Ep 384 "Happy New Year"

January 8, 2026·1 hr 14 min·3 clips

The episode opens with the usual chaos: somebody is sick, somebody cannot find the intro, and everybody is immediately talking over everybody else. They decide to fake the opener and keep it moving. The return has the feel of friends who have been out of the room for a month and are trying to remember how the show works. Once that is out of the way, the talk settles into football. The crew moves through end-of-season results and playoff seeding. Commanders-Eagles comes up first, with the focus on the seeding angle and what Philadelphia might have gained if the result had gone the other way. Dolphins-Patriots gets brushed past quickly, because there is not much mystery there. Lions-Bears follows as another game that mattered more for the bracket than for the drama. Chargers-Broncos gets the same treatment, with the Broncos needing the win and the stakes doing most of the work. Jets-Bills gets a little more life because someone actually watched it on a streamed setup through a laptop and HDMI cable. Then the episode gets to the Ravens-Steelers finish, and the whole thing tightens up. The retelling turns intense fast. The score is close. The fourth quarter gets frantic. Lamar is thrown into a late drive that has everybody sitting up. The kick comes down to the wire and hooks right. The Steelers survive. The crew lingers on both kickers missing and on how wild the ending felt. The story lands with that familiar mix of disbelief, laughter, and lingering annoyance the show uses when a game gets under everybody's skin. After the football run, the conversation drifts toward the outro instead of cleaning itself up. There is still banter, still sarcasm, still one more round of ribbing before they wrap. The ending keeps the same loose, shambling pace as the opening. It never tries to be elegant. It just keeps moving until the group has burned through the last joke and signed off.

As heard by us

Messy New Year football banter that peaks with Ravens-Steelers chaos.

Critical Thinking Podcast comes back with a New Year episode that leans on familiar in-studio friction, a refreshed intro, and plenty of NFL recap. The hosts play off the missing-file scramble, the week of illness, and the back-and-forth that keeps the opening in motion.

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Why you'd press play

You want a rowdy New Year sports catch-up that lands on a wild Ravens-Steelers finish.

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