Mr. Irrelevant Podcast v2.0

By popular demand (only eight of you asked us to please not do this!), Jamie and Matt return to talk about the Washington Commanders heading into Week 1 of the 2022 season. Is there ANYTHING to be hopeful about? Can the most 7-10 organization in the world manage to exceed that win total? One of us thinks so! Also, toward the end of the episode we discuss a bunch of TV and movie stuff (without spoilers) and then Jamie makes fun of emo for awhile. The Mr. I Pod is BACK, baby!

Jamie and Matt try to catch up on four months that included a name change, a new quarterback, multiple congressional investigations, a pre-draft process, a draft, post-draft evaluations, 40 hours of Marvel content, and six to ten top-notch TV/streaming programs. Mainly they talk about the draft and the team name before trying to do an overview of the pop culture stuff. There are no major spoilers I can think of in that part. It's all kind of a ramble but let's be honest: you're probably not here for hard-hitting analysis.

This episode actually has nothing to do with the actual locker clean-out day, so if anything interesting came out of the exit interviews don't expect to hear about it here. The title is more of a metaphor, as Jamie and Matt discuss the last few games of the season, their hope for the team going forward (minimal!); their thoughts on the new name, which will probably be Commanders (meh!); their ideas for how to succeed in spite of Daniel Snyder (¯\(ツ)/¯); and their general analysis of the current squad. From a non-football standpoint, they discuss Yellowjackets (which appears to be on an assortment of streaming services, including but possibly not limited to Showtime, Hulu Premium, Pluto TV, something called Spectrum TV, or The Roku Channel), Station Eleven (HBO Max), and a little bit about if Disney+'s Book of Boba Fett is boring (yes).

In their second episode since shedding the canned intro music, Jamie and Matt discuss the WFT's debacle of a loss against Dallas, a game they lost by seven and never led and probably should've lost by 40. They touch on what went wrong (everything), what comes next (nothing good, probably), and spend several agonizing minutes talking about how much more impactful than Chase Young Micah Parsons appears to be (very). They close by very briefly touching on Succession and Hawkeye but don't really say much about either and if we didn't mention them here you probably wouldn't even notice that part of the episode happening.  

Jamie and Matt grapple with a reality where WFT has won their fourth straight game, the playoffs are entirely in the conversation, and the remaining five games are all against NFC East opponents. It is a weird reality. They also have a spoiler-free discussion about the podcast The Rumor and the Disney+ documentary The Beatles: Get Back. It's a very pleasant chat that still hasn't made Matt feel any better about the episode from last week that somehow got lost to the capricious whims of the internet.

Jamie and Matt try to determine if the WFT's win against Tampa Bay actually matters, and then gets very engrossed in messing with the NYT Playoff Scenario Predictor machine to figure out the math of it all. They talk about Chase Young, about kickers and conspiracy theories, and also about Peloton and the Washington Wizards, if you like that sort of thing.

Jamie and Matt react to the WFT's latest loss and go on to explore the intricacies of Ashburn Syndrome (TM the NBC Sports Washington WFT podcast). That part is pretty grim! Then they discuss a variety of pop culture stuff (without any spoilers), including Squid Game, Dune (2021), the Ringer Fantasy Football Podcast, and the new War On Drugs record. That part is actually kinda fun!

Jamie and Matt focus much more on the Sean Taylor tribute than on the game against the Chiefs, for obvious reasons. This includes some reminiscing about the week of Taylor's death, some musing on the nature of fandom, and some general existential angst. So pretty much the usual for Week 6 of a Washington NFL season. 

Jamie and Matt battle some audio issues and some early-onset crushing ennui to TRY to discuss WFT's Week 5 loss to the Saints. They succeed, at least in the most technical sense of "There is a podcast posted," but whatever answers this team needs to find, they're gonna have to come from somewhere other than this pod.