Jeremy Schaap on ‘The Sports Reporters’ revival: ‘It’s a show that should be out there’

Schaap said the player safety discussion they had particularly stood out to him, especially around some comments from Tirico relating his current work calling the NFL on NBC to how he covered ESPN on SportsCenter decades back.

“I thought what Mike said in the show was really interesting. He said, ‘I used to stand up where you’re standing now when we did that ‘Jacked Up’ segment, and now, of course, we know so much more about player safety. We know so much more about the long-term effects on the human body and what playing football does.’ So I said ‘How does that affect your approach?'”

Schaap said that discussion also emphasized how while these announcers aren’t conventional reporters, they wind up relaying information on breaking news in similar fashion at times. That particularly happened with the Damar Hamlin saga, which Buck covered live in 2023. He then later defended that coverage against (questionable) NFL pushback.

And Tirico said on this episode Buck’s handling of that should be shown in journalism schools “to everyone who’s going to be on a live broadcast,” because “It’s in real-time, 10 minutes before in this electric scene, to now having to walk America, for an hour, hour-twenty minutes, through a life or death situation with very little information. And it’s done with the absolute right tone.” Schaap said the Hamlin discussion here was notable, and emphasized what Tirico said there about how the announcers (and the whole production team) are reporting to viewers in a situation like that.

“I thought the guys had an interesting discussion about what it’s like when something happens on the field which creates a scary situation,” Schaap said. “The prime example, of course, being what happened a couple of years ago to Damar Hamlin, and what’s it like in those moments. And obviously these guys aren’t our classic sports reporters, obviously that’s not their job, but in those moments, they are reporting to tens of millions of people about something that’s going on on the field.”

Beyond that, Schaap said those broadcasters brought interesting and not-often-seen perspectives on the NFL.

“I would also say ‘Look, obviously these guys have insights into the league, the games, the teams and all of that.’ You know, there are very few people who are better-versed on the league, I believe.”

He said another notable part of that conversation was on how to handle broadcasts with Taylor Swift in attendance, always a hot-button NFL topic.

“It was just fun just hearing their perspectives on all these different topics that we brought. Like, people say this is frivolous, but it was such a big deal last year with Taylor Swift’s presence and how they handled that, and how you balance what the purist wants with what that audience coming in that’s unfamiliar with the game wants, what they want to know. These are all things they have to deal with in real time. So I thought that was interesting.”

But Schaap said beyond the roundtable format, his interviewing approach to talking to these broadcasters didn’t change much from what he’d do for E:60 or another ESPN journalism brand.

“I don’t think it did, really,” he said. “It’s the same approach, it’s asking open-ended questions to people who have interesting perspectives, important perspectives on this.”

Schaap added that this conversation also worked well as something with a longer shelf life where it’s interesting to viewers given that it wasn’t tied into specific upcoming games. And he said that actually was something the original show tried to do early on, but it had to evolve to often be more game-related given its Sunday morning linear timeslot.

“And it also kind of harkens back to the early years of The Sports Reporters, which wasn’t as focused as it became later on the games taking place that day and the games that had taken place the day before. There were always the discussions about what the hot-topic issues were, but this was a Sunday morning show leading into the NFL preview show, coming off of college football, whatever else was going on.”

Schaap said the YouTube origination of the new show and lack of tie to a specific timeslot means they’re shooting for content that can be of interest for longer periods of time.

“Instead of trying to reproduce the old structure, which worked and was necessary at the time, and not just the amount of time but where it fell in the schedule on Sunday mornings, we could do a show that is more conversational, which is more anecdotal, and which, by necessity, also is not as focused on what’s happening at this specific moment in the sports news cycle.”

And he thinks the broadcasters’ comments fit in well with that longer-term, less-current focus, and they’ll be of interest to people going forward.

“Since we’re not in that time frame and we want this to live on YouTube for a number of weeks, it had to have a longer shelf life. So the stuff about the craft, and doing the job, and what it’s like calling the NFL, what it’s like being part of this traveling circus every week. …You could argue this is the last big tent in American life. Everybody comes in to watch football.”

As for YouTube versus linear TV, Schaap said the digital platform not only lets them meet fans who consume content there, but gives them more freedom in the show format than if this was originating on linear (versus being rebroadcast there).

“That’s kind of the nice thing too with YouTube,” he said. “It’s on TV as well, it’s on linear TV as well, which has been great. But people have more room to run; the comments are longer, it’s more conversational. It’s not as structured, obviously.”

Schaap said he’d love to do a lot of The Sports Reporters episodes, but that’s ultimately up to Burke Magnus (ESPN’s president, content).

“It’s my hope that we’d be doing it every week, but that’s up to Burke,” Schaap said. “I hope we get there. But the initial plan has been we’re going to do this every few weeks, once a month, something like that.”

He feels there are a ton of potential options for taking the show forward, though.

“There’s so many different ways we could go. We can do a show with NBA insiders and NBA commentators, something like we did with the NFL guys. We can do a show where it’s all sideline reporters through different sports. We can do shows where it’s Mitch [Albom] and Bill [Rhoden] and Bob [Ryan] and some combination of other people who have been on the show in the past, and a combination of new faces, and new people, which we’re looking to do as well.

“And that’s kind of one of the fun things here. We almost have this, you know, it’s not a blank canvas because there’s the canvas of the old show. But it’s a canvas that we can update.”

Schaap said he thinks there are plenty of different ways they can approach what The Sports Reporters can be, and who can be on it, and what it can cover.

“I would love to see us doing this a lot. I’d love to see this show on every week. I’d love to see these kinds of different ways that we can think about The Sports Reporters. I have some esoteric sports interests, and any of the five or six people who listened to The Sporting Life, my radio show on ESPN Radio, would be aware of that. You know, the show was aggressively programmed not to be listened to. But it was a fun show, and I did that for about 20 years, and I’d love to do that.

“I’d love to do, I mentioned Classic Sports Reporters, that old show, maybe we can get one on YouTube like ‘Sports reporters talk about the history of the Super Bowl, the greatest moments, the greatest performances, the greatest athletes.’ We can turn it into all those kinds of things. But I’d also like it to be where the format doesn’t have to be the same every week.

“We can do where I’m sitting there with Mitch and Bill and Bob, and hopefully a lot of the other regular crew from the old days, and we get new faces as well. We used to do a version of The Sports Reporters at Outside The Lines, we did it for a few years, it was called “The Friday Four.” We did it with Kate Fagan, and Mina Kimes, and Clinton Yates, and Ryan Smith, and, you know, 100 different people. And there are so many voices out there that I’m sure are really strong on what’s going on in the world of sports right now that I’m not even aware of.”

Schaap said another exciting element of this is the reaction it’s drawn from people who want to be involved, which he thinks will help with trying to put together those different versions of what The Sports Reporters can be.

“Once we announced this was coming back, I got a lot of colleagues, a lot of people in the industry, saying ‘Hey, I want to be part of this.’ And I think that’s good. That’s great.”

For Schaap, this is a highly-personal project given his father’s history with the show. And he’s thrilled ESPN has supported the idea of bringing this back.

“There’s a lot here that’s of a personal nature. The Sports Reporters means so much to me because of the role my father played.  He didn’t just do the show, he loved the show, he loved being in that chair and it meant so much to him. And, you know, I think he would have kept doing it until they kicked him out of the chair, had he not died so young.

“And John [Saunders, who hosted from 2001 through his death in 2016] did such a great job for so long after my father died. And we’ve lost a lot of people who were integral to the show. Ralph Wiley, in the early years, was on the show all the time. Bryan Burwell. And it’s just great to see that ESPN wants it back, and understands the significance of the brand and its legacy, and has these hopes for its future. That means a lot.”