Counting the Days: The Rich Eisen Show Divisive Debate That’s Gone on for (How Many??) Days

Some debates split a fan base over a Hall of Fame case or an MVP vote. This one split the phone lines over arithmetic. With Tom Pelissero in for Rich, the show spent a good chunk of its time wrestling with a deceptively simple question: if today is Thursday, how many days away is Sunday?

The premise sounds like a kindergarten worksheet. The execution turned into a referendum on math, religion, and the calendar itself. "Today is Thursday. If something is on Sunday, how many days away do you say it is?" went the setup. Pelissero, a man who clearly believes subtraction should settle this, kept returning to the numbers. Today is June 25th. Sunday is June 28th. "When we subtract 25 from 28, gentlemen, what do we get?" Three days, not four.

Brockman would not be moved. His counter, repeated like a mantra, was that "you have to count the day you're living." That logic gives you four, and it set off the full lines.

The callers came armed with theories. Newton in Richmond and Max in South Carolina sided with the math at three. A caller from Illinois offered the most poetic accounting yet, suggesting you skip days entirely and count sleeps. "Sunday is three sleeps away," he reasoned. Pelissero loved it. Then Rick in San Antonio threw the first real wrench, insisting on four and dragging the room into a separate fight about what "this Saturday" versus "next Saturday" even means.

Things got philosophical from there. Muel in Queens proposed counting by the Jewish calendar, where a new day begins at sundown, which by his math lands you at four days to a Sunday night game. Another caller went biblical. "On the third day he rose," he noted, pointing to Good Friday and Easter as evidence for four. Pelissero, ever the literalist, pushed back: the third day is two days away, not three, because you count the day you are living.

Through it all ran a running gag about the host whose name is on the show. "I hope Rich like flipped through the channels and is like, what the hell is going on on my show?" Brockman said. Pelissero noted that this debate has confused nearly every guest who has ever tried to solve it.

For the record, the audience leaned toward three, with a stubborn faction holding at four and a couple of brave souls floating two. One was even threatened with a blocked number for daring to suggest one. By the end, nobody had said half, which Pelissero counted as a small mercy.