Unplayed podcasts when nothing subscribed?

I’ve seen other posts about this but no solution so I thought I’d bring this up again. I have unsubscribed and deleted every podcast that I was subscribed to in iTunes on my Macbook, then I synced my iPhone (I have sync podcasts on my iPhone podcast settings). In fact I synced it several times but the podcast app still shows a bunch of podcasts under both Unplayed and under My Podcasts. I then did a restore of the phone using a recent backup and still the podcast app continues to show the same podcasts. This is driving me nuts! What I would like to be able to do is delete the podcast app from the phone then restore it in the hopes this would reset/clear out whatever data it has cached for these podcasts. Is there any way to clear out all podcast data from both the phone and iTunes?

BTW, after I unsubscribed and deleted all podcasts from iTunes I found that iTunes had left 655MB worth of podcast audio files under iTunes Music/Podcasts folder. Apple needs to fix both iTunes and the Podcast app which are very, very unreliable and buggy.