ESPN’s Marcus Spears Talks Cowboys, Vikings, Chargers, LSU & More with Rich

Marcus Spears joined the show from a Kansas City hotel room, fresh from the gym, with a photograph of an international jetliner mounted on the wall behind him. He had thoughts about that too.

"Who chooses the art for hotels? I'd love to meet these people," Spears said. "The thought that somebody traveling would want to see a plane when they got in there is kind of crazy."

Then he got to work, and the first subject was one Rich teed up from earlier in the show: a head coach has to be the right amount of crazy.

Rich applied it to Ben Johnson. Spears applied it to Lane Kiffin.

"To be the head coach at LSU, you can't just think you're going to go X's and O's and hone in with your guys," Spears said. "You've got to be outwardly. You've got to ingratiate yourself with the culture."

His evidence was a walkout. Boosie, a Baton Rouge rapper and a childhood friend of Spears, and Lil Wayne came out alongside Kiffin. Not for Alabama. Not for Texas coming into Death Valley. For Louisiana Tech.

"That said all that it needed to say to me. Lane gets it."

The game got hairy early before LSU put its foot on the gas, but the point stands regardless of the score. Spears believes there is more to that job than coaching football, and that not everyone can do it. Brian Kelly could not capture it, which is why he is not the coach anymore. Les Miles, for as badly as it ended, lived close enough to that borderline of crazy that people related to him.

Rich saw a page out of the Prime playbook in the walkout. Spears drew a distinction. Deion Sanders had to go up to Colorado and create that from nothing. LSU has seen this before.

Rich turned to Dallas, and the word he had used earlier, punked. Spears made clear he does not care for it, and that this one is personal for him.

His football concern was more specific than the vibe. The physical runs Dallas could not stop were a problem, though the Cowboys bowed their neck at times. The real issue was Christian Parker and the coverages.

"It just looked like assignment problems," Spears said.

He is willing to grant the circumstance. Coming out of training camp into Week 1, you genuinely do not know what wrinkles an opponent is bringing. The line of scrimmage is always the line of scrimmage, and the Giants had good run schemes. But coverage is different, and the sequence before halftime is the one that got him.

"You just run out routes right over the top of the first layer of coverage in the zone. Two, three times, the last one being Likely for a touchdown. Inexcusable."

Adjusting on the fly is a big part of football. The Giants found it and kept exploiting it, then went to the running back in the flat again and again in the second half.

Spears had flagged this exact unit before the season. The secondary was going to tell him where this defense is and where it could get to. On the one-on-one snaps, Isaiah Likely simply won, and Spears thinks that will keep happening to people given his size and his ability in and out of breaks. What actually made him angry was the zone work, the drops that never got to the right depth.

He is still not panicking. It was an eight point loss, not a bludgeoning, and he would bet on the Dallas offense getting more possessions and clearing 20 points most weeks. George Pickens dropped a potential touchdown. Dak Prescott threw an interception that Spears hopes was an attempt to throw it away, and he was careful not to speculate too far into the quarterback's head.

"Two or three plays different, this might be a different football game."

None of which is meant to shrink what the Giants did. Greg Roman and Matt Nagy had a plan, and Spears admitted he has not always been a Nagy fan.

"That offense looked clean."

Jaxson Dart took a step in maturity, in Spears' read, with timing and an understanding of where to go with the football and what to get in and out of at the line. The lone exception was the snap when Caleb Downs nearly knocked his dome off his shoulders. New York wanted to be physical, which everyone expected the moment Roman walked in the building, and the Giants controlled time of possession and kept Dallas off the field.

Rich laid out the field. If the Chiefs win Monday night, half of last year's playoff teams, seven of them, will have lost in Week 1. Six were already down: the Patriots, Texans, Chargers, Panthers, Rams and Packers.

Spears picked the Chargers without much hesitation.

Carolina made the playoffs, but people were always speculative about how good that team really was. Los Angeles is the one that makes you scratch your head. He acknowledged the injury situation Jim Harbaugh had talked about all offseason, and then Ladd McConkey went out of the game.

"It doesn't seem like they trust anybody else on the outside."

The disappointment is sharpened by the anticipation. Mike McDaniel and Justin Herbert working together was supposed to be explosive. It was stagnant.

"A loss is a loss, but a performance and how you lose matters. I think how the Los Angeles Chargers lost, and how they looked in the loss, is probably the most concerning one of the weekend."

Rich pushed back with Spears' own argument. Shouldn't a new offense get the same grace he extended to a new defense in Dallas?

Spears took the point, and then turned it into a broader complaint about the business.

"We all in media now because of how fast we want stuff to happen. Everybody sucks that lost week one and everybody that won, those are the teams to beat."

He does not believe the Rams are going to lose a lot of games or look that bad again. He believes San Francisco is good. He is genuinely unsure whether Arizona is that good, and says that uncertainty is the entire point of September. Attrition is already running, with Myles Garrett on injured reserve and Zay Flowers dealing with a hamstring.

"We don't know a damn thing," Spears said. "Nobody in the world thought that the Houston Texans would give up 36 points."

Everyone knew Josh Allen was good. Spears calls him arguably the best quarterback in the league right now. Nobody expected Buffalo to hang 36 on a defense that was supposed to be the Green Goblins. Meanwhile, if you let fans tell it, Tampa lost to Cincinnati by 50. It was six.

Rich's verdict on all this nuance was affectionate and immediate. Thoroughly unacceptable.

"I want to live in that lane of some common sense," Spears said.

Rich set up the scenario. Kyler Murray clears concussion protocol and is available for Week 2 against the Bears. Does Carson Wentz keep the job?

Spears' answer was layered. Wentz's name absolutely belongs in that meeting with the coaches. What he showed, and the connection he built with Justin Jefferson, was super impressive. Spears also suspects Murray is out longer than a week.

But he does not think the job changes hands.

"When you name a starter, these coaches don't like going back and forth and flip-flopping," he said. Murray did not lose the job on performance. He got hurt. Spears does not believe an early injury should supplant a starter, and he warned against revisionist history about what Wentz does over a full season.

Then he gave the version he tells his kids.

"The most popular football player on every football team is the backup quarterback."

Rich brought up Cooper Rush in Dallas, and the moment Jerry Jones lit the match by saying he could not wait for Rush to give him a problem with all his winning.

Rich raised Adam Schefter's reporting on Pat McAfee's show, that he does not know whether Deshaun Watson starts this week and that Cleveland could go to Shedeur Sanders right now. Rich understands why Watson got the Week 1 start and why the Browns want to see something. He also notes they traded Myles Garrett to Los Angeles and officially began a youth movement, with more kids coming next year.

Spears was blunter.

"We all know damn well that there are 230 million reasons why Deshaun Watson started."

His case is that the money is already gone and cannot be recovered by playing him. There is nothing to show for the trade or the contract, and there is a young quarterback who could actually be solid and quiet a lot of noise.

"You're not going to the playoffs. You're not going to win a Super Bowl. You're not going to be a different team with Deshaun Watson playing, in my opinion, than you would be with Shedeur."

What he described in Cleveland is an ownership group with an unsettling inability to let go of $230 million.

The last item before Monday night was Washington's loss to Philadelphia. The Commanders could not move it all day until a late drive where Rich saw the player from two years ago reappear. Jayden Daniels found Terry McLaurin, found rhythm, then found Stefon Diggs over the middle to make it a two point game.

Diggs jumped and hugged the upright. Fifteen yards. No chance to go for two and tie it.

Daniels took the podium and called out the mistake, then immediately took the blame.

"You just got to be smarter. We got to know situational football," Daniels said. "That's on me for not reiterating that in the huddle. As the leader and the captain, I put that on myself."

Rich wanted to know why a quarterback would paper over a correct criticism of a veteran receiver that way. Spears' answer was the best few minutes of the interview.

"It's important to let Stefon Diggs know that that was terrible, but I'm also with you, and I'm going to take the brunt and the bullets when I need to for this football team because I'm the leader."

The mechanism matters more than the words. If Spears is Diggs, the next conversation with Daniels starts with Diggs saying that one is on him, veteran receiver, big games, should know better. That exchange builds respect, responsibility and relationship.

Spears also punctured a comfortable assumption about the position. These quarterbacks getting paid a quarter of a billion dollars, you would love for all of them to be the leader and the voice.

"Everybody ain't that," he said. Plenty of good quarterbacks are not the guy a locker room rallies behind. Daniels is establishing that he is the front facing guy, that he takes responsibility publicly, and that he handles the rest behind closed doors.

Before Rich sent him off to Arrowhead, he gave Spears the floor on the game itself. Spears is big on Eric Bieniemy being back in Kansas City, and his reasoning has nothing to do with play design.

"I think he establishes an attitude that I think Kansas City got away from."

His argument is that people remember the Chiefs of the Super Bowl years through Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, which is fair, but incomplete. That team was physical at the line of scrimmage and wanted to run the football. Spears thinks that identity got lost in the pursuit of being explosive and scoring in bunches. Bieniemy believes that if you cannot run it, you do not have a good offense.

The matchup reinforces it. Nobody wants to sit back and drop into obvious passing downs against that Denver front all night.

"I'm expecting Kansas City to try to come establish the line of scrimmage."

He is not expecting Denver to fold, either. That team is tough and not a pushover defensively. What interests him more is the psychology on that sideline. Last year Denver ran up on people. Bo Nix played well, Sean Payton knows exactly what it takes to be there, and now everyone shows up knowing who they are and what they can do.

"It's a different approach when teams are coming in knowing who you are," Spears said. "I'll be interested to see their response to success."

Kansas City wants to reestablish who it is. Denver wants to make clear it is not moving aside for anybody.

"It's going to be hype, man. I'm actually shaking my leg right now because I just get excited about football."

He signed off with a request on behalf of Scott Van Pelt, who has to hold the desk down for hours six through eight, and a promise to be in the Los Angeles studio next week.