Upon Further Review

Live from the airwaves of WRNT, the 50,000 watt scorching (yet fictitious) voice of Boston sports radio….it’s The Dougie and The Donk Show. On today’s episode we take a trip to a fantastical football universe. A new TV special about a notorious 2001 Patriots game asks a lot of crazy questions. Like what if quarterback Drew Bledsoe, the hero of Pats Nation, had been pulled and replaced by benchwarmer Tom Brady? And what if Bill Belichick took over for the Big Tuna? It’s a bunch of malarkey but we’ll give our guest Steve Kornacki a chance to explain before The Donk destroys him. And as always, we’ll take your calls.

What if Brandi Chastain’s penalty kick against China in the 1999 Women’s World Cup final had bounced off the crossbar resulting in defeat? Just imagine the devastating fallout. There would be no thriving women’s professional league, women’s soccer highlights wouldn’t dominate ESPN and female players would’ve never gotten the same pay as the men. The thing is none of that actually did happen, despite their triumph in 1999. Journalist Louisa Thomas talks to Chastain and Julie Foudy about the mixed legacy of women’s soccer in the U.S.

It’s 2018 and after decades of threatening to do so the Dodgers are finally leaving Brooklyn. What will this mean for the vibrant cultural scene and local economy? Or is it possible nobody will even notice since the Brooklyn Nets dominate this hoops and hip-hop-obsessed borough nowadays. Legendary NPR host and longtime Dodgers fan Robert Siegel reports on a bygone era that never actually left.

An update on the 1993 letter a young Jesse Eisenberg sent to his NBA hero Dan Majerle.  25 years after Eisenberg wrote that fan letter, he and Majerle were brought together to talk about it on 98.7 FM Arizona's Sports Station.

Actor Jesse Eisenberg revisits a painful chapter of his youth when his beloved basketball team, the Phoenix Suns, lost to the Chicago Bulls in the final seconds of Game 6 of the 1993 NBA Finals. Wracked by guilt at the possibility that his fan letter to the Suns’ Dan Majerle provided a fatal distraction, he imagines an alternate reality where he never put pen to paper. NBA legends Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan also make an appearance. Podcast production by Derek John and Jonathan Mitchell of The Truth podcast. 

Football really mattered to Richard Nixon. Only one problem — he sucked at it. That frustration fueled a persecution complex that would eventually bring down his presidency. How would history be different had Nixon been more than just a tackle dummy on his college football team? Upon Further Review and Slow Burn's Leon Neyfakh explores that question, and other great what ifs from sports history. 

From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slatepodcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way. Upon Further Review is a limited edition Slate podcast based on the book of the same name. Over the course of five episodes Mike and a roster of podcast All-Stars will explore counterfactual sporting scenarios through a combination of speculative fiction, investigative journalism and sound-rich narrative.From turning points that every sports fan rues or celebrates, to the forgotten would-be inflection points that defined sports, Upon Further Review answers age old questions, and settles the score, even if the score bounced off the crossbar.