The Cutting Room Floor: 6 Tyler Dunne Passages Too Stupid Even for Podcasting
Hey, Patrick here, the guy whose words you're reading. The past three weeks, I had the great pleasure/disorienting nightmare of joining Travis and Kyle over at Start Kyle Orton to try to read and explain Tyler Dunne's absolute atrocity of journalism that is the three-part "House of Dysfunction" series via a 3-part series of our own. Thus was born — "A Dramatic Reading of Ty Dunne's B.S." with a simple goal - attempt to explain the madness in all its blubbering glory:
A Dramatic Reading of Ty Dunne's B.S., Part 1 (Spotify link) (Youtube link)
A Dramatic Reading of Ty Dunne's B.S., Part 2 (Spotify link) (Youtube link)
A Very Ty Dunne Final (Spotify link) (Youtube link)
We did not succeed. We didn't come close. Over the course of a combined 3.5 hours of podcast across a three-part series, we got through reading maybe 10% of the (suspiciously erotically charged) words Tyler Dunne wrote on Caleb Williams. We processed maybe 1%.
How can it be that 3 adults over the course of more than 3 hours barely scratch the surface of the stupidest part of Tyler Dunne's series? Because Tyler Dunne's writing is an accordion of stupid - the more you pull, the more's revealed, all while your brain and ears plead for death.
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| "Did I tell you about the dyslexia?" |
So while we have a Christopher Nolan movie-length series dissecting the self-evidently stupidest bits from Tyler Dunne's writing, trying to discern the very stupidest Tyler Dunne passages is a level of violence to the human brain only seen in Packers' fans accounts of an Austin Booker sack.
Trying to evaluate a Tyler Dunne passage is a lot like walking in on a one-armed man wearing a Jane Goodall mask attempting to have sex with a goat - you're so baffled by the apparent goal of the attempt that you're at a loss on how to evaluate it - your main takeaway really only being a sense of shame for everyone involved and the sneaking suspicion that what you've witnessed should really be illegal. "And wait did those weird details have any meaning?" pleads your conscious mind, while its counterpart looks for a way out of all this.
Thus, there are some absolutely incredible (read:misguided to a degree that may be legally actionable) Tyler Dunne passages that didn't make the cut. So, presented for your enjoyment(?), behold — the "Dramatic Reading of Tyler Dunne" series' deleted scenes - One Final Dunnke:
6. That Time Scouts Went Beyond Parody
I've said before that one of my hottest takes is that scouts shouldn't do any of the bullshit that makes up 99% of their job - driving around from college to college, attending practices, interviewing players' families, finding out who went to who's birthday party - it's a vestigial organ of a process from when you didn't have instant streaming access to every single snap of every single player and analytics so advanced it gives the Flock camera guys erections. Player evaluations should be 100% film, analytics, and maybe testing, and personal/ity evaluations should be a simple pass/fail by a third party with a sample size to go off of - a kind of double-blind scientific study. Or, as Aaron Rodgers calls it - "the means by which Jews keep their sweet ivermectin away from the rest of us! ScreeeeeeeeEEEh!!!!".
Of the many reasons for this, my main one is simple: scouts and GMs have a shamefully long history of woefully overvaluing the "character" evaluation of a player, and by character evaluation they mean whether or not that 20-something did enough in a ten-minute sit down to make this middle-aged man feel special. As Kyle put it in the final episode:
“How many times have we heard of one player schmoozing his way? Every bust that they talk about there's always 'Well he really blew the lid off of us in his interviews' 'His pro day was insane' - there are so many more horror stories of teams overthinking it than there are of just taking the best player, the consensus pick at the top."
Aaron Rodgers was in talks to be the first overall pick in his draft, but fell because he was an asshole in interviews. The idea that GMs had the chance to get one of the most talented quarterbacks in NFL history, but passed on him because he wasn't respectful enough in their sit-down meeting is like a Drew Magary parody of an NFL GM, but 23 GMs did that exact thing!
Speaking of NFL scouts being beyond parody, let's hear about the time this one old man from a team Caleb knew would not be drafting him met with him anyways, failed to get Caleb to feign interest in a meaningless waste of time to an acceptable amount, and was so shaken by Caleb's failure to lie that he ignored every other interview of the draft and instead proceeded to question the entirety of This Generation:
I ask this NFL boss what specifically struck him as strange, and he says it wasn’t anything specific Williams said. Rather, how he acted. The way he walked in, slumped, didn’t make eye contact and rambled without any direction. The GM’s been around hyper-intelligent people who jam a ton of words together in a short amount of time, but usually they arrive a point or ask if they answered your question. “Caleb starts talking,” the GM says, “and you don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Like a misunderstood artist.” Even then, once Williams left the room, this GM looked inward and wondered if he was the grumpy old asshole, if he was the one at fault for failing to connect with a modern-day athlete. “Is this the new normal?” he questioned.
"Is this the new normal"! I can't make this up, one single disinterested interaction was enough to crumble this man's entire worldview. Imagine how self-absorbed you'd have to be to invite Caleb to a meeting you both know is pointless, watch him do it anyway despite nothing to discuss, and turn his disinterested rambling into an indictment of him, nay, his entire generation!
All this time, I thought Eberflus rambled incoherently because when he reached back into his brain for content, he found it empty. I might've gone easier on him had I only known that rambling is not the act of someone who doesn't know what to say in the situation - it's the act of a misunderstood artist.
Oh god Dunne's got me thinking of Eberflus - the only man alive who makes Dunne look intelligent by comparison, that sly dog - this must all be by design. Where were we?
Oh right, NFL GMs are beyond parody:
Even then, once Williams left the room, this GM looked inward and wondered if he was the grumpy old asshole, if he was the one at fault for failing to connect with a modern-day athlete. “Is this the new normal?” he questioned.
The more he was around those other quarterbacks, the more the GM realized Williams was an anomaly.
Yes, Williams is a scintillating talent. He even declares Williams the single-most talented quarterback in the ’23 and ’24 classes combined.
Yes, it’s incumbent upon the team to pull the talent out of player.
“But the most important part of that position is not the physical talent,” he says. “Is everybody going to believe in you and play their ass off for you? Can you do that? Can you get everybody to buy in? There’s a reason there’s such a high failure rate. There’s a reason we’ve got 32 teams and we don’t have 32 real dudes at that position. There’s a reason! It is unique. That’s the most important thing with that position: the intangible qualities. And that’s a real question with Caleb.”
That's right, a real NFL GM said in writing that the "intangible qualities" matter more than the actual play! I... I don't even have a joke for this part! What could I possibly write here that's stupider than that?
Oh, duh, another Tyler Dunne passage.
5. Getting Injured Isn't Bad But NOT Getting Injured IS
Is getting injured in college bad, or good? Trick question - it depends on context, according to Tyler Dunne. Specifically, the context of whether or not you're Caleb Williams:
Right on through Chicago selecting Williams, sources in the room emphatically state that red flags were not properly examined... and — whereas medical issues are discussed at length on all other prospects — nothing ever came up in all Williams talk.
and—
All teams, Chicago included, routinely discuss the health of players bound to go in the 200s, let alone No. 1 overall. Sources we spoke to never remember such dialogue on Williams.
Gosh, I wonder why “nothing ever came up” when it came to talking injury history about Caleb Williams, the man who has never missed a single game due to injury in his career, from two years now in the NFL through all of college and even high school.
You’d be forgiven for thinking “the player who won the starting job as a freshman in high school AND as a true freshman in college having never been injured in his entire career” is a positive - but not to Dunne. To Dunne, this is a mortal sin, akin to asking follow-up questions, or making him think gay thoughts, with those pouty lips and gazelle hips, you absolute temptress you.
Oregon’s Bo Nix and Washington’s Michael Penix Jr. were footnotes.
... The Bears hardly did any work on Penix. They didn’t like his throwing motion or his injury-riddled stint at Indiana. (“He was not in play at all,” says one scout. “Zero.”)
Stepping aside from the obvious "stating that Michael Penix should've been the number 1 overall pick is technically a symptom that warrants an ambulance", let's try to figure out what Dunne's point is - is it that the 25-year-old with half a dozen knee surgeries shouldn't have been eliminated just because he'd filled his ACL replacement punchcard?
Does injury history matter, or not? For Caleb, the lack of discussing his (clean) injury history is bad, because all medical history should be weighed at length - but for Penix, they should have not? Does anyone even understand what the point is?
4. Caleb Didn't Arrive Early Enough, Except When He Did, Which Was Also Bad
We covered on the podcast just how wild and baffling Tyler Dunne's insinuation that Caleb wasn't coming in early enough was:
In Washington, No. 2 pick Jayden Daniels developed habits of his own by showing up to work at 5:30 a.m. each morning.
In Chicago, nobody recalls seeing Williams show up remotely that early.
Even by Tyler Dunne standards, it's an embarrassing lie repackaged as reporting. What possible explanation could there be for why Dunne ignores facts to take wild swings of accusations while working to minimize any personal responsibility? Is he training to be a cop and practicing how he'd treat black people? "Nobody recalls" is nothing, less than nothing really, since it's closer to proving the opposite than his point - the only way it could be true is if Caleb was already in the building.
But hey, let's do something Dunne never could - consider the point he's trying to make while using a brain. Dunne's insinuation is that there is no proof of Caleb ever showing up early. Which is why it's so interesting when just a few paragraphs later—
It was the fall of 2023 and his rebuilding team was clearly in the running for the USC quarterback. Up close, he wanted to see how Williams prepared for a game. The GM arrived at the stadium very, very early to watch the quarterback’s pre-pregame routine from the sideline, and… lordy. It was a jaw-dropping spectacle. All 50 throws were deliberate — freakin’ missiles. “He threw the shit out of the ball,” the GM says. And when the entire USC team later came out for their official pregame, Williams resembled a quarterback who did not give a damn.
He attempted left-handed passes. Clowned around.
“If you hadn’t been there to see the first thing,” the GM says, “you’d have been like, ‘What the fuck?’ Because he was dicking around.”
Hey speaking of point whiplash—
3. Caleb Didn't Criticize Thomas Brown Because Thomas Brown Will Literally Beat Him Up, I Swear to God That's Legitimately What Dunne Is Saying
In the offseason drama fallout after 2024, a ton of terrible and embarrassing stories came out about the coaching staff. That Shane Waldron didn't bother watching film with Caleb, sure—
At times, Williams said he would watch film alone, with no instruction or guidance from the coaches. "No one tells me what to watch," Caleb Williams told his dad. "I just turn it on."
Veteran tight end Marcedes Lewis told Jay Glazer of Fox that Lewis, tight end Cole Kmet, and quarterback Caleb Williams had a meeting with offensive coordinator Shane Waldron.
"'We're not a Pop Warner team,'" they said to Waldron, via Glazer. "'You've got to coach us up. Coach me up, even though I'm in year nineteen. Coach up Caleb, even though he's s rookie. You've got to get more aggressive on coaching us together.' He does think there will be a different."
(Per Jay Glazer)
But the real reason Shane Waldron got so much criticism instead of Thomas Brown? Because Thomas Brown would beat his ass.
Once he’s finished cursing Caleb Williams for the 17th or 18th time, this coach who’s been around some of the best quarterbacks of this generation laughs, and laughs, and laughs a little more. He knows it’s no accident that Williams pinpointed “Shane Waldron” — and not “Thomas ” — as the coach who did him dirty in multiple reports that’ve trickled to the public.
“He knows Thomas will beat his ass,” the coach says. “He knows better than to name Thomas’ name.”
That's not a joke! He literally says that's the reason! Not any of the very public, very well-documented lack of any coaching at all from their coach, which the players brought up from the start of camp. The reason is that Thomas Brown, professional football coach who is such a respected leader that he was made interim Head Coach, would go over and beat up Caleb Williams! Like, I guess he... drives up to Caleb's house one afternoon? You know how Amazon delivers packages at weird times to your door? It's like that, but physically assaulting the world-famous face of a multi-billion dollar franchise. Would that be the funniest court case in Bears history? No, only second (foreshadowing alert)!
Eberflus is described by former assistants as a very pleasant man. Albeit, a little dorky. Waldron is similarly docile. , on the contrary, is old school. promised to bring a completely different coaching style to Williams those final five weeks. Odds are, Williams never experienced anything quite like this his entire football life. In a team meeting, minced zero words. Without calling out players by name, he asked everyone why they were so afraid to hold Williams accountable when the Bears do it with everyone else on the roster. If the right tackle botches a combination block, the tight end speaks up because it directly affects the success of the play. If players think the quarterback is doing something wrong, he implored, tell him.
Quarterback may be the most important position in the sport, he explained, but it’s not untouchable. In fact, the opposite is true. Caleb was the handpicked savior of the franchise, thus Caleb needed to be held to a higher standard.
Brown tried like hell to inject a novel dose of accountability and professionalism into the most vital employee of an $8.8 billion company.
“When it changed,” one coach in that team meeting recalls, “everybody was like, ‘Oh, good. Now he’s going to be a little bit stricter. That’s what we need.’"
"When Eberflus and Waldron were fired, the only coach that Caleb respects was the one who asked, point blank, why they were afraid to coach Caleb. This was a welcome change. Unbelievably, I think this is a point for the coaches" - Tyler Dunne, in between setting timers so he remembers to blink and breathe.
"Well that's stupid in a level that insults the act of writing, but what did you mean about that court case thing?" you may ask. Oh buddy, aren't you lucky, we've only got two more entries, and they're both arguably crimes—
2. That Time Dunne Commits Libel
There's a really special portion of the series where Tyler Dunne takes the laughably false claim that Caleb has dyslexia - the entire case of which rests on "multiple" (two, I'm calling it) "personnel men" claim there's "evidence" that Caleb has dyslexia.
Multiple personnel men tell Go Long they saw evidence that Williams has dyslexia
Okay, so not "Caleb has been diagnosed with dyslexia by a doctor" or even "a medical professional says he has it", just "some guys say they've seen evidence".
"What is that evidence?" you'd be forgiven for asking. You fool. You absolute simpleton. You don't understand the Dunne school of writing - no showing, no thinking, no follow-up questions. We will never get the privilege of learning what the evidence was. We're not worthy.
Okay, giving Dunne way more credit than he deserves here, but let's say he did ask the very obvious follow-up question "what is the evidence", but decided the evidence wasn't strong enough to put in the article (think about that! The article is like 30,000 words! The novel A Wrinkle in Time is 50k! Think of how nothing it would have to be to not make the cut!?), let's see what British Dyslexia Association gives as what is evidence of dyslexia (emphasis mine):
- Confuse visually similar words such as cat and cot
- Spell erratically
- Find it hard to scan or skim text
- Read/write slowly
- Need to re-read paragraphs to understand them
- Find it hard to listen and maintain focus
- Find it hard to concentrate if there are distractions
- Feel sensations of mental overload/switching off
- Have difficulty telling left from right
- Get confused when given several instructions at once
- Have difficulty organising thoughts on paper
- Often forget conversations or important dates
- Have difficulty with personal organisation, time management and prioritising tasks
- Avoid certain types of work or study
- Find some tasks really easy but unexpectedly challenged by others
My god, having a hard time concentrating amidst distraction? Feeling overloaded? Getting confused by lots of people giving instructions at once? I think I've seen evidence of dyslexia in... every single rookie in NFL history! Someone, check the power stations!
And since we've set the precedent that someone "seeing evidence" of a condition in a person is enough to put in writing and publish to the world...
Oh right, sources, let's see—
- Strong discomfort around discussions of homosexuality.
- Internal conflict between attraction and personal or cultural beliefs.
- Overcompensation through exaggerated displays of conventional masculinity.
- Intense preoccupation with policing others' gender expression or sexuality.
- Anxiety, shame, or compartmentalization surrounding attraction.
“We would’ve fucking coached him differently,” says one former offensive assistant, who believes Poles knew. “This is criminal. Withholding this shit? They should have been fired. They knew. The GM and them knew.”
1. The Real Crime Was Having an Ego (Please Ignore Our Actual Crimes)
Once again - the three of us made it through over 3 hours of bewildering issues in Tyler Dunne's writing and never addressed any of this. Do you understand how dense in stupid you have to write to get to the point where none of this made the cut!? The man is a black hole of stupid - the density is so great that nothing escapes past a certain point. And that of course leads us to the final entry—First, there was the peculiar case of Alan Williams. Fellow coaches noticed the team’s defensive coordinator acting strange during staff meetings on Sept. 12 of that season. He didn’t want to go home. The next day, Bears security searched his office. On Sept. 15, it was reported that Williams would not travel to the team’s game in Tampa Bay due to personal reasons. On Sept. 17, the Bears played the Buccaneers.One day felt like a year as the Bears — waiting and waiting and waiting — inexplicably fueled curiosity into the mystery themselves. What did Williams do exactly?One person involved with the fallout told us the Bears determined Williams, inside his office, engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior on an electronic device with a woman. “Between meetings. After practice. Before practice. All the time,” this source adds. The woman, we’re told, then tried to extort him — the Bears logo was in the background of one photo sent. This triggered an investigation and prolonged the situation. Internally, those involved with the crisis management found it strange that neither GM Ryan Poles or head coach Matt Eberflus were in charge of punishment. Final jurisdiction rested in the hands of Kevin Warren and, for whatever reason, the team president opted to slow-play the PR nightmare. Warren stressed the need to talk to the coach.Others insisted the Bears cannot tolerate such behavior and must act fast. This was getting out of control.On Sept. 20, Williams finally submitted his resignation, and was paid his full salary due.
Then, there was David Walker. Two months later, the running backs coach was let go. One high-ranking source tells us the Bears concluded Walker harassed several females in the building via text and was warned by HR to stop. The father of an intern whom Walker was texting finally contacted the Bears and threatened to take action. On Nov. 1, Eberflus announced that Walker had been terminated.
Elsewhere in the building, several people share salacious stories of employees sleeping with people in power to climb the ladder. “Soap opera drama. It’s part of the fabric, part of the culture there right now,” says one source, who cites the Coldplay Kiss Cam scandal as the sort of thing that’s common here.
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