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The Thom & Hawk Football Show is the only football podcast hosted by two long-time NFL vets, former teammates, AND current best friends. Each week, twice a week, join 10-time Pro-Bowler, Joe Thomas, and 7-year NFL vet, Andrew Hawkins as they bring you an unfiltered and insider's perspective on today's NFL that you're not gonna get anywhere else.

Listen every Wednesday as they welcome in guests, play some games, and make weekly picks as they weave through the NFL slate. And on Mondays, listen exclusively on Amazon Music for the "insider minicast" where Thom and Hawk bring you football, FASTER, breaking down their five favorite stories from the weekend, in 1 0 minutes or less.

Listen each week during football season, Mondays and Wednesdays here http://wondery.fm/THS_GSSA

We return to the fascinating story of the pioneering National Women's Football League (1974-88-ish) - and its overlooked role in the surprisingly resilient world of women's pro football - with sportswriters Britni de la Cretaz & Lyndsey D'Arcangelo ("Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League")

The modern women's pro game started modestly enough in 1967, when a Cleveland-based talent agent named Sid Friedman launched a barnstorming outfit known as the "Women's Professional Football League" in which a team of women (eventually nine) toured the country playing men's clubs in exhibitions and charity events – even as halftime entertainment at NFL and CFL games.

Frustrated by the lack of seriousness accorded their efforts, a number of breakaway players and teams bolted from Friedman's grip in 1974 to form a decidedly (and competitively) legit seven-team league; by 1976, the NWFL had ballooned to 14 franchises from coast-to-coast, including three in football-mad Texas – led by the "Herricanes" of Houston (our Episode 154 with filmmaker Olivia Kuan).

Though lacking sustainable budgets, major media coverage or appreciable crowds, the NWFL featured a passionate and determined breed of player – drawn to an unprecedented opportunity to play real men's-style tackle football for pay and buttressed by an emerging progressive era of Title IX, the Equal Rights Amendment and rampant sports league entrepreneurialism.

D'Arcangelo and de la Cretaz share insight into this little-known but ultimately influential league, especially from the stories of its players - whose spirit, tenacity and simple "love for the game" helped set the template for the eventual mainstream arrival of women's pro sports in the decades that followed.

By the time you hear this week's episode, the Atlanta Braves just may be celebrating their second-ever World Series trophy since moving from Milwaukee in 1956.

If so, it would be the team's first title in 26 years, and only the second time in the region's modern sports history - or fourth, if you include the titles won by the now-defunct NASL's Atlanta Chiefs in 1968 and Major League Soccer's Atlanta United three years ago - that "The ATL" has been able to boast of any true major pro sports championship.

That kind of futility can make any sports fan question their sanity, and as this week's guest Clayton Trutor ("Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta―and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports") tells us - in Atlanta's case, that self-doubt dates all the way back to the mid-1970s when one of its major newspapers dubbed the city "Loserville, USA".

As Trutor describes it, Atlanta's excitement around the arrival of four professional franchises during a dynamic six-year (1966-72) period quickly gave way to general frustration and, eventually, widespread apathy toward its home teams. By the dawn of the 80s, all four of the region's major-league franchises were flailing in the standings, struggling to draw fans - and, in the case of the NHL's Flames, ready to move out of town.

While that indifference/malaise has dissipated somewhat in the decades since then (save for a second attempt at the NHL with the short-lived Thrashers), the dearth of team titles continues to loom over Atlanta's pro sports scene.

The resurgent Braves and their paradigm-changing Truist Park complex may just help change all that.

It's off to Vegas this week, baby, as we dig in to the fascinating backstory of two short-lived racetracks that lived fast and died hard trying to bring top-flight motorsports to Sin City in the late 1960s and early 1980s - with all the over-the-top theatrics, gambling connotations and underworld intrigue you'd expect from the "Entertainment Capital of the World."

Racing writer Randy Cannon ("Stardust International Raceway: Motorsports Meets the Mob in Vegas"; and "Caesars Palace Grand Prix: Las Vegas, Organized Crime and the Pinnacle of Motorsport") takes us behind the scenes of two of the city's most ambitious auto racing facilities - each designed to attract high-rolling visitors to both the tracks and the tables, long before it was kosher for sports and gaming to coexist.

We pick up where we left off in our previous episodes 62 (with the "Whaler Guys") and 100 (featuring WHA-version franchise founder Howard Baldwin) for a comprehensive look into the former NHL franchise that regularly sells more branded merchandise than even some current league teams - the Hartford Whalers.

Author Pat Pickens ("The Whalers: The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Mystique of New England's [Second] Greatest NHL Franchise") walks us through the history and ongoing mystique of one of the National Hockey League's most enigmatic clubs - one whose legacy endures some 24 years after its odd and bittersweet relocation to Raleigh (via Greensboro), North Carolina in 1997.

We take another crack at the history and mythology of the late, great North American Soccer League - this time through the eyes of sports filmmaker Rachel Viollet, whose new documentary "Big-Time Soccer: The Remarkable Rise & Fall of the NASL" makes its US debut at New York's Kicking + Screening film festival later this week.

If that surname sounds familiar, it won't surprise you that Rachel is also the daughter of the late Dennis Viollet - one of the legendary Manchester United "Busby Babes" of the late 1940s & early 1950s - who later went on to become one of the pioneering coaches in the 1970s-era NASL.

With managerial roles overseeing Washington, DC's Diplomats and two flavors of Tea Men in both New England and Jacksonville, the elder Viollet unwittingly provided his young daughter with a bird's-eye childhood purview into a vibrant and hugely entertaining pro soccer circuit, whose influence is still felt in today's MLS and beyond.

Featuring dozens of first-person interviews, rare video footage, and a mountain of exhaustive research, "Big-Time Soccer" is a love letter to both the best and the worst of the NASL - and the legacy it left behind.

Veteran sportswriter and Sports Broadcast Journal columnist Rich Podolsky ("You Are Looking Live! How 'The NFL Today' Revolutionized Sports Broadcasting") joins the pod this week for an inside look at the TV pregame show that modernized how America experiences nationally televised pro football.

While the concept of NFL pregame coverage dates back to the earliest days of the medium, it wasn't until 1974 that the format was produced live for the first time in full "wrap-around" fashion via the The NFL on CBS - with studio hosts Jack Whitaker and Lee Leonard providing pregame features, as well as halftime and post-game scores and highlights from around the league.

But it was during the following season - when CBS Sports producers hired up-and-coming play-by-play sportscaster Brent Musburger, former Miss America winner Phyllis George, and ex-Philadelphia Eagle player Irv Cross to anchor the proceedings - that things really got interesting.

Three magnetic personalities from differing sports experiences and perspectives - soon joined by professional gambler Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder in 1976 - helped drive the now-renamed "The NFL Today" to must-watch status among both die-hard NFL fans and casual viewers alike. And with it: sky-high ratings and Emmys for CBS' NFL coverage.

Along the way, headline-grabbing drama among the show's stars became commonplace - including George's shocking departure from the show in 1978 (replace briefly by former Miss Ohio USA Jayne Kennedy) and equally surprising return two years later; a post-show, bar-room fist-fight between Musburger and Snyder in 1980; and Snyder's infamous comments about Black athletes during a 1988 Martin Luther King Day interview that immediately ended his career.

It's a return to the Nation's Capital this week as we take a romp through Washington, DC's surprisingly rich pro basketball history with Brett Abrams (The Bullets, the Wizards, and Washington, DC Basketball).

While today's astute District hoops fans know the current Washington Wizards were once known as the Bullets - the name under which the franchise won its one and only NBA title back in 1978, and from which it converted to its mystically less violence-connoted label in 1997 - lesser devotees of the team are aware of its previous home (Baltimore: 1963-73), let alone its origins as the NBA's first-ever expansion club in 1961, the Chicago Packers.

Of course, true Washington basketball connoisseurs know the city's relationship with the professional game runs far deeper - dating all the way back to the mid-1920s American Basketball League "Palace Five" - owned by future Washington NFL football owner George Preston Marshall.

And in between, a host of teams - all domiciled in the NE quadrant's history-drenched Washington Coliseum (née Uline Arena) - attempted to keep pro hoops in the local sports spotlight:

• The Red Auerbach-coached Capitols (1946-51) of the NBA-antecedent Basketball Association of America;
• The half-season-lasting Tapers of Abe Saperstein's not-much-longer-lasting "new" American Basketball League (1961); and
• The exceedingly curious single season (1969-70) American Basketball Association "Caps" - the peripatetic franchise that began its life (along with the ABA's) in 1967 as the Oakland Oaks, and ended as the regionally-oriented Virginia Squires until the league's demise in 1976.

We revisit LA's spirited pre-majors Pacific Coast League rivalry (begun in Episode 208: The Hollywood Stars - With Dan Taylor) with a look at the team ultimately responsible for the demise of both - the Los Angeles Angels.

Baseball author Gaylon White ("The Bilko Athletic Club: The Story of the 1956 Los Angeles Angels") helps us set the table for the club's background story as the city's preeminent minor league baseball franchise - seen through the lens of its triumphant pennant-winning season of 1956, its penultimate before the National League's Dodgers took over town.

Comprised of major league castoffs and unproven rookies, the Angels that season were centered around a bulky, beer-loving basher of home runs named Steve Bilko - a former St. Louis Cardinal whose headline-grabbing exploits at the plate led the PCL in eight different categories and the club to a dominating 107-61 record - 16 games ahead of their nearest challenger.

In addition to earning national Minor League Player of the Year honors that season, Bilko also became an instant celebrity in Los Angeles - earning as much (if not more) than some of his better-known major league colleagues, as well as unwitting fame the eponymous lead character for of the Emmy Award-winning Phil Silvers Show.

When the Angels and the Stars left town in 1958, so did Bilko - this time for a few more cups of coffee in the bigs, including, ironically, the first two seasons of the major (AL) league expansion version of the Angels in 1961-62 - the inaugural season of which was played in the same Wrigley Field that housed him and its predecessor.

University of Texas Permian Basin history professor Derek Catsam ("Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement") joins to delve into the intriguing story of how a relatively low-key South African rugby tour of the United States in 1981 became an unwittingly pivotal turning point in the nation's growing collective conscience against apartheid, and an influential test of American foreign policy.

By the late 1970s, the US lagged significantly behind the rest of the Western world when it came to addressing the thorny moral, societal and diplomatic issues posed by the Republic of South Africa's racial policies, and its ruling National Party's obstinate defense of them despite increasing international condemnation.

The September 1981 American tour of the country's perennially world-dominant "Springbok" national rugby union team - a continuation of an already tumultuous and violent summer of matches in New Zealand - markedly changed that dynamic.

Those who had been part of the US's relatively small anti-apartheid decades-long struggle opportunistically seized the visit by one of white South Africa's most cherished sporting and cultural institutions to mobilize against both the team, and the political regime it represented.

American protestors confronted the Springbok team at airports, chanted outside their hotels, and openly courted arrest at matches - forcing tour organizers to hastily (and bizarrely) convert publicly announced matches into near-clandestine affairs to avoid undue attention or confrontation.

What began as a modest effort to publicize an exciting but little-followed sport in the US, quickly gave rise to the solidification of the nation's soon-robust anti-apartheid movement.