Mike Florio spends most of his days talking or writing about the most American of topics, the NFL.
These days, when it comes to America, it can be hard to put on blinders and, for lack of a better term, stick to sports.
On Friday, the dam broke for Florio. There, he felt compelled to speak his mind about a crisis impacting the United States government that has ramifications far beyond the El Salvador prison at the center of it.
I opened Friday’s @PFT_Live by addressing something not about football. The feedback was surprisingly positive. I wrote something about that issue tonight. If you’re interested, here it is. If you’re not, don’t read it. Either way, have a good evening. https://t.co/PBAKLMnTts
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) April 19, 2025
I will say that I wholeheartedly understand the position Florio finds himself in. Awful Announcing has a self-appointed mandate to write about sports media, the people within it, and it’s impact on the world. But sports media doesn’t exist in a vacuum, just as sports themselves exist within the context of a larger society.
Speaking for me, I hold myself and my writers to high journalistic standards, as Pat McAfee might say. However, my blogger roots also mean that sometimes I can’t help myself, especially when I perceive an injustice or imbalance that demands honest thoughts. Sometimes you can’t worry about the reactions (which are almost always generic and predictable anyway), you just have to speak your mind.
Florio, who was a lawyer before founding Pro Football Talk, opened Friday’s episode of PFT Live with a diatribe on how the current executive branch of our government appears intent on rendering the judicial branch impotent, thereby installing itself with king-like powers. Specifically, he highlighted the unfolding case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadorian cititzen who was illegally deported from the United States to an El Salvador prison despite never being charged of a crime in either country. He also discussed the perilous path forward if the Trump administration refuses to accept the checks and balances that the nation’s government was built upon.
“I’ve been shaken in my core by the Kilmar Obrego Garcia case,” Florio said on PFT Live. “Not the facts, okay? Because there’s always conflicting facts. In any case, civil or criminal. There’s two sides. It’s an adversarial process that is designed to have the two sides come together and the truth is determined by some neutral party.
“I don’t care if the Chicago Bulls hat means he’s in MS-13. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t care. I don’t care about anything else, factually. I care about one thing, and I think of it this way. The human body, we have all sorts of systems and illnesses and conditions and things that complicate our existence. But at the end of the day, we need three things: oxygen, food, and water. Our government needs three things: executive, congressional, and judicial. Period. Co-equal branches, Acting in harmony. Checks and balances. It’s three. Three. Not one. Not one. Three.
“…I care about this country. I care about our future, and I care about what’s going on now. When you lose, you’ve lost in court. You have to comply with the order of the court. You can’t just say, ‘make me.’… When you lose, you’ve lost. What’s happening where there is this open defiance of a ruling we don’t like. I lost some cases. I don’t love to be able to go to the newspaper and say that judge should be impeached. I don’t love to be able to say the whole system is illegitimate. I don’t love to be able to say defund the courts. But I lost. And you move on. That’s how it works. That’s how a nation of law and order works.
“…This is not hyperbole. There has to be three functioning branches of our government. If one is determined to ignore the other two… Now, one has the second one under its thumb right now. But if the one is going to completely ignore the third one, we have the makings of a serious problem that, again, this is not rhetoric. It threatens to tear down our entire system of government and way of life.”
Florio later put these thoughts on on Pro Football Talk, which you can read here. In that piece, he also cited a Thursday ruling written by J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a United States Court of Appeals judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, in which the well-respected judge expounded on the perilous path that the Trump administration is on.
“Now the [executive and judicial] branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.”
In other words, as Florio put it, “if the executive branch refuses to accept and respect the decisions of the judicial branch — decisions that serve as an important check and balance against the power of the executive branch — everyone loses.”
Just like some readers who visited PFT Friday night or Saturday morning weren’t expecting to read a political diatribe, there are almost certainly some people reading this on Awful Announcing and thinking the same thing. But regardless of your beat, focus, or interests, there comes a point where the situation requires you to speak up, even if only for your own peace of mind, to be able to say you said something because you could. Florio reached that point, and I have to believe a lot more people are thinking the same thing.