The Bill Simmons Podcast Review

The Bill Simmons Podcast is my 23rd podcast of the year. This podcast is currently ranked number 15. The title of the episode is "Seattle Spanks the Patriots, Drake Maye's Mystery Stinker, and Parent Corner With Cousin Sal." This episode was released on February 8, Super Bowl Sunday right after the Super Bowl. This podcast was released on Netflix. Bill Simmons is the host and Cousin Sal is the guy talking to him. The show began with Cousin Sal taunting Bill Simmons about the Patriots losing. Apparently, Bill Simmons is a big Patriots fan. They talked about Drake Maye's poor performance. They talked a lot about gambling. He gambles on everything including the length of the national anthem, the coin toss, and how often celebrities are shown on television. I am really against this culture of gambling on everything. I think it is bad and it is harmful to sports. Gambling has a corrupting influence on sports and as more and more people do it and it is more and more mainstream, the corrupting influence will just be larger. The sports leagues acceptance of gambling just invites scandal. They have had plenty of scandals so far in sports and I suspect the scandal is just beginning. The gambling on everything invites more scandal. If people are just gambling on wins and losses there would be less corruption. But as they gamble on everything, everything is suspect. Players will feel like they can do small things that don't harm their team to make some gambling money. This already has happened with baseball players who pitch certain pitches at the beginning of the count in coordination with gamblers. A lot of the podcast seemed liked it was more a podcast for gambling addicts than sports fans. One thing I did agree with was towards the end of the podcast they had parents corner. Here they talked about some experiences as parents. One of them mentioned sports pictures and how it is just a money grab. Which is a funny thing to complain about when you are gambling about how long the national anthem is before the Super Bowl. But I did agree. He said instead of going on a different day and driving way out of your way to get a team picture, they should just take a few minutes before a game and have people take pictures with the team with their phones. I say this same thing every time we have team pictures. It is hard to do when nobody else even thinks about it and just wants to pay money to a photographer. Phones are pretty high quality now and I think it is such a waste of money. I give this podcast 1/5. I give it low points mostly due to the gambling content that I think is very harmful not only to individuls lives, but to the integrity of sports. They also had some profanity that I am not a fan of. They get one point for the comment about team pictures.