Bill Simmons picked a rough week to argue that tennis matches take too long. Hours after renewing his push to shorten sets from six games to five, he watched Frances Tiafoe claw back from two sets down against Alex Michelsen in a fourth set so scrappy that one fan calculated 22 combined unforced errors in its first seven games alone, then needled Simmons with it directly. He didn’t retreat with his reply: “I’ve carved out the next 3 hours for the 4th and 5th sets,” he wrote, watching the match he’d just called unwatchable.

So, by the time Andy Roddick sat down to record his Served podcast, he had two things to respond to: complaints about the 3:33 a.m. finish to Ben Shelton’s win over Carlos Alcaraz, the latest a match has ever ended at the US Open, and Simmons’ renewed case for shorter sets.

“I hear a lot of complaining. I don’t hear a lot of proposed solutions,” Roddick said of the scheduling gripes, before turning to the format question directly: “I know Bill Simmons made the point that this is ridiculous, that we’re playing too long. He’s normally well thought out in his thoughts. I don’t disagree with the premise that five hours is too much. I’m bored.”

On the late finish, Roddick separated the logistics from the tennis. “You’ve got to get 25,000 people out of a stadium responsibly, and you’ve got to get 25,000 people in responsibly,” he said, explaining that the night session couldn’t start earlier because Tiafoe’s five-set win over Michelsen had pushed the day’s schedule back, with Pegula and Navarro then playing before Shelton and Alcaraz finally took the court at 11:05 p.m.

A night session, he added, is something fans have come to expect and is “one of the things that we all love” about the US Open. Shelton and Alcaraz, he added, “have been on the wrong side of luck.”

Simmons’ complaint wasn’t just a general gripe about long nights, either. He’d floated it publicly ahead of the quarterfinals, arguing that nothing built as entertainment should ask four and a half hours of an audience, and proposing the shortened sets as a fix. He held that even as the Tiafoe match played out in real time in front of him.

So, Roddick’s disagreement with Simmons was with treating a scheduling problem and a format problem as the same problem.

“7-6 in the fifth last night for Ben Shelton and Carlos Alcaraz, in that match where Tiafoe is down two sets and the guy’s serving for it — I kind of like the fact that we have a sport where you get into these long-form matches, and it’s the hardest thing on earth,” he said. “If you take that away, can we lay that claim anymore? I don’t know.” His closing line for Simmons was blunter: “Did you f***ing see what happened last night?”

Roddick then pointed to Alexander Zverev’s own grueling run through the draw this week, a player who looked physically exhausted early in the tournament and is now chasing a second major of the year, as another example of the format producing stories a shorter set simply couldn’t.

That said, Roddick never fully resolved the tension in his own take. “I’m totally torn,” he admitted, sympathetic to fans who lost sleep, unwilling to call a 4 a.m. finish good scheduling, but just as unwilling to trade the format for a tidier broadcast window.

“The best-of-five format — I don’t know that you can ever get rid of that,” he said. “It’s what makes us different. It’s what makes us stand out against all the other sports in the world.”

Simmons, for what it’s worth, kept watching anyway.