5-Time Grammy Winner Michael Bublé Talks Fantasy FB, Singing With Rich & More I The Rich Eisen Show

Michael Bublé joined the show from Argentina, where he was hiding from his own children, and the first order of business was establishing whether calling him a fantasy football freak was fair.

He did not contest it. He escalated it. "My buddies who are crazy about fantasy football literally go, no dude, it's too much. You're in too many leagues."

Asked for the number, he declined, then produced it anyway. Last year he admitted to eight and got mocked for it. "I think we might be at a 10 or 11."

The unexpected upside of outing himself is that his DMs turned into a consulting practice. Men who are exactly like him now write in asking who he is taking in the second round and whether he will run their draft order. He answers, and he clearly enjoys it. "Stay away from him. Get that guy. Don't pick your D first again."

The Argentina setup deserves an explanation. His wife has a movie out and was doing press, leaving Bublé alone with four children and a live television hit to get through. His solution was chemical. "I've basically given them candy and ice cream and said, daddy has to do an interview, so don't scream." They were downstairs, quiet, watching something on Disney Plus, which is where their father happened to be appearing at that exact moment. His wife's film, he noted, also sold to Disney, which he finds strange given that it is a serious, heavy movie.

He had drafted for the first time the night before, and described the wait the way you would describe a holiday. "It's like Christmas. I was so happy. It's the greatest day."

He is also a defending champion, of the League of the People, a name he endorses on principle. "I felt like the People's League had a bite to it." The people he beat are his buddies and brothers-in-law, and the sweetest scalp belonged to the commissioner, a doctor who runs an emergency room in Vancouver and was certain Bublé would never take the belt.

Bublé has handled the victory with no dignity whatsoever, which is the correct approach. He sends the league photographs of himself with the belt in increasingly ordinary situations. Pushing a baby carriage containing no baby, only the belt. Eating breakfast with the belt. "It's constant. I don't stop."

On the draft itself, he had the eighth pick, which he says he always has. "I have been a lottery loser." Rich called eight a tough spot. Bublé pushed back, and produced the most relatable sentence in the segment about the run-up. In the 4,322 mock drafts he did, Jahmyr Gibbs fell to him at eight every single time.

He did not get Gibbs. What he got, in a 10-team half PPR league, was running back and running back: James Cook first, then Chase Brown. He added Chris Olave and Ladd McConkey, went late on tight ends and later still on quarterbacks, taking Trevor Lawrence and Bo Nix somewhere around the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth rounds.

Then he did the thing everyone does and immediately regretted it. "I felt like I finished the draft and I went, I look good. And then I saw that projection for my first week. It doesn't look good, but it's just projection."

Rich told him to stop looking, and made the case that projections and computer grades are the enemy of the entire enterprise. "Nobody knows, and that's the beauty of fantasy football." He also identified the specific torture that follows. Someone who knows a fraction of what you know beats you in Week 1, and you start pondering life.

On the roster itself, Rich was reassuring. Cook and Brown both catch it out of the backfield, which in a half PPR league means the receiver-light start costs less than it feels like it does.

Bublé's real anxiety was operational. He had been weighing whether to lie about his picks on the air, because everyone in his upcoming drafts watches this show. "They all watch you, and now they're all going to go, okay, I know what Bublé's doing today."

That led to an appreciation of a certain running character in the sports news cycle, the man who has been insisting he is on an NFL roster and refusing to back off it. Bublé's admiration was sincere. "I like that he's doubled down. I really do. I feel like that's something that I might just do. Just get caught in a lie and then just double down on it." Rich's favorite detail was the explanation that training camp is for people who need practice.

Both men are guillotine league people, and Bublé won his last year, which he and Rich agreed is the hardest one to win. Rich made the case for the format over standard head to head, and it is a good one. In a normal league you ignore everyone else's matchup until it matters. In a guillotine, everyone is hyper aware of everyone else all week, and by Monday night you know exactly who is on the block. "You're rooting for someone to get on the block, because you want to pick at that person's roster like a buzzard in the desert."

Bublé's trophy from that one is better than a belt. A leaguemate made him a T-shirt, and because every week another head gets cut off, the shirt depicts the Futurama gag of heads preserved in jars, with Bublé standing among them.

Rich, for his part, was drafting live during the interview, having grabbed George Kittle during the commercial break on the theory that Kittle plays Week 1 and, if he does not, will be Kittle soon enough. That is the Vinnie Pasquantino guillotine league, which is 19 teams after Pasquantino added one, meaning two get chopped in Week 1.

Bublé asked, with real hesitation, whether he might be invited into something like that someday. Rich did not make him wait. The show is starting its own guillotine league, beginning Week 1, and Bublé is in.

He accepted with a caveat about his home life. "The divorce isn't going to be pretty, but it's worth it." He was kidding, mostly. The Bublé family goes to church on Saturday specifically so Sunday is clear, a scheduling decision his wife understands perfectly and disapproves of on philosophical grounds. Her position is that it is not real. His position has not moved. "You don't know. I'm telling you, it's super real."

He also made the case that the stakes cut both ways. That morning one of his keeper leagues had a genuinely tense argument about keepers and forfeited draft rounds, the kind of thing where relationships end. But the same group chats produce real friendships. "Guys really become buddies. You really grow relationships."

Rich then aired his own league crisis, which is entirely modern and entirely serious to him. The show's text chain was clean until someone added the broadcast's director, whose Android turned the whole thread green. Rich is weighing whether to demand his removal or his conversion. "Text chains on fantasy leagues are almost as important as the draft itself. I don't want to have to talk smack with somebody and then have to hit it 15 times because it's not going through."

He then noted where he was doing this from. On a Zoom, to Argentina, complaining about bubble colors.

Before letting him get back to the children and their dwindling candy supply, Bublé raised unfinished business. He has a record coming in 2027, and the two of them still have not recorded together. His pitch was to bring the band into the studio for My Way or Feeling Good.

Rich chose My Way, and then escalated it, because he intends to call Paul Anka, who is also a football guy, and ask him to rewrite the lyrics so the version belongs only to them.

Bublé got the joke immediately. "We're doing it our way."