Austin and Mitch discuss the season three arcs of Smash and Saracen's Grandma, which means deep dives into dementia and ACL injuries. Plus a very stupid edition of Football Expert Austin.
Follow us on twitter @deviltownpod, @a_greenameyer, and @organzapleats
Email us at deviltownpodcast@gmail.com
Find transcripts, sources, and links at deviltown.buzzsprout.com
Links:
A Multisport Epidemiological Comparison of ACL Injuries in High School Athletes
A History of the Wig Reveal on RuPaul's Drag Race
Alex Trebek laughing at nerds
Austin and Mitch discuss the season three arcs of Smash and Saracen's Grandma, which means deep dives into dementia and ACL injuries. Plus a very stupid edition of Football Expert Austin.
Follow us on twitter @deviltownpod, @a_greenameyer, and @organzapleats
Email us at deviltownpodcast@gmail.com
Find transcripts, sources, and links at deviltown.buzzsprout.com
Links:
A Multisport Epidemiological Comparison of ACL Injuries in High School Athletes
A History of the Wig Reveal on RuPaul's Drag Race
Alex Trebek laughing at nerds
0:00
MITCH: Count us... I almost said count us in. Bring us in.
AUSTIN: Bring us in?
MITCH: Get it started.
AUSTIN: Ohhhh oh so like,
MITCH: Introduce
AUSTIN: Hey, hey, this is, this is,
MITCH: (laughing) You don't have to
AUSTIN: this is our podcast. Uhhh. Uhhh.
MITCH: I'm gonna cut it wherever.
AUSTIN: Wait, uh, um, uh, uhhh, I'm Austin.
MITCH: I'm Mitch
AUSTIN: And welcome to Devil Town. Intro music!
MITCH: I can cut anything out I want to cut out.
AUSTIN: (laughing)
MITCH: And I will, and I won't feel bad about it.
AUSTIN: (whispered) Welcome to Devil Town.
0:33
(Devil Town theme music)
MITCH: We were just saying that I don't have much, but I still wanna talk about what we were planning on talking about.
AUSTIN: Oh, of course.
MITCH: Which was... dementia.
AUSTIN: (laughing)
MITCH: Here's the deal, I don't have great research but it's an interesting part of the show,
AUSTIN: It is. That was -
MITCH: (laughing) so I think it's worth talking about.
AUSTIN: That was the biggest downer way to bring up dementia.
MITCH: Yeah, it is!
AUSTIN: We're gonna talk about... dementia.
MITCH: We... We're not... (sigh) I keep, like, getting mad at myself for doing what I said I wasn't gonna do. We're not going through the show episode by episode.
AUSTIN: No
MITCH: But we kind of are. (laughing)
AUSTIN: Well, in this situation...
MITCH: Well, right now we're watching -
BOTH: season three
AUSTIN: And two things came up that were fairly significant.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: And, I mean, they're huge parts of the story.
MITCH: Matt's grandma.
AUSTIN: Matt's grandma, and Smash.
MITCH: And Smash.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Do you wanna take over first?
MITCH: Yeah, I'll do mine first, 'cause I don't have much, I just wanna talk about that part of the show.
AUSTIN: I will preface this by saying that my grandmother recently was diagnosed with dementia. It has been a problem for quite a while,
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: it's just now she has been diagnosed. I don't know what she's taking, necessarily. She's on a patch, and apparently it's helping quite a bit.
MITCH: I've heard somebody else talk about that. I think maybe my other grandma. I think it was, like, mentioned, but she didn't do it.
AUSTIN: Yeah. I don't know what it is, I'd have to talk to my grandparents about it.
MITCH: I didn't... Ok, here's where I went on my journey to, like, nowhere. I really wanted to find out information about Matt and his Grandma's legal situation.
AUSTIN: Mmm ok
MITCH: And that's where I just hit a million dead ends. I think... I read a lot of stuff about both emancipated minors and adult guardianships, and, like, powers of attorney and all that stuff. I really, really don't think there's any way that he would get legal guardianship of her as a minor.
AUSTIN: No, I don't think he could.
MITCH: I think it's very possible that it would play out how it plays out in the show, where he kinda just slips through the cracks. And, like, there's probably a strong case that if, if CPS or whatever came in, they would say that he needed a guardian.
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: I could see that part not happening, like... They come by to do a visit when his dad happens to be home, or his grandma has a good day, and it just, like, doesn't get noticed. That's reasonable.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: He goes and talks to a lawyer, season 3 episode 2 I think, and he says, you know, "Here are your options. You can get yourself emancipated and then become her guardian." And that part of it I just don't, I don't see anything in everything I've read that says that that would ever happen. It would have to be... All adult guardianships... If you're an adult that's gonna get guardianship over another adult, whether it's because they're old and they can't take care of themselves, or like, have a disability, or for whatever reason, it's always judge approved.
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: So for him to try to go that route, he would have to go into court in front of a judge, and there's no way a judge would let that happen.
AUSTIN: Not with him being a minor, yeah.
MITCH: And honestly, he's seventeen, that process would probably take long enough that he'd probably turn eighteen before it all got sorted, anyway.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: That's what I was trying to find. I feel like it's what we see in the show, which is like, there aren't any good, clean options for Matt and his Grandma, so they kind of just wait it out. And that's what they do. And that's probably what they'd have to do in real life.
AUSTIN: I know.
MITCH: The things that would be - on paper - better, he doesn't want. He doesn't want the government to come in and put his grandma in a home and put him in, you know, a group home or something. So the other option is do nothing, and just try to survive until, I don't know, I don't know what happens. So I looked up all that, didn't really find anything concrete, which was frustrating. But then I started looking at dementia in general. I did not know that dementia is a syndrome. Which means there is... It's not a disease. It's not a -
AUSTIN: I thought it was a lower, like a... like one of the first steps to Alzheimer's.
MITCH: No, Alzheimer's is a specific disease that is in the dementia family.
AUSTIN: I did not know that.
MITCH: I know, I didn't either. Dementia's a syndrome. A syndrome is a group of symptoms.
AUSTIN: It's not Syndrome, the villain from The Incredibles?
MITCH: He's a... There are symptoms there. You could... A group of symptoms, meaning, two people could have different diseases but have the same syndrome,
AUSTIN: Ok
MITCH: because it's not... Syndrome doesn't tell where something comes from or what's causing it.
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: So somebody could qualify for, like, meeting the criteria for dementia, who is young, who has a specific type of brain injury. They probably wouldn't call it dementia, because it's not a helpful diagnosis.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: But like, you know, the symptoms that make up dementia, early stages, are forgetfulness, losing track of time, and becoming lost in familiar places.
AUSTIN: Ok
MITCH: There's a lot of things that would cause those things that don't get called dementia because it's just, there's something else that's more accurate.
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: But if you're a young person who has a traumatic brain injury, you might meet those criteria.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: There are also... That means there are a lot of cases of dementia that do get better, if they're not caused by Alzheimer's or something. Like, if you have dementia that's caused by, you know, a substance, or a bad reaction to a prescribed drug, or if it's mental health related, you can have dementia and then not have it in the future.
AUSTIN: Oh ok
MITCH: Most people, when we talk about dementia, we talk about something like Alzheimer's, though.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: And most of the things that are for elderly people don't get better, generally.
AUSTIN: Yeah
6:38
MITCH: And like I said, if you’re young and you check those three boxes, you’d probably have a different diagnosis that fit better.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: So you probably wouldn’t call it dementia because honestly, what does that help, to use that word?
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: Middle stage of dementia is becoming forgetful of recent events and peoples’ names, becoming lost at home, increasing difficulty with communication, needing help with personal care, and behavior changes, wandering, repeated questions. That’s what we think of it being.
AUSTIN: That’s probably where my grandma sits.
MITCH: Yeah. Late stage would be complete unawareness of, like, time and place, not recognizing anybody, difficulty walking, like…
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: So depending on what is causing the dementia, some people would stay at early stages forever, some people progress really quickly to late stage and stay there.
AUSTIN: Now - and this may be a completely dumb question. I don’t know anything about dementia or Alzheimer’s or anything like that -
MITCH: Alzheimer’s is the most common form. It’s sixty to seventy percent of dementia cases are Alzheimer’s.
AUSTIN: All right. In terms of, say, it does get to late stage, does it affect motor skills?
MITCH: It can.
AUSTIN: It can?
MITCH: It’s one of things where there’s a lot of comorbidities, where, like, it would be hard to suss out what is caused by what.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: And it’s honestly not even necessarily important. But if somebody is in their 80s or 90s and they have late stage dementia, and they also have motor skill issues, who’s to say.
AUSTIN: Right, yeah
MITCH: You could probably go in and figure out with scans and tests and stuff exactly what is happening to what. But it’s pretty normal for somebody at that age to have both,
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: and you would just treat… And a lot of people at that age, also, I think that some of the reasons that some of the dementia causing things are not… Like, I think there’s a big push to treat and cure Alzheimer’s, but at a certain point, the dementia that occurs when you get to the end of your life, like, extreme old age,
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: that’s just not something that there’s ever going to be a strong need to cure, because there’s no… It’s gonna be something else, at that point.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: It’s tragic, and I hope that we make progress on Alzheimer’s and stuff, but it’s not as urgent of a thing for the medical community to try to solve.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: But I think it can. I think it’s… It says the boundaries between different forms of dementia are indistinct and mixed forms coexist. I’m thinking about, like, like, my great grandma had trouble walking that I’m pretty sure was just physical. Just her knees and hips were giving out.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: Around the same time that… And she went from no signs of dementia to severe relatively quickly, like, probably within six months to a year. That all happened at the same time. I don’t know if anybody ever bothered running the tests to figure out what was causing what, it all just happened really quickly and there’s no… There’s really not any going back,
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: at that point. It seems to me like Matt’s Grandma, that seems like Alzheimer’s to me, what we see in the show.
AUSTIN: Really?
MITCH: The doctor says dementia, is all we ever hear him say, which is accurate, it seems like.
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: But yeah, that seems like early, to me…
AUSTIN: Now that we know, now that I know that dementia is a syndrome, like, that makes sense.
MITCH: Yeah. But it also would explain why the doctor is not.... The way the doctor talks to Matt seems to be coming from a place of, like, we need to maintain her general health, we need to keep an eye on things and be aware, but they’re not trying to stop anything or prevent anything.
AUSTIN: No
MITCH: They’re basically just mitigating.
AUSTIN: Yeah
10:26
10:26
MITCH: Which tells me that it's probably something that there is no treatment for.
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: She's gonna slowly get worse, they can, they can pay attention to it and try to, like, mitigate the difficulties as they arise.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: But it doesn't seem like there's much hope for her to get better in any way.
AUSTIN: Yeah. It seems like - and this is just looking at her situation and then looking at my grandmother's situation - obviously I have not been able to see them all that much with everything, and when I do, we're literally, like, six to ten feet away, I'm in... For some reason, we sit in the foyer, away from them, and we eat breakfast and we just talk. And that -
MITCH: The one's in Texas?
AUSTIN: No, here.
MITCH: They have a nice foyer.
AUSTIN: (laughing) But what my grandfather has done is that he has gone through the entire house and put up pages, like pieces of paper telling her where things are.
MITCH: Mhmm. We did that here for a long time.
AUSTIN: Yeah. But it does not seem... I wonder, and I feel like this is the case, I feel like it kind of shows where Matt is, in terms of, he has these things that she probably needs. She's probably in the same position as my grandmother is.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: She needs the help like that, and he's not been able to do that. And it's not an indictment on whether he can or can't.
MITCH: No
AUSTIN: He's busy, he's a high schooler.
MITCH: Well, we were talking about it when we were watching the last season, like, the time commitment of everything he's doing.
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: If she gets to a point... like, right now it seems like she, you know, just what we get from the show, it seems like she can bathe and use the bathroom and wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night and, like, keep stuff clean around the house.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: If she were to get to a point where she couldn't do that, how is Matt supposed to deal with that? He's gonna be gone at school and football most of the day, some days.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: You know, like, they're at that point where she needs him to help with, like, official things and, like, stuff around the house, but if it got to the point where she needed him to take care of everything because she would be not eating or not using the bathroom, he couldn't do it.
AUSTIN: She would have to go to a home.
MITCH: Or have somebody come in, like they did.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: My grandma, she's living with my mom now, she has Pick's disease, which I'm pretty sure would fall under the dementia umbrella. It's some type of Alzheimer's that primarily affects the, like, social emotional...
AUSTIN: Ok
MITCH: So, like, looking at this. Middle stage dementia is where you get the communication issues, and late stage is where you get the behavior changes and aggression and stuff.
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: With her specific thing - and the numbers for Pick's disease are pretty low, population wise - it was like she could - this was while I was in college and I was living here - she could do ninety percent of things just fine, but would have a really hard time with, like, social interactions, and aggression out of nowhere.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: To where, she would go out and run errands and, like, fill her prescriptions and go to the store and do all that stuff just fine, but then would be with a cashier at Wal-Mart and they would say something very normal and pleasant to her and in her mind that was like a slap in the face. And she would, like, yell and cause a scene. But that was tough because that was the first sign, and, like, someone like my aunts or my mom would see it and be like, "No, she's like... the laundry's done, her prescriptions are filled, she's making all of her appointments. It's like everything is good." And I would be like, "But it's not. Like, there's clearly something going on here." And it eventually progressed to where that stuff started slipping. She has regressed to, like, no communication. It's gone a long way in a short amount of time.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: I get nervous watching the show, having seen both my grandma and, like, other people, 'cause, like, there is no endgame for Matt and his grandma.
AUSTIN: No
MITCH: Like, we see them... They're some of my favorite scenes, are Matt and his grandma, through the first few seasons, and it's only gonna get harder, and he's never gonna be in a convenient place to really handle it the way it needs to be handled.
AUSTIN: I mean, the best thing for that situation is him mother coming in like she did.
MITCH: But that's her mother-in-law, like, she's not...
AUSTIN: I know, but honestly that is the best thing.
MITCH: Yeah, it is.
14:56
MITCH: The last thing - I didn’t know numbers - fifty million people worldwide have dementia, currently, at any given time.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: It’s about five to eight percent of the general population over the age of 60.
AUSTIN: That’s pretty high.
MITCH: Yeah, it is.
AUSTIN: My god.
MITCH: It’s because of, you know, increased life expectancy in most parts of the world, and because of the aging population in most, like, developed countries. The World Health Organization projects 82 million by 2030, and 152 million by 2050. Obviously assuming nothing else happens. But at the rate things are going, it’ll be triple the rate it is now in thirty years. And that’s where, like, socially, like big picture, globally and nationally, if we have three times as many elderly people who can’t take care of themselves as we do right now, there’s gotta be some structural changes that happen (laughing)
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: ‘Cause there’s not gonna be enough young people to take care of all the old people.
AUSTIN: No. Well, and (sigh) what’s so sad - and this is just purely based off of kind of the generalized idea of taking care of yourself when you’re younger -
MITCH: Mhmm
AUSTIN: My grandmother was an avid reader.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Avid. She would read constantly. She had stacks and stacks and stacks of books, and read, if not most of them, all of them.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: And it did nothing.
MITCH: Yeah, that’s… Reading some of the sites, that’s the good advice: keep your brain exercised and sharp, and it helps, but it can’t stop it if it’s gonna happen.
AUSTIN: No. I mean, yeah.
16:40
MITCH: I can see that with my three grandmas, my grandma and my two stepgrandmas or whatever
AUSTIN: Mhmm
MITCH: two of them are definitely getting older, are definitely heading that direction, but the two that didn’t live here had like, just had so many hobbies. Like quilting and reading and crossword puzzles and church groups and all that stuff, and I can see how it helps a lot. Because my grandma who lives with my mom, who it hit hard and fast and bad, one of the things that made it harder is she didn’t have anything. When it got to the point where her and my grandpa were mostly staying home all day, she didn’t have anything to fall back on, and nothing to keep her mind activated at all.
AUSTIN: Yeah. And what makes sense, my grandmother is kinda the same way. She read all the time,
MITCH: Mhmm
AUSTIN: there was no social interaction. And she… Especially since they moved to Oklahoma, it was one of those things where they moved to Oklahoma so that they could be close to family.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: They don’t have friends here.
MITCH: No
AUSTIN: They did it because they’re three hours away from us and - well, when I was down in Texas, anyway - and they’re fifteen minutes away from my aunt and uncle. Like, that’s why they’re here. And it makes sense, that probably is a big part of it. You have to have some social interaction.
MITCH: And that’s not… It’s not like it’s an all or nothing...
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: There are lots of people who have done “everything right,” and it still, tragically, hits hard. And there’s people that haven’t and are fine.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: But it does seem to help, generally. I didn’t know this: the strongest factor is age and family history, by far.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: But African Americans are twice as likely to have dementia as elderly white people.
AUSTIN: Wow
MITCH: Hispanic people are 1.5 times more likely. That makes sense to me as a… It’s not a disease that you have genetically or you catch, it’s a syndrome. It makes sense that, like, having it be caused or worsened by other things. Obviously if you’re lower income or you have a lifetime of not eating as well or other diseases, that makes sense.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: That also means if you could improve general health, you’d probably see those dementia numbers decrease.
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: Which is, you know, hopeful.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: Obviously not things like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and stuff, but in general.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Let’s hope that that’s the case.
MITCH: Hopefully. That’s a real, real downer.
AUSTIN: And it was a lot of information, like, in a short amount of time. (laughing)
MITCH: Mainly, I just think.... That’s a very normal, like, part of life that most people have some connection to, and there aren’t that many tv shows that I can think of that deal with it as realistically as Friday Night Lights.
AUSTIN: No. That’s very true.
MITCH: Like, I can’t think of any. Other shows that feature elderly people don’t really…
AUSTIN: The things that Friday Night Lights gets right, they get very right.
MITCH: Yeah. And sometimes a big part of getting it right is just doing it in the first place.
AUSTIN: And sometimes they speed it up, like with Jason Street’s injury. But, like, they hit the bases.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: They hit it. They nailed it.
MITCH: Yeah, yeah, it really nails the… It’s not like Matt… I feel like a lot of tv shows would go the way of, this is a thing you have to deal with for an arc or for an episode. This is just Matt and his grandma’s life all the time.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s not. But no matter what is going on, that is also happening in the background.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: It’s not a Very Special Episode, it’s not one arc where it’s like, season 3 we have to Deal with The Dementia. It’s just a thing in his life.
AUSTIN: It’s just a… yeah
MITCH: That’s more realistic. It makes it difficult to watch. Like, it’s not pleasant tv viewing.
AUSTIN: It’s not easy, yeah.
MITCH: But it’s real. Also, before we put this issue to bed. That actress is incredible.
AUSTIN: Oof, she’s just… so good.
MITCH: I think of, like, all the roles in the show, she might have been given the hardest task to do.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: Like, just the nuance in that performance. Especially considering she’s not really a lead,
AUSTIN: No
MITCH: she doesn’t get that much screen time. But, like, there’s so much there.
AUSTIN: She just nails it.
MITCH: It’s really good.
AUSTIN: It’s, it’s…
MITCH: I feel bad that I don’t know her name or anything she’s been in.
AUSTIN: I know. I wonder how old she is, or was when the show was going on.
MITCH: We’re gonna take a little break so I can google, and then it’ll seem like I knew.
(Devil Town theme music)
MITCH: Her name is Luanne Stephens. Holy shit. She’s Luanne Worley Stephens. Worley’s not a super common name, that’s one of my family names, too. From Texas.
AUSTIN: I know. I’ve heard that name before.
MITCH: Like, I also have Worley from central Texas area, so we could be related. Her name is Luanne Worley Stephens. She’s from Dallas, she grew up in Ft. Worth. She was in Longmire until 2017.
AUSTIN: Ok
MITCH: Yeah, outside of Friday Night Lights it was just a lot of, like, one episode tv show stuff, like Walker Texas Ranger, you know, things like that.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: Seems like Friday Night Lights was her biggest role, except for Longmire, she was also on that the whole time. That’s kind of what I love about these, I guess, prestige television. It gave roles for people like her, or like… Like, would Margot Martindale be a huge star if she was only limited to movie roles? Probably not.
AUSTIN: No
MITCH: She’s never really had a movie lead, really. But you give her three or four good tv shows to sink her teeth into and she’s like one of our greatest actresses.
AUSTIN: Oh yeah. One of the biggest things I remember from when I started binging tv shows was her going out by key lime pie in Dexter.
MITCH: Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah
AUSTIN: (laughing) ‘Cause Dexter was like the biggest one that I watched at the time.
MITCH: Ok, here’s the deal, I found Luanne Stephens IMDb page. It doesn’t have anything about where she is now. She was on Longmire in 2017, that’s the last thing I can see. There is nothing else. The next results on google are not about her. So, like, she does not have much of an internet presence. I hope she’s doing ok. I’m gonna, like, research that for the future.
AUSTIN: We’re actually gonna find her and we’re gonna interview her.
MITCH: I would love that.
23:17
(Devil Town theme music)
MITCH: All right, let's pivot. Not too hard.
AUSTIN: Pivot
MITCH: Don't wanna break our knees.
AUSTIN: No. You don't break a knee.
MITCH: You can break a knee!
AUSTIN: You can break a knee but not like that, like...
MITCH: That's my greatest fear. That is one of my - I don't have really bad nightmares or anything, but my whole entire life - people have, like, the teeth falling out dreams. I've never had that before. I've had so many dreams where I'm just walking and I look down and, like, take a step and my knee just, like, breaks the wrong way.
AUSTIN: See, I don't have the teeth losing dreams, I have the teeth grinding to nothing, to dust.
MITCH: That's stress.
AUSTIN: They're just gone.
MITCH: I don't know why. I don't know why mines, like, leg stuff. I did break my ankle when I was a kid but it wasn't that bad.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: I've just had, like, consistent, recurring nightmares of - oh I'm walking along everything's fine. Oh no my knee is bending backwards and all the, like, bones in my leg are broken.
AUSTIN: See, I think I watched The Arrival with Martin... with Charlie Sheen, and it never bothered me. Me knees never bothered me.
MITCH: What is that?
AUSTIN: It's an alien movie.
MITCH: Oh
AUSTIN: And he befriends this, this kid, and at the very end of the movie the kid turns out to be an alien.
MITCH: Love that
AUSTIN: And when he sees him, his knees - he's looking off in the distance and he sees him staring at him, and then his legs go backwards.
MITCH: Ahhhhh that's gross
AUSTIN: (laughing) And he runs off into the distance.
MITCH: They do that a lot in the Animorphs books. I finally finished reading the Animorphs books. They have to morph in to a lot of animals -
AUSTIN: How many? How many?
MITCH: Fifty-four-ish.
AUSTIN: Ughh
MITCH: Sixty. They're good. They do a lot of animals where their limbs work differently than our limbs, and it describes feeling, like, the joints grinding against each other.
AUSTIN: Ughhhh
MITCH: Also, the covers of those books are iconic. Everybody remembers them from, like, Scholastic book fairs. They do not represent the books well because the covers are like a slow, fluid morph.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: The book is very explicit that that is not how it works. And you never know which part of your body is going to go first or last or how it's gonna happen. It could be - if you're going lizard, you could be a lizard with fully human skin and then you start changing shape, or vice versa. But there's a couple where it describes someone becoming, like, a deer or something where their limbs are longer, and their bones grow first and shoot out of their skin
AUSTIN: Ahhhh
MITCH: and then the skin and muscle is dripping down their exposed leg bones to, like, form the new legs. (laughing)
AUSTIN: Ohhhhh
MITCH: Those books are... traumatizing.
BOTH: (laughing)
MITCH: I read them when I was 30 years old and they were traumatizing.
AUSTIN: We're just gonna, actually for the rest of the episode, we're just gonna summarize the Animorphs.
MITCH: There are like three really good Animorphs podcasts. I wanna do my own, but, like, there's already too much... I like the ones that exist too much, I don't wanna step on their toes.
AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah. Speaking of, ok
MITCH: Let's talk about,
AUSTIN: Ok
MITCH: horrible leg stuff.
AUSTIN: Leg stuff. The reason we're talking about this: in season 3, in season 2 actually,
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Smash hurts his knee. And then the aftermath is that Eric gets a bunch of shit from everybody in the town saying "how dare you make the offense revolve around Smash Williams." When, in reality, that's what he's been doing. They did it when they won the state championship. Nobody was complaining at the time then. But we are focusing on his injury.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: In the show, they don't ever mention exactly what happens.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: It seems like it's an ACL tear.
MITCH: What does ACL stand for?
AUSTIN: So, the ACL stands for, I think it's the anterior cruciate ligament. Ok
MITCH: Crueshit?
AUSTIN: Crutiate.
MITCH: Cruciate.
AUSTIN: Yeah. It is actually - and I did not know this, I always assumed it was gonna be on the inside or the outside of your knee. It is right in, like, underneath your patella.
MITCH: Don't do that. Don't do that. He's knocking on his patella with his hard fingers. It's like knocking on a door. (laughing)
AUSTIN: It doesn't feel good. And then the patellar tendon attaches like that, right there.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: But it's underneath that. It connects your tibia to your femur.
MITCH: The actual bone tibia to the bone femur?
AUSTIN: Mhmm
MITCH: I didn't know that.
AUSTIN: Yeah. It goes in between
MITCH: Ohhh that makes thinking about it tearing so much worse! (laughing)
AUSTIN: Yeah. Oh, there's... I watched a video
27:17
27:19
MITCH: That's what, also like - we've been talking about this all week, getting ready for this. About half way through the week I was like, oh no, I'm opening myself up to potentially seeing some videos, and I got... No, I will not watch them.
AUSTIN: You're gonna watch it.
MITCH: I'm not. I won't. I'm not joking, like, I...
AUSTIN: No, no it's very...
MITCH: I won't.
AUSTIN: It doesn't show anything bad, it is very much anatomical and it talks about...
MITCH: Oh ok. I'll watch doctor stuff.
AUSTIN: Yes
MITCH: There's a million videos on the internet of horrific sports injuries, especially to knees, and every single one I've ever accidentally seen lives in my brain permanently. And just thinking about it really, really upsets me and I do not wanna see another one ever in my life.
AUSTIN: (laughing) Ok so...
MITCH: There's some really bad ones.
AUSTIN: Let's see, let's see, let's see. Here we go, ok I found it. Pause.
(Devil Town theme music)
MITCH: We just watched one of those CGI videos of how the procedure works. What did the say in the beginning? It mostly happens by rotation?
AUSTIN: So, the ACL is strictly - not strictly for that - but a lot of it is for side to side movement, lateral movement.
MITCH: Ok
AUSTIN: So most of the time whenever you're gonna see an ACL tear - not most of the time, it's actually pretty even if I remember right, based off the numbers I saw - particularly in football, a lot of people won't just get it when you get hit.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: They'll try to cut and their knee will blow out. So, sometimes you'll get tackled and your knee will pop a different way and it'll tear that way too. But it's primarily trying to move from side to side. You have somebody that tears their ACL, they can run as fast as they possibly can, straight, and it's fine.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: But it's the side to side movement that really screws with them. So, the reason I wanted to talk about ACL is, obviously Smash messed up his knee. It seems like it's an ACL.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: I also remember from the book and the movie, Boobie Myles, his was a full on ACL tear.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: And then there's that whole scene in the movie where he threatens the doctor that tells him he can't play anymore. Tells him that he's an insider for Midland Lee.
MITCH: Which, like, he's probably right.
AUSTIN: (laughing) But, it, the saddest part was he was just telling him, "I'm on your side, I'm on your side." And he's like, "No you're not! You're not on my side! You're telling me I can't play anymore." But in the book, he, he heals.
MITCH: Yeah, he recovers
AUSTIN: He recovers.
MITCH: pretty well.
AUSTIN: And comes back and then realizes his spot's gotten taken, and disappears. And that, ugh, that's worse to me. Is that he comes back and is, is, is the same.
MITCH: Yeah, the indignity in the book is... We don't really see that in the show as... The book really paints it as, like, there are no good guys. Boobie doesn't seem like the most likeable person in the world, but he's a kid. He gets injured, doesn't seem to get much support at all from other players, from his coaches. Of course they have to replace him, they need to replace him.
AUSTIN: Oh, yeah
MITCH: He would want them to succeed while he's recovering.
AUSTIN: Of course.
MITCH: But they replace him so easily and so well, and his replacement ends up being better, and he gets no sympathy for that.
AUSTIN: Yeah, none.
MITCH: And it would be unrealistic to hope that he would, like, you know... They shouldn't change their play out of sympathy. Like, they're gonna play the person who's better for the job.
AUSTIN: Oh, of course.
MITCH: But they don't care about him at all. Like, he is just left on his own.
AUSTIN: It's sad.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: It's so, so sad.
MITCH: That's what I like about... I like that the show... The show could've told us that story, but I don't wanna watch a show where everything's just, like, bleak all the time. I like that they let this storyline be a way to show Coach proactively helping somebody.
AUSTIN: Right. Well, and I really enjoyed - and again, it's just something that... They didn't really touch on the direct aftermath of that.
MITCH: No
AUSTIN: 'Cause obviously they go by school year pretty much, in the seasons. So you didn't get to see what exactly happened with Smash.
31:35
31:35
AUSTIN: But what we're looking at is probably... He probably did have surgery if he did have an ACL tear that was that significant.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Now, I did have a minor ACL tear when I was in college. Not a tear, a strain, which is kind of the same as a tear.
MITCH: How did you do it?
AUSTIN: Some dude. I was doing kickoff return, which is -
MITCH: In college?
AUSTIN: High school
MITCH: You said college.
AUSTIN: Did I say college? I said school.
MITCH: It's like, that's why I asked. 'Cause I was like, did you play in college?
AUSTIN: No, I thought I said school. Either way.
MITCH: It's on tape, we can go back and check (laughing)
AUSTIN: No, I don't want to. No, no, don't prove me wrong.
BOTH: (laughing)
AUSTIN: I was returning a kickoff,
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: and the guy on the outside missed the block. And the dude came around and instead of trying to tackle me up, like upstairs, he just dives for my knees.
MITCH: Ughh
AUSTIN: His helmet hits me in my left knee. And, um, I don't remember what I said, but apparently it was loud enough for everybody in the stands to hear.
MITCH: (laughing)
AUSTIN: And all they head, all they heard was "Ah fuck!"
BOTH: (laughing)
MITCH: Hey, that's understandable.
AUSTIN: And I thought that I was done.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: But it was minor. I was walking around on crutches the entire night, and I essentially walked it off afterwards, but I had to wear a brace. Either way, when it comes to ACL tears, you have to have surgery. If you've torn it completely, you're gonna have to have surgery. And what we were looking at was the anatomical, like...
MITCH: Well, I didn't know what it was that was tearing.
AUSTIN: Yeah, I didn't know where it was in your knee.
MITCH: It connect your femur to your tibia, so if it's torn completely in half, it's not gonna grow back.
AUSTIN: No
MITCH: It has to be reattached.
AUSTIN: It has to be reattached. And so whenever they do the surgery, based off what we were watching,
MITCH: So - you might not know the answer to this - before this surgery was developed, for, like, most of human history, this had to have happened to a lot of people in, you know, thousands of years ago.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: Do you just permanently not be able to use your leg?
AUSTIN: I mean, you'd be able to use your leg. You wouldn't be able to that... Like, it would heal -
MITCH: That's what I'm asking. So if you tore your ACL completely through, it's gone, you can still walk on it?
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: You can still do stuff, you just can't -
AUSTIN: Well eventually it does seize up to where, like, you're not able to walk as easily.
MITCH: Yeah, but, like, assuming I'm like a medieval serf or something and I tear my ACL, I can still get around.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: I just won't have the mobility I used to.
AUSTIN: Correct, yeah.
MITCH: Ok. 'Cause, yeah, knowing what it is, that had to have happened to so many people before they had the medicine to fix it.
AUSTIN: Oh yeah, oh yeah. And especially since we know that, of the knee injuries, it is by far one of... it is by far the most injured part of your knee. But what they do is they splice out a part of your patellar tendon and then basically shove it through a hole in your bone that they drill, and then replace the entire ACL joint.
MITCH: It looks like they're making like a rope swing. Like, drill a hole through the wood and the knot the rope and...
AUSTIN: (laughing) It does. I just don't understand how they just allow your patellar tendon to be, like, there's a hole in it now.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: I mean, there's enough there I'm assuming it would...
MITCH: It's crazy to me that, for most things, the body will just heal it up eventually,
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: if you give it time. So like, it won't heal your ACL, so you gotta take stuff and put it there. But they can drill holes into bones and cut sections off of other tendons and they're gonna heal up just fine.
AUSTIN: It's just wild.
34:54
34:54
AUSTIN: So, we'e talking about the ACL, and I just wanted to talk about the prevalence of ACL injuries. The study that I found - and it's on, um, it's the Journal of Athletic Training and the National Athletic Trainers Association -
MITCH: NATS
AUSTIN: NATA
MITCH: Oh yeah
BOTH: (laughing)
MITCH: 'Ssociation
AUSTIN: So it is, uh, this study is - scientific paper - it's called A Multisport Epidemiological Comparison of Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries in High School Athletics, by Allen M. Joseph, Christy L. Collins, and R. Dawn Comstock, PhD. But it goes through and it talks about the prevalence of ACL injuries, and then who it actually affects more.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: So I'm not gonna go through this entire goddamn paper 'cause it is long.
MITCH: No, give us the highlights.
AUSTIN: But I am gonna go through the results, 'cause that's essentially what we were looking for. When it comes to ACL injuries, in the period of time that they had, they had 617 ACL injuries, of 9,452,180 athletic exposures.
MITCH: Ok
AUSTIN: Ok. So that's an injury rate of 6.5 per 100,000. Nationally, in the nine sports studied - they studied nine different sports, that's both men's and women's -
MITCH: Nine total? Or nine men's...
AUSTIN: No, nine total.
MITCH: Nine total.
AUSTIN: Yeah. Nationally, of the nine sports studied, an estimated 215,628 ACL injuries occurred during the study period. The injury rate was higher in competition. Obviously we understand, like, that's fairly, gonna be fairly obvious. Can you guess which sport of them had the most prevalence of ACL injuries?
MITCH: Volleyball
AUSTIN: No.
MITCH: A lot of jumping.
AUSTIN: Girls' soccer.
MITCH: Girls' soccer.
AUSTIN: Yeah, had the highest injury rate, followed closely by football. It was 12.2 per 100,000, as opposed to boys' football, which was 11.1.
MITCH: Yeah. See, I wonder why girls' soccer, but boys' soccer is not higher than...
AUSTIN: No
MITCH: You know what I mean?
AUSTIN: Yeah, and what they -
MITCH: Where is boys' soccer on the list?
AUSTIN: It actually does not have it in the results page. It's gonna be in between those two -
MITCH: Is it also high?
AUSTIN: It is middle of the road.
MITCH: Really?
AUSTIN: Mhmm. 'Cause we have the highest two, which is a 12.2 and 11.1, and they say that the last two are boys' basketball and boys' baseball.
MITCH: Really?
AUSTIN: Which is 2.3 and 0.7.
MITCH: I mean, baseball makes sense to me, it not being a thing. I just... It's weird that, like, obviously there's not gonna be a girls' equivalent for football,
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: but you'd think that boys' soccer and girls' soccer would be next to each other, wherever they ranked.
AUSTIN: And it may, it may be below football but it may be fairly high.
MITCH: Yeah. Do we know why, though? Why is girls' soccer more risky?
AUSTIN: So, and they say that it has a lot to do with muscle, like...
MITCH: Maturation?
AUSTIN: Muscle maturation and generation and things like that.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Hormonal differences and things like that.
MITCH: You might not have looked this up. Does girls' soccer have a higher rate in college and professional?
AUSTIN: I did not look that up so I don't know for sure.
MITCH: Like, is it a thing of they're just, their bodies have to catch up to what they're doing?
AUSTIN: That may be what it is. In sex comparable sports, girls had higher rates than boys. That's an 8.9 as opposed... let's see... than boys, which is a 2.6.
MITCH: That's really surprising, a huge gap.
AUSTIN: Mhmm. But, overall, 76.6% of ACL injuries resulted in surgery. So if you injure your ACL, you're most likely gonna get surgery on it.
38:49
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: And that's usually a complete tear.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: 'Cause most of the time if you have a partial tear, it'll heal itself without having surgery on it.
MITCH: I wonder - I bet we could read in that study. I need to read it. I wonder how much it's like concussions, where, how many times does somebody have a partial injury to it and it just never gets recorded 'cause they don't know?
AUSTIN: And that could be the case.
MITCH: Like, I bet there's a lot of people that have had minor ACL injury and just walk it off or ice it or wear a brace on their own, without telling anybody.
AUSTIN: Eventually, down the road - 'cause they got athletic trainers that were a part of this...
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: They basically emailed a ton of them and said, "hey do you wanna be a part of this study?" And they did prevailing ones as well, so, like, if you injured it once they went back in the study.
MITHC: Ohhh ok yeah
AUSTIN: And they looked at that. But the numbers are fairly low, just because, if you end up tearing your ACL, you're gonna get a complete, like, restructure.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Or reconstruction. But the most common, let's see, the most common mechanisms of injury - and this is where I was talking about player to player contact and non-contact - they're actually really close in percentages. Player to player contact was 42.8%, and then no contact was 37.9. So you're probably, say you're watching a college football game,
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: and somebody blows out their knee, looking at those numbers, you're gonna see an equal amount of ACL was blown here and here, there's really no...
MITCH: You're almost as likely to hurt your ACL just running on the field as you are getting hit.
AUSTIN: Exactly. They have a key points section: ACL injuries are generally regarded as a particular concern for female athletes. However, of the nine sports studied, football had the largest number of them.
MITCH: Because there's more players, yeah.
AUSTIN: Which makes sense. And the highest competition related ACL injury rate. So that actually confuses me, it seems like that women's soccer is more prevalent to get them in non-competitive situations.
MITCH: Yeah. Maybe, I feel like... I'm trying to think of other sports, if this is an accurate thing or not. I feel like football, when you're practicing, you're doing things differently than you do in a game.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: For most of what you do.
AUSTIN: Most of the time, yeah. That makes sense, actually.
MITCH: Like baseball, you're not, they're not playing scrimmage games all the time, but the things you're doing are pretty similar to how you do them in a game. Soccer, you can run drills and stuff, but in the drills it's pretty one to one with how it's gonna be on the field.
AUSTIN: Right, yeah
MITCH: Football's like, you don't really see the scenario you see on the field until you're out there on the field.
AUSTIN: Right, yeah, you're repeating a lot of different small things over and over again.
MITCH: But if it's gonna be a hit, you're not gonna get hit like that, that intense, in a practice. Even the most intense practice, it's not gonna be that bad.
AUSTIN: Yeah, and even then, they're constantly watching you.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: The coaches are right there, they're making sure that you do the things that you need to so you don't get injured. Now, if you're on the field, they can't really do that. It's... that makes sense.
MITCH: Also, we see... Like, I played some sports, not football. We've seen, in the show and in football in general, the idea of like, you gotta leave it all on the field. I feel like that's more in football than in other sports. Other things that I've seen and done, there's not as much, like, verbal pressure to be like, ok, this is the game where it matters, you have to go out there and do whatever it takes.
AUSTIN: That's, that's
MITCH: Like, it's like a mental thing that I feel like exists in football more than it exists in other sports. Of like, you have to go out there and destroy your body to prove that you're doing it right.
AUSTIN: That's where football and toxic masculinity meet.
MITCH: Yeah it is. I don't know how much that actually affects it, but it seems...
AUSTIN: Well, it's this unspoken rule. It is, not even that, like, it's not even unspoken. Like you said, they say, "you need to give it... you need to basically sacrifice your body for whatever you want."
MITCH: So, like, subconsciously and mentally, kids especially are going to be riskier and harder and do things in games that they wouldn't do in practice,
AUSTIN: Oh yeah
MITCH: because they've been ramped up by... Which is just, like, that's just how it works, but... I didn't - in all the baseball I ever played in my life, I had coaches that were really intense, we definitely, like, wanted to win and were competitive. But I wasn't getting that, like, fight through the pain, like, you owe it to the team to injure yourself for the sake of winning (laughing). That's just not the vibe.
AUSTIN: No, it never is, and it... That's, I mean, like, we've talked about it on multiple occasions. Football is not great.
MITCH: The Devil.
AUSTIN: Well, yeah. (laughing) But back to key points. Athletes were seven times more likely to sustain an ACL injury in competition than they were in practice, which makes sense. Overall, 76.6% of ACL injuries resulted in surgery.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: However, 29.2% of ACL injuries assessed by an athletic trainer and a general physician, and 12.8% of those assessed by an athletic trainer and orthopedic physician did not result in surgical repair. The ACL injury rates and mechanisms vary by sport and sex, indicating that targeted prevention efforts will likely be most effective.
MITCH: That's big.
AUSTIN: Yeah, so, whenever they - and that's probably why in practice you don't see it as much. It is whenever... They find that whenever you are actively teaching people how to plant correctly and how to, like, if you're throwing a football or whenever you're tackling, you need to have a certain way to tackle, or...
MITCH: What are - 'cause I don't know - what are those preventative things? How can you prevent it?
AUSTIN: So, whenever you're... It's more of a repetition and motor skill thing. You just keep on going over and over and over again. And it's strengthening the muscles to do so. And whenever you're cutting, you're controlled and not out of control and you're not just wildly going all over the place. That's why you do agility drills over and over and over again.
MITCH: Is there, like... So let's say I'm gonna do a side to side drill, is there a right and a wrong way to do that with your legs and your feet?
AUSTIN: In order to... They don't necessarily say, ok, you're gonna blow your ACL if you don't do it like this.
MITCH: Yeah, but what is the right way to do that?
AUSTIN: So, it's... In order for it to work correctly, it's more so based off of speed and efficiency. And whenever you're more efficient and you're more fluid, you're gonna be less prone to injury.
MITCH: Ok
AUSTIN: And that's just because if you're stopping and you're jerky and you're out of control, you're gonna be more prone to screw something up.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: If you're able to do it, if you're able to focus on the small things and make sure that your plant foot is like right here, and you start out with this foot, and things like that. If you start with those small things, those small steps, then you're gonna be less prone to injury later on. And that's the same thing with tackling, too. I mean, whenever you tackle, you usually, whenever you're first starting out they teach you how to wrap your head around,
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: keep your face up, and don't lead with the top of your head. Now, that's of course, now they do that.
MITCH: I... Like, I truly don't know. When you're tackling you wanna keep your head up, all that stuff. What are the things you do and don't do with your feet? (laughing)
AUSTIN: So, drive your feet.
MITCH: What does that mean?
AUSTIN: So, whenever you tackle, a lot of people - and you'll see it in the pros, too - their feet will stop.
MITCH: Ok
AUSTIN: So they'll tackle and immediately their feet go limp,
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: and they just drag them. You're looking at an injury to a knee. But if you're finishing a tackle off, you're going to be able to... Now, you may screw the person up that you're tackling.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: But you, yourself, if you're driving your feet, you're the one that's in control of the situation. You're not gonna be...
MITCH: And you're engaging the muscles that you've hopefully conditioned to that point.
AUSTIN: Exactly, right.
47:20
47:20
AUSTIN: Oh, here's one. Knee injuries are among the most common serious injuries, accounting for 60% of high schoolers' sports related surgeries. ACL injuries account for 50% or more of all knee injuries, making the ligament especially important in any discussion of knee injuries. Estimated - and this one's a big one, this'll be the last one I talk about on here - but an estimated one billion dollars is spent annually for ACL reconstructions in the US.
MITCH: Ughhh. One billion dollars.
AUSTIN: Billion dollars. So, it's wild. Furthermore, ACL injuries place the patient at risk for early osteoarthritis and chronic pain ten to twenty years after the injury.
MITCH: I didn't know that. 'Cause I knew, like, we had said how it's, you know, of the injuries of that severity, you do come back from it,
AUSTIN: You do, yeah.
MITCH: pretty fully. But then ten or twenty years down the road,
AUSTIN: You're screwed.
MITCH: it can come back again.
AUSTIN: Yeah. And that's what makes me think about, like - I don't know if I've ever talked about Adrian Peterson on here.
MITCH: Not on the podcast, no.
AUSTIN: I mean, there's many, many, many players that have torn their ACL.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Especially in the NFL, you're gonna see that. But Adrian Peterson specifically, I think it was in 2010 or 2011, blew his ACL and his MCL out. Tore 'em both completely. The MCL is on the outside, I wanna say.
MITCH: I don't know.
AUSTIN: Medial Collateral Ligament? I'm not sure. It's on the outside parts of your knee.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: But, he tore his, and then obviously he got surgery, reconstructed his knee. And then just worked his ass off to come back the next season. The very beginning of the season, which is incredibly difficult to do.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Usually - and this is what you see in the show with Smash -
MITCH: With Smash, what he's trying to do.
AUSTIN: Yes. Smash is very tentative to put any weight on his knee the way he used to, to cut, to do anything. He's scared, and that makes sense.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: That's not, like, that is not a fault of his. It's natural to make sure that you are safe and your knee, whatever is injured, you don't wanna reinjure it.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: You don't wanna hurt yourself. But in that situation, in order to get the best out of yourself, you have to get past the fact that your knee's gonna be ok.
MITCH: Yeah. Well, we see him, we see him after the risk is truly gone.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: We're assuming that he did the physical therapy and got himself to that point. Now it's all in his brain.
AUSTIN: Right, exactly. That's what makes the Adrian Peterson thing so wild. Is he came back and he ended up rushing for the second most yards in the history of the NFL. He was the NFL MVP. It was one of the most dominant seasons of a running back that I've ever seen. So I... The guy is a machine. He's an absolute monster, I don't understand him. And if it was anybody else it would not have been able to happen.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: It's just his genetics and the amount of work that he put in, and I guess now that ACL injuries, the surgeries are so prevalent, they've been able to put a lot of technology into these things, and the rehab and everything like that.
MITCH: Yeah, if anyone's gonna have the tools and the information to do it, it's someone in the NFL.
AUSTIN: Yeah. So yeah, that's ACL injuries (laughing)
MITCH: Cool. I made it through this whole thing and I didn't ever see any graphic horrible videos.
AUSTIN: We could watch it.
MITCH: Nope.
AUSTIN: No? Ok
MITCH: I'm not seeing it.
AUSTIN: Honestly, whenever you see ACL injuries,
MITCH: I don't know what's the difference between ACL... I'm just picturing all the sports injury videos I've seen.
AUSTIN: Most of the nasty ones are not ACLs.
MITCH: They're bones, are the nasty ones.
AUSTIN: Bones or, what's his name, Dak Prescott's recently. His, he dislocated and broke his ankle.
MITCH: Ahhhh
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: Ah!
AUSTIN: (laughing) It was bad.
MITCH: We gotta change the subject. I have a little bit of a different Football Question for Football Expert Austin.
AUSTIN: Oh no. If it's about, uh, contracts or anything like that...
MITCH: It's not.
AUSTIN: Ok
MITCH: It's not, it's not, it's not
AUSTIN: Ok ok ok
MITCH: Imagine you were - I don't know what a commissioner is. I'm assuming a commissioner gets to write the rule book.
AUSTIN: Roger Goodell.
MITCH: Yeah. Imagine you're Roger Goodell, and you get to change one rule in football.
AUSTIN: Oh Jesus.
MITCH: You can add a rule, you can take a rule away, you can take a rule that exists and change it somehow.
AUSTIN: Oh my
MITCH: What would you change? Just for your own... What would you like to see different?
AUSTIN: That is a hard, hard question. To be honest - and this is low hanging fruit - get rid of the kickoff.
MITCH: Really? Ok what would that do? I don't know what that would do.
AUSTIN: It...
MITCH: Like a throw off?
AUSTIN: You would start at a... If you won the coin toss, they'd set you on a... They could either do a punt,
MITCH: Ok
AUSTIN: or they would set you on a yard line. And they say, "Ok, start the game. Go!"
MITCH: Ok. I've heard that tossed around as like a potential thing that could happen. I never understood, why would you want to see that happen?
AUSTIN: Injuries
MITCH: Ok
AUSTIN: It is... A lot of injuries happen on kickoffs.
MITCH: Because you're running back...? Why do injuries happen on kickoffs?
AUSTIN: So, they've now tried to mitigate the amount of injuries. It doesn't, it doesn't change anything, really. But they used to be able to - the people that were doing the kickoff, you have the kicker and you have the entire team. They're the ones that are covering the field. They used to be able to get a run up, with the kicker.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: So they would be full speed, ten yards down the field, whereas the people that are on offense don't get to move until the ball's kicked.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: So they are sprinting down there, and injuries are going to happen.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: So what they've now done is they've made it to where you're on the line with the ball, you can't move until the ball's kicked on defense.
MITCH: Ok
AUSTIN: Makes sense.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Still, these people are running full speed.
MITCH: Still running a long way before you meet the people you're hitting.
AUSTIN: Yeah. But it's gonna take a lot of the injuries away. Plus, kickoffs are boring.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: They're really boring. Punt returns are a lot of fun, 'cause you go backwards and you go forwards and you run around.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Kickoff returns are just -
MITCH: Just kickoffs, not all kicking, not all returning, just kickoffs?
AUSTIN: Yeah. Just kickoffs. And it's gotten to the point where if you have a good kicker, which most teams have good enough kickers, they're kicking it into the endzone, you're not getting a kickoff return.
MITCH: So maybe it just gets rid of itself that way.
AUSTIN: Get rid of it. It doesn't... You're spending way too much money and you're endangering your players.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Get rid of it, it's dumb. It's stupid. I hate it. God.
MITCH: I mean, yeah, I'm all for getting rid of it. I'm all for getting rid of all of it, football.
AUSTIN: I understand you are, but...
MITCH: If we have to have it, I would love to see 20020 by Jon Bois come to life, in real life. That would be amazing, but that would never happen. But how we could replicate it a little bit, I want some version of more that two teams at the same time.
AUSTIN: Christ. (laughing)
MITCH: I'm imagining, maybe, you have three fields in a triangle where the endzones are little triangles. There are six teams.
AUSTIN: You wanna see injuries? That's how -
MITCH: But you can go to another field if you wanna go to another field. Maybe you take -
AUSTIN: That's how injuries happen.
MITCH: Maybe you take two football fields and put 'em together like a cross. Maybe that's -
AUSTIN: So four teams?
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: Oof
MITCH: Or maybe two teams and you get to decide which way you go.
AUSTIN: You could.
MITCH: There's a lot of things. What if Slamball but on football?
AUSTIN: I mean, that's pretty much the same thing.
MITCH: Yeah, but I wanna see it, kind of.
AUSTIN: So just random trampolines everywhere. What would be the rule that you would change, of the ones that you know of?
MITCH: I don't know that many rules, I don't care to know that many rules.
AUSTIN: I got one, it's dumb.
MITCH: Yes, give me a dumb one.
AUSTIN: Get rid of pass interference. It's stupid.
MITCH: So they can interfere?
AUSTIN: So they can tackle them when the ball's in the air.
BOTH: (laughing)
MITCH: No! That would just fundamentally change the way it's played so much.
AUSTIN: But, caveat, the offensive players can run towards the line, whenever they're motioning.
MITCH: I got my rule. It's different in pro and college and high school, but there's some rules for, like, lower level where you can't, like, celebrate. They call it celebration?
AUSTIN: Yes
MITCH: Mandatory celebrations. And that's judged Olympic style.
AUSTIN: (laughing) Yeah
MITCH: So we get rid of field goals, we get rid of extra points, two point conversions, all that stuff. You have to do some sort of celebration when you score a touchdown,
AUSTIN: Ok
MITCH: and you can get one to three points depending on how good your celebration is.
AUSTIN: Ok. So, let's see, I'm gonna give you a hypothetical situation.
MITCH: Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
AUSTIN: Actually I'm just gonna give you ones that I've seen.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: We have Randy Moss scores a touchdown, ok? He goes to the back of the endzone, right next to the field goal post,
MITCH: Yes
AUSTIN: he turns around, faces everybody at the field, butt facing the crowd, acts like he pulls his pants down, and then dances in front of the crowd and rubs his butt up against the field goal post.
MITCH: I'd give that a two for style and, just, statement. He'd get a three if he actually pulled his pants down.
AUSTIN: (laughing) And he would get fined immediately.
MITCH: Yeah. I'm picturing, I want... Ok, we're gonna take this up a notch, we're gonna replace the cross bar on the field goal with the judge's table.
AUSTIN: Ok
MITCH: You have six judges, like Olympic figure skating. They each have a criteria of, like, ten different things they're judging on. It takes minutes to deliver a score.
AUSTIN: (laughing) So teams that just really run up the score of the games -
MITCH: It's only one to three points.
AUSTIN: Yeah, but the game would increase in time. You're getting into Brockmire territory that way.
MITCH: Yes.
AUSTIN: Oh my god
MITCH: What's some other real life celebrations?
AUSTIN: Ok, so we have one recently that the Browns like to do. Somebody scores, they go into the corner, everybody on the team lines up on the back line and then gets down or gets to the side, and they act like they have cameras.
MITCH: Love that. Love that.
AUSTIN: And then the guy walks down the line
MITCH: Oh!
AUSTIN: and they take pictures of him.
MITCH: My gay heart. That's my favorite one I've ever heard.
AUSTIN: (laughing)
MITCH: See, me personally, if I was a judge, I love having more than just the person who scored involved. I want everybody involved.
AUSTIN: There was one...
MITCH: I want choreography. I want, I want to see evidence of rehearsal, is what I wanna see.
AUSTIN: There was, ok, so this one, this one's actually one of my favorite ones because it's idiotic and stupid. Somebody on the Colts scores a touchdown. They go to give the - I think was their running back. The running back gives the ball to their best line man.
MITCH: Mhmm
AUSTIN: He grabs the ball, spikes it, and then immediately jumps up on somebody's back who is now on the ground, acting like they're a keg, and they do a kegstand.
MITCH: Oh that's good, I like that. I like that a lot. I like it whenever it's somebody who doesn't usually run the ball because it's like, it feels like a spontaneous celebration, because they didn't expect to score.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: I'm thinking my criteria - not my criteria, the categories of celebrations. You have pantomime, especially with the football. Pretend the football's a telephone.
AUSTIN: Of course, yeah.
MITCH: You know, it's a pot of stew you gotta stir around a little bit. Something like that. I like just pure dancing. Just dance for dance's sake.
AUSTIN: Ok, yeah. Props?
MITCH: I'm not ok, I don't want props.
AUSTIN: You don't want props?
MITCH: I like it when it feels spontaneous.
AUSTIN: Ok, what about utilizing the props around the field?
MITCH: Yes. Using the field goal post, using other stuff on the field. That's great, I love that.
AUSTIN: Ok, I got another one.
MITCH: Yes
59:32
AUSTIN: Ezekiel Elliott, I think it was his rookie year, scores a touchdown. Pretty long touchdown, it’s like twenty or thirty yards. Just outruns everybody. And it’s right around Thanksgiving or Christmas. He jumps… He goes through the back of the endzone and jumps over the side of the -
MITCH: Love that. I was gonna say that a second ago.
AUSTIN: Salvation Army bucket and he hides in it and he pokes his head over the top.
MITCH: Yes. I was gonna say, I would give full points for just the suddenness and the surprise if you just kept running full speed out the gate, out the tunnel. Just don’t slow down.
AUSTIN: (laughing)
MITCH: Just keep on going.
AUSTIN: I think Herschel Walker did that one time.
MITCH: I like this idea, genuinely. I think this would be a good idea because, you know, you have your categories. You have miming something, you have dancing, you have a little skit or what have you, but you’re not gonna get rewarded for doing something that someone’s already done.
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: You’re not gonna get rewarded for something that’s stale or expected.
AUSTIN: Oh, so you can get zero points?
MITCH: Oh, you can easily get zero points.
AUSTIN: Really?
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: What if you spike the ball so hard it goes into the stands?
MITCH: You would have to, though. That’s what I’m saying. You go out there, spiking the ball might get you three points, but you have to do it in a way that is gonna be not cliche and tired.
AUSTIN: Ok
MITCH: So, yeah, you can just dance if you want to. But if you’re just gonna dance you better wow me in some way.
AUSTIN: Dance your ass off.
MITCH: Yes.
AUSTIN: Ok
MITCH: I like that because it would never get stale because one of the things you’re judging it on is Is this surprising? Is this fresh?
AUSTIN: Yeah
MITCH: Basically, it’s wig reveals on RuPaul’s Drag Race.
AUSTIN: (laughing)
MITCH: There weren’t any, like… You know… They started, early seasons, like season three or four, truly spontaneous, just ripping the wig off to the skull cap, and it wasn’t planned. And just a few years later it was this elaborate things where it was almost expected to happen. And now, just pulling your wig off, nobody cares. It’ll get you… It’ll hurt you if you just pull your wig off. You better have something that no one's ever seen before.
AUSTIN: (laughing)
MITCH: And it leads to some really great… It leads to Monet X Change having a tiny little Peter Pan short hair wig, and pulling it off and having an identical one underneath.
AUSTIN: (laughing) So good
MITCH: It’s good. I think there’s a lot of potential there for some really creative stuff.
AUSTIN: Did you see -
MITCH: I would watch football if this was a rule.
AUSTIN: Another Dak Prescott one. Not Dak Prescott, an Ezekiel Elliott one. Did you ever see Dak Prescott getting made fun of for doing his hip flexor workout?
MITCH: No
AUSTIN: Whenever he was, like, warming up one game, I think, I never seen him do it again. But he would, like, he would spin and he would do this number
MITCH: (laughing)
AUSTIN: And he would just, like, move his feet around and, just,
MITCH: I like that
AUSTIN: spin like this. So Ezekiel Elliott scored, last year, I think it was. And he just got to the back of the endzone and started doing that, all the way down the endzone.
BOTH: (laughing)
MITCH: That’s good.
AUSTIN: Ezekiel Elliott’s got some good shit. It’s just, it’s spontaneous. But you don’t, you don’t like Terrell Owens pulling a sharpie out of his sock?
MITCH: Nope
AUSTIN: And signing things?
MITCH: I mean, I don’t dislike that. I, honestly, I like pretending to pull a sharpie out of your sock and signing things better than actually doing it. That’s just me personally. I wouldn’t be the only judge.
AUSTIN: Right
MITCH: We’d have judges from France and China and Russia and England and Germany
AUSTIN: (laughing)
MITCH: People who’ve never seen football before.
AUSTIN: Ok, I got another one. And this is the last one.
MITCH: Last one.
AUSTIN: Terrell Ownes scores a big touchdown.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: He decides - actually I got two of ‘em - he decides when he was playing for the Cowboys to run over to the cheerleaders. He steals the pompoms from one of them and starts cheering.
MITCH: That’s ok, that’s funny.
AUSTIN: Another one, and this one almost got him hurt. He was playing for the 49ers. Playing the Cowboys in Dallas. Scores a very long touchdown and he immediately goes past the line and then sprints towards the middle of the field. Nobody has any fucking idea what he’s doing. He gets to the middle of the star, puts the ball on the middle of the star, and then -
MITCH: You’re allowed to go back out? Is that allowed?
AUSTIN: This was the first time it’s ever happened.
MITCH: Ok ok
AUSTIN: He puts the ball down, puts his hands out like this, like he’s on the cross, and looks up and just stares.
MITCH: Love it. Yes! I love the sacrilege, I love all of it.
AUSTIN: And then immediately, one of the players from the Cowboys sees that he’s doing this, goes and tackles his ass.
MITCH: This is what I want. This is why I want this rule.
AUSTIN: Misses him.
MITCH: (laughing)
AUSTIN: He misses him, not completely, he like hits him. But he misses him enough to where Terrell Owens just kinda like shucks him off. But the ball goes flying. He goes and grabs the ball, takes it back to the star, puts it down and does it again.
BOTH: (laughing)
MITCH: Oh I love that. That’s what I want, I want the theatrics of it.
1:04:08
AUSTIN: So, yeah. This was the same guy that had a press conference outside of his house while doing an ab workout.
MITCH: Yeah, I don’t know who this guy is but I love him. I’m all about it.
AUSTIN: He’s the guy that cried about his quarterback on live tv.
MITCH: What about him?
AUSTIN: They were criticizing Tony Romo and he got really in his feelings and he was like, “That’s my quarterback.”
MITCH: Yeah I like this guy.
AUSTIN: And just like tears, tears.
MITCH: All right, that is all of my questions. That was the last question I had.
AUSTIN: (laughing) Ok, ok.
MITCH: So I gotta think up some new questions before our next one.
AUSTIN: That was a good one.
MITCH: (laughing) Was it?
AUSTIN: Yeah!
MITCH: Ok. I think that’s about the right amount of time.
AUSTIN: Ok. Got it.
MITCH: (laughing) All right.
AUSTIN: Hell yeah
MITCH: Oh, we have stuff to say.
AUSTIN: Oh yeah
MITCH: You can email us at deviltown dot nope
AUSTIN: Nope
MITCH: You can email us at deviltownpodcast@gmail.com
AUSTIN: Got it, yes. You can find us on twitter at @deviltownpod. Let’s see, you can find me on twitter at @a_greenameyer, I think that’s right.
MITCH: That’s right.
AUSTIN: And then Mitch you can find at @organzapleats. What else do we have?
MITCH: Oh, you can find notes and links and transcripts at deviltown.buzzsprout.com. I think that’s everything.
AUSTIN: I think that’s it. If you wanna get on twitter, I’m just mad, mad, mad about everything that’s happening right now, so.
MITCH: Austin got really into politics.
AUSTIN: Yeah, a lot. Like, it was like night and day.
MITCH: (laughing)
AUSTIN: It just happened one day and I was like, fuck everything.
MITCH: Not the wrong time to do it.
AUSTIN: No it’s not (laughing)
MITCH: It’s very understandable.
AUSTIN: I’m just watching a lot of John Oliver. That’s it, just a lot of John Oliver, and getting very angry the entire time.
MITCH: That’s a lot of your twitter, is retweeting political things.
AUSTIN: Yep. That’s all it is.
MITCH: Mine’s a little bit that, but not all that.
AUSTIN: Sometimes it’s like dogs and shit, but mainly it’s just -
MITCH: And jokes.
AUSTIN: Mainly it’s just political shit.
MITCH: I thought about that the other day. I was like, if somebody were to listen to this and actually go find out twitters, it’s not… (laughing) Neither of us do much on there.
AUSTIN: No! I like I retweet things about football occasionally.
MITCH: I like the thought of somebody listening to this podcast and being like, you know what, I will check it out. And then being like,
AUSTIN: What the fuck?
MITCH: Why would they tell me to come here? This is nonsense.
AUSTIN: Yeah (laughing)
MITCH: Oh! The last thing I was gonna ask. We didn’t talk about non-Friday Night Lights stuff, but we’re recording this the day after Alex Trebek passed away.
AUSTIN: Yes
MITCH: Very, very sad. I watched - I’ve watched it probably five or six times - the clip of him and the football category. Have you seen that one?
AUSTIN: No. I just remembered you showed me one
MITCH: I showed you the one with the losers, in other words.
AUSTIN: Yeah, he called a girl a loser.
MITCH: She was a loser.
AUSTIN: (laughing)
MITCH: Alex Trebek was, like, King of the Nerds, but he was a jock. He was a kind, good hearted jock who loved to make fun of nerds and I love him for it. There’s one clip, I don’t know where to find it but if I… I’ll put it in the show notes.
AUSTIN: (laughing) Put it in the show notes.
MITCH: It’s a football category, and they cleared the whole board and all that’s left is the five football questions, and they get zero of them. And I was proud of myself, from, I think, this podcast. I got four of the five right.
AUSTIN: That’s what’s up.
MITCH: But they get none of them right and he’s just like - the first time he’s like, “It’s ok, that was a tough one.” And then as they go through it, he just keeps on ripping into them for not knowing anything about football (laughing). It’s so good, I’ll show you in a second. But, rest in peace, Alex Trebek. I’m very, very sad.
AUSTIN: Rest in peace. Rest in violence.
BOTH: (laughing)
MITCH: That’s truly all we have.
AUSTIN: Also, Blaseball may be coming back soon.
MITCH: Oh, on twitter today. They’re doing things.
AUSTIN: Oh I know.
MITCH: They’re in court.
AUSTIN: What’s his name’s dead apparently.
MITCH: Yeah
AUSTIN: The Commissioner (laughing)
MITCH: Yeah. He did a great job. Now he’s dead. They’re in court doing something. It’s gotten too much, it’s too much for me. I still love it, but it’s a lot.
AUSTIN: All right, I’m Austin
MITCH: And I’m Mitch
AUSTIN: and this has been Devil Town?
MITCH: It has.
AUSTIN: You’re leaving Devil Town.