BBCollective

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, your hosts dive into the Games of the XI Olympiad, better known as the 1936 Summer Olympics. Contested in Nazi-controlled Berlin, Germany, these games also exist at the precise intersection of sports and politics. The conversation focuses on American participation and the resistance of old friend Avery Brundage to a boycott. Contrary to Brundage’s stance t...

This week the Bill Bradley Collective present another installment of our Dollop-style bonus episodes. Join us as Ed documents the rise and fall of late MLUA (Major League Umpires Association) executive director Richie Phillips. Phillips’ ascent in the world of sports labor begins with working on behalf of NBA officials, before taking the reins of the MLUA in 1978. Ed details the circumstances behi...

Welcome back to the Bill Bradley Collective, where this week the panel examines the NBA’s decision to go forth with their annual All-Star game March 7, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Your hosts return an unanimous verdict opposing the game being staged, but not before detailing the economic factors responsible for the inevitability of the league’s decision to proceed with the event. The game’s inte...

This week the Bill Bradley Collective present Trump 2: Impeachment Boogaloo, the most electrifying sequel since the famed 1984 companion to the motion picture classic, “Breakin’.” Donald Trump is the first president in history to be impeached twice, and his second trial is set to commence this week. Join us, as the boys dissect how insurrection brought us here; the “question” of impeaching a non-s...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, your hosts consider the life, career and legacy of recently passed baseball icon, Henry “Hank” Aaron. The subject of this season’s individual profile, Aaron’s twenty-three year career is among the most accomplished across any sport. The panel delves into his many accolades and achievements, as well as his standing among the game’s other titans, but not bef...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, your hosts put the first four days of the Biden administration under the microscope and evaluate some of the early returns. The inauguration itself is given a quick review, before the boys get to examining some of Biden’s cabinet nominees and political appointees, including Marty Walsh, Janet Yellen and Merrick Garland, among others. In a week where the ne...

As we eagerly count down the final days, hours and minutes of Donald Trump’s first and god-willing last term as President, in tribute, the Bill Bradley Collective presents their desired collection of the things in sports, politics and media, that have gone on far too long and should simply go the fuck away. In this first intra-season bonus episode, join your hosts as they each describe in detail w...

This week, the Bill Bradley Collective presents its 2020 NFL regular season in review. Join us as each of your hosts nominate a best and worst moment, as well as the moment that best encapsulated the year 2020. A star QB’s close brush with premature evacuation, the return to the field of another signal caller from a catastrophic leg injury, and the league’s continued race problem in hiring practic...

It’s Tuesday. You know what that means. That’s right, season four of the Bill Bradley Collective is off and running and how else to ring in the new year than with a conversation about our nation’s Supreme Court. On the heels of two historically unqualified appointments and an election fallout dominated by the question of whether or not the court would back efforts to challenge the veracity of the...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, the hosts round out season three with the very first installment of “Rantapalooza.” Inspired in part by the eclectic annual concert festival bearing a similar name, Rantapalooza is the proper embodiment of the two words it combines. The rants: the backbone of this catalogue and the concentration of this episode. What of a-palooza? Well, it “emphasizes or e...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, your noble hosts are granted the opportunity to wield the kind of power normally reserved for officers of state: the power of the veto. Join your panel as they enter their respective chambers to argue the merits of six individual vetoes of legislation impacting the world of sports and in one case our very Constitution. The rules are simple. Each host prese...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, the hosts outline how they expect the transition from a Trump presidency to a Biden White House to impact the sporting world. Among the major topics addressed include whether the new administration will seek to push for stricter and more centralized protocols for leagues with regard to COVID-19, the impact an ideological shift in our judicial system could...

“Boys, the rules don’t make much sense. But I believe in the rules. Some of us broke them. I broke them. I can’t do this. I can’t win like this.” From Coach Pete Bell’s mouth to our ears, this week the Bill Bradley Collective return to the movies for a discussion of William Friedkin and Ron Shelton’s 1994 basketball drama, Blue Chips. Tepidly received by critics and audiences alike upon release, t...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, the hosts preview the fast-approaching 2020-21 NBA season. Determined to plow ahead bubble-less amidst the still devastating COVID-19 pandemic, the league believes they have the protocols in place to complete a full campaign. Do they? The Collective examines that question among other league topics, as we consider the changes being implemented to both the r...

In this intra-season bonus episode, we present the Bill Bradley Collective: At the Movies, as your hosts dive into the famed 1980 sports comedy, Caddyshack. A modest success upon release, subsequent re-appraisal has garnered Caddyshack a massive cult following and frequent citation as one of the great sports movies of all time. The Collective set out to assess this legacy, as we detail the cocaine...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, the hosts review all things NFL as the league’s season passes it’s mid-point. The on-field and off-field, the good (yes, there’s some) and the bad, join us as the panel weighs in on the superlative young crop of quarterbacks spread across the league, year one for both Brady and Belichick as each goes it without the other for the first time, the continued f...

This week the Bill Bradley Collective comes to you in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 Presidential election being called for Joe Biden, completing a near five-day odyssey of sleep-deprivation, cable news consumption and alcohol intake  the likes of which we recommend be left to us, your noble hosts. The fallout from this election is the focus, as the panel covers everything from the...

Election Day 2020 is here, and as a final supplement to our election coverage, the Bill Bradley Collective consult their proverbial crystal balls and preview what the lay of both the political and sporting landscapes will look like in 2024. Who will represent each party’s ticket, how the hierarchy of professional sports will stand, and what exactly college sports will look like are the questions o...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, the panel give their respective impressions on the second and final Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, before giving way to a broader discussion of how we all project November 3rd (and the probable weeks beyond) unfolding. Consider it a forecast, as the hosts each outline what they perceive to be best- and worst-case scenarios, with cl...

This week, the Bill Bradley Collective presents “Snakes in the Senate,” a snake-draft style conversation about the forthcoming Senate races where red incumbents find their prospects for (re-)election in varying degrees of peril. The eligible contests are broken down into three categories, as round one examines those where the Democratic candidate appears likely to win, round two focuses on the “co...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, the hosts weigh in on the Vice Presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. In assessing the performance of incumbent, candidate and moderator, the panel uses the 1965 NCAA Tournament consolation game and collegiate adieu of our very namesake as the guide for evaluation. While the debate mirrored Princeton’s 36-point evisceration of Wichita St...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, the hosts break down the first Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The virtually nonexistent good, largely bad and often ugly highlights of this spectacle are the focus of a conversation that attempts to gauge the respective performance of each candidate, as well as moderator Chris Wallace. Before we assess the debate, Zak outlines how...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, the hosts examine Donald Trump’s efforts from high atop his Twitter pulpit to influence how our sporting landscape navigates the COVID-19 pandemic. A concentrated nod to Trump’s perceived-electorally expedient (and answered) call on the Big 10 to salvage their previously-aborted college football season sets the table for a discussion that attempts to hamme...

On the first of our intra-season bonus episodes, the Bill Bradley Collective discuss the history and legacy of Tommie Smith and John Carlos and their black-glove fisted salute whilst on the medal podium during the 1968 Summer Olympics. Regarded as one of the most influential and overtly political declarations made in Olympic history, the gesture drew wrongful condemnation from many in the moment,...

This week on the Bill Bradley Collective, the hosts examine the complicated nature of the “tell-all” book, from the three narrative perspectives of insider, embedded journalist, and outside reporter. These tell-all documents represent a significant, in-demand segment of the sport and political publishing arenas, most recently brought to public focus in the wake of books detailing the Trump preside...