can change if you decide to change. But right now, Seattle is a four-point favorite versus the Patriots.

34-17 Seattle. I think Drake Maye’s got a bad shoulder; nobody’s talking about it. This is just from what I hear, inside information. Because Galaxy Sports has their eyes everywhere. I think they’re not going to talk about it a whole lot, but I think Seattle’s got a defense. They got rangy DBs, they got studs at linebacker. Leonard Williams up front, I mean, that team, I got to tell you, that team is physical, they got everything going for them. If they had Charbonnet, or Charbonnet, I think they’d be a lock, but I still think they’re going to win the game going away 34-17.

All right. The Duke quarterback is now at Miami. They settled with Duke, the legal case, talk how many student athletes transferred in the transfer portal, which is the worst move in the history of the NCAA. How many?

There’s something like 3,000 guys that went into the portal, but some of the key ones you had Brendan Sorsby, who was the quarterback at the University of Cincinnati, he goes to Texas Tech. That oil money comes in handy there. You got Cam Coleman, a wide receiver who goes from Auburn to Texas. Really good looking player. Sam Leavitt, by the way, Lane Kiffin got five of the top 21 guys rated in the portal. So I don’t know what he’s got, but they must have a lot of money at Louisiana State University, because to get five guys is unheard of out of the top 21, seven of the top 100. Miami got away with it. You know, one of the things after the National Championship game was Mario Cristobal went on this rant and rave about how much money the University of Indiana had. And they don’t have a whole lot. And he has, you know, access to Coral Fables, Florida, South Miami, okay, and he’s complaining about what wasn’t fair. He got to play in his own home stadium, okay, got every call there was. They just about took the quarterback’s head off Mendoza on a couple of plays. It looked like 1970s football when the Raiders were playing with Atkinson and Tatum. But, you know, and I’m listening to this, and Saban came after him full speed. I know, you know that, but I mean, here’s a guy complaining. Let me tell you something. You’ve done a great job. You’ve built that program up. Who would have thought the ACC was going to play for the National Championship? Just, you know, you played a great game, you got beat. Cignetti had an unbelievable year. But, you know, Mark Cuban was basically the only guy that put any money into that program. And he went and got a bunch of kids from James Madison and brought them with him. The one kid blocked a punt that made the difference in the game. I mean, that team played great team football, I loved to see it. And he, you know, he’s just, that really bothered me about Mario Cristobal. But yeah, I’m excited. We got Super Bowl week. I got to tell you, I watched a little bit of the Senior Bowl, the practices for the Senior Bowl. Nussbaum looked really good. Bunch of kids that, you know, these are going to be the guys that are second to seventh round, maybe third to seventh round. But this is where you build football teams, Fred, you don’t have to pay a lot of money. Even if they don’t get drafted and you get those 10 free agents, maybe two or three of them hit. That’s how you build a really great football team depth-wise.

But before we go, I want to talk, again, we talked about this in our last show, but it bugs the heck of me. Oregon and Nebraska; Nebraska quarterback transfers to Oregon, assuming Dante Moore was leaving.

Dylan Raiola.

Dante Moore is given five million dollars, so he’s staying, so is the kid from Nebraska going to transfer? Is he going to stay in Oregon? What’s going on?

No, he actually played as a freshman and sophomore. He’s gonna red shirt,

Okay,

So he’ll come back and have three more years, because you know, you can play 12 years in college.

You know, it’s unbelievable, it really is. Again, look, you’ve played the game, I’ve lived and loved the gam. You’ve loved and lived the game. The bottom line is you, nor I, nor Laura, nor Mark, nobody with any common sense, would have done what the NCAA did. How did that come into occurrence? How did they get, the NIL is one thing, but worse is the transfer portal.

This isn’t, you know, like the local dealership giving you a car, so you can do like local ads, so you have a car to drive around with, which is what NIL was – name, image, likeness. Now it’s like, there’s going to be, and wait until the Big Ten plus Eight decides. They’re going to do this private venture capital deal where each school gets $100 million, the conference gets $100 million. And the people putting the deal together get $100 million. You’re going to have. Now you have $21.5 million for the whole program, of which I believe 75% goes to the football program. Unless, you know, there’s other conferences doing it differently. The Big East doesn’t have football so that their basketball teams are going to be getting more money. But it’s ridiculous, Fred. I mean, one of these days. And I used to joke about Charles White taking a pay cut from, you know, when he got drafted in the third round for the Browns. Because, you know, we used to get a nice little chunk of change in an envelope on the road, and I was number 13, he was number 12, and they got the envelopes mixed up one day.

And you found out.

And I said, Man, that was a big field goal I kicked there. Look at that!

Was there that much of a difference at that point?

Ten to one.

Honest to God?

Yeah, 10g’s versus 1,000, that’s a hell of a lot of cash.

Are you going to testify in court?

Notre Dame was getting more money than we were.

Sam Gilbert was doing pretty well for UCLA. All right, for Art, Mario, I’m Fred. We miss Laura, we miss Mark, and thank you guys and gals for listening to Fred the Fantastics on BLEAV and on PodClips. Bye everybody.