Late-Round Perspectives: Chris Harris Returns

**JJ Zachariason** (0:00)
Chris Harris is the owner of Harris Football, who hosts the popular Harris Football Podcast. Prior to Harris Football, he's been over eight years at ESPN. He's a film-based analyst, a novelist, he's got a new book called Pound Foolish out on September 1st. These are his late-round perspectives.
This episode is sponsored by DraftKings. We've partnered up with DraftKings again this year for best ball, and we've got a can't miss offer on their biggest best ball contest ever. Twenty million dollars in total prizes. It's draft one, get one. Draft your team once, no weekly line up management, and your top scorers start automatically each week, all season long. Download the DraftKings daily fantasy app and sign up with promo code LATEROUND. Enter a line up in the $20 million best ball contest for $25, and get a bonus ticket for a second entry. Two shots at the title. Draft one, get one, only on DraftKings. The crown is yours.
How's it going with this new book?

**Chris Harris** (1:14)
You're going to have to ask me in like two weeks, because it's not out yet, but people are pre-ordering and I was like, I would love to say, oh, the response has been amazing, but nobody has it. You have it, but it's busy time of year.

**JJ Zachariason** (1:27)
Tell me about the book, what it's about, what inspired you to write it? I mean, you've done other novels and such in the past, other books, like what was it that made you go? Is this your first football-focused one too?

**Chris Harris** (1:42)
Second. Yeah, my first novel is called Slotback Rhapsody. It was like 2011
And actually, so that's about an undersized running back who tries to make it in the NFL.

**JJ Zachariason** (1:54)
And was it a precursor to Christian McCaffrey? Is that what the?

**Chris Harris** (1:59)
No, you know, it was Danny Woodhead in his Patriots days.

**JJ Zachariason** (2:04)
Right, OK.

**Chris Harris** (2:06)
It was more like, that was who I had in mind.
It takes place in Detroit, but it was Danny Woodhead was who I had in mind. And so then you're right, I wrote a bunch of other books and came back to football as a subject matter for this one. And it's a sequel. The same character from the first one is one of the main characters in this one.

**JJ Zachariason** (2:27)
Gotcha.

**Chris Harris** (2:28)
This one's a lot more ambitious and has a lot of other characters in it, and is about the season in a life. And the team happens to have somebody who might be a serial killer who's murdering women on the team.
Oh. And so the character from Slotback no longer plays, he's retired, and they bring him in to investigate the things that they cannot be seen investigating themselves internally. Like, see if you can figure this out. They like ask them, so he infiltrates the team, and then we meet many of the team members, and there's a lot of fun game action and stuff. And yeah, it's what inspired me to write it, I guess, was my own feelings of moral compromise about being a barnacle on the side of professional football.

**JJ Zachariason** (3:20)
Yeah.
Do you ever feel that way? Yeah, I feel that way all the time. Yeah, I mean, it's there's definitely like a grossness to what we do, you know, for for a living that that I think that like it's only human to feel that way. I think it's important to like talk about that on shows sometimes and remind people that we feel that way for sure, you know, like it's very easy for, you know, what we're doing to essentially just minimize what these athletes are going through and doing on a football field for our entertainment, you know, and treating them as like they're not people sometimes in the way that we analyze fantasy football. And so, yeah, I mean, I feel that way all the time, all the time.

**Chris Harris** (4:01)
Plus just, there's that aspect of it, the sacrifice, the churn of human flesh, you know, human flesh.
There's that side of it and there's the compromises that they have to go through to get put themselves through it. The bad behavior that that can sometimes then result in, that we then wind up either excusing or waving away, and certainly the league's waves away. And then, to me, my way of thinking, worst of all, is kind of the too big to fail nature of the billionaires and the business, and Roger Goodell and the whole bread and circus and nonsense, as though they're smart, as though they've done anything other than literally just accidentally find the the goose that lays the golden eggs, or be the lucky sperm club of such a person. And then that somehow, because they're billionaires and own these teams, grants them some sort of claim to intellect or savvy or anything. And then they get to hold communities hostage. The Bears are going through this right now, where give us public money that we don't need, but we can ask for it, we can hold a gun to your head, so we're just going to do it. Like, it's all pretty nauseating in some ways. And people who get turned off of the NFL, I have plenty of friends. I have a really close friend who's been in my fantasy leagues for more than a decade. This year, he quit.