The National Sports Media Association (NSMA) announced its 2026 Hall of Fame class on Sunday, electing James Brown, Adrian Wojnarowski, Greg Gumbel, and Sid Hartman.
ESPN’s Sean McDonough earned National Sportscaster of the Year for the first time in his career, while Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger took home National Sportswriter of the Year.
Brown has been the anchor of CBS’s Sunday NFL pregame show since 2006, after spending over a decade at Fox. The three-time Emmy winner also received the Pete Rozelle Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2016, capping off a career that started at a local Washington, D.C. station and eventually spanned decades covering every major sport.
Wojnarowski essentially invented the modern NBA insider role. He spent years grinding at newspapers before Yahoo Sports hired him in 2007, where he rode the rise of social media to become the go-to source for breaking NBA news. ESPN brought him on board in 2016, and for eight years, he was the definitive voice on NBA transactions and movement. Then last September, he surprised everyone by walking away to run the basketball program at St. Bonaventure. He’s won National Sportswriter of the Year three times.
Gumbel and Hartman were both inducted posthumously. Gumbel died in December 2024 at 78. He worked at CBS twice during his career. The first stint from 1989-94 included hosting the NFL pregame show and anchoring two Winter Olympics. After four years at NBC, he returned to CBS in 1998 and spent the next two decades calling football and basketball games. His brother Bryant was inducted in 2018, making them the only siblings in the Hall of Fame.
Hartman’s story remains one of the most remarkable in sports media history. He started selling newspapers as a 9-year-old kid on Minneapolis streets and turned that into a seven-decade career writing for the city’s papers. He kept cranking out three columns a week well past his 100th birthday. When he died in 2020, the Star Tribune had counted more than 21,000 bylines under his name.
McDonough has handled just about every major sport for ESPN over the past three decades. He’s currently the lead NHL voice while also calling major college football and basketball games. He joined the network in 1989, left for a brief CBS stint in the mid-90s, then returned in 1999 and hasn’t left since. He also spent 16 years as the voice of the Red Sox. His father, Will McDonough, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2003.
Dellenger covers college football for Yahoo Sports, where he’s worked since 2023, and also contributes to On3. The Mississippi State graduate cut his teeth as a beat writer on the SEC circuit before moving to Sports Illustrated in 2018.
The NSMA will honor its inductees and award winners at its annual ceremony in late June in Greensboro, North Carolina.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.