‘The Sports Reporters’ returns…as a YouTube show featuring NFL broadcasters?

After a lot of discussion about a potential The Sports Reporters revival from ESPN (but only for their YouTube channel), that has indeed happened. On Monday, Jeremy Schaap tweeted the details of the first planned show of the return, which will premiere Tuesday.

The Sports Reporters is back tomorrow, streaming on @YouTube. In this edition, @Buck, Ian Eagle, Kevin Harlan and @miketirico join us for a wide-ranging discussion on the upcoming NFL season and their experiences as voices of America’s most beloved sport. pic.twitter.com/b6UtuyQcga

— Jeremy Schaap (@JeremySchaap) September 2, 2024

That matches up with John Ourand’s Puck report on this return from last month, which mentioned that this first episode had already been shot at that point. However, as we discussed then, it’s quite unclear what level of connection this new project has to the old The Sports Reporters show. That show aired on ESPN on Sundays from 1988-2017, hosted by Gary Thorne, Dick Schaap (Jeremy’s father), John Saunders, and Mike Lupica, and for most of its run, it primarily featured journalists outside of ESPN most known for their print work. Joe Buck, Ian Eagle, Kevin Harlan, and Mike Tirico are all prominent NFL (and beyond) play-by-play voices, but none of them are print journalists.

A conversation between Schaap and those NFL PXP voices is certainly notable, and certainly worthy of ESPN’s platforms. (And there’s a good argument to be made that this would be more worth ESPN linear airtime than many of the things they air on their main network, so it’s odd that this is only airing on YouTube.) But it is unusual to see The Sports Reporters as the branding here, as this easily could have slotted in under a SC: Featured, E:60, or Outside The Lines brand and fit in much better; Schaap is the only figure here who could be at all described as a reporter. And that adds to some of the skepticism Lupica expressed about this “revival” last month, where he said he wouldn’t necessarily return if asked (it’s unclear if he was indeed asked):

“If they’re going to bring it back, do it right and don’t do it in some half-a**ed way. …”I just don’t want it to be a reboot that doesn’t work. And if they want to put The Sports Reporters back on television, I’ll tell them what they can do. Put it on Sunday morning at 9:30, which is when they never should have taken it off of.”

In that interview (with Michael Kay of ESPN New York), Lupica also spotlighted ex-ESPN president and current Meadowlark Media talking head John Skipper as the only reason the franchise ever left television:

“Why did it go away, Michael? Because a chucklehead named John Skipper at ESPN canceled it, that’s why,” Lupica told Kay. “We hadn’t lost a single rating point, we hadn’t lost a single sponsor. To this day, nobody (knows).”

Chucklehead or not, Skipper is no longer making ESPN programming decisions following his December 2017 exit from the company around his cocaine dealer’s attempts to extort him. Instead, he’s now attempting to discuss business matters with ex-Miami Marlins president David Samson on a Meadowlark podcast. So while he may be at fault for the program’s initial May 2017 exit from the airwaves of the Worldwide Leader (apologies, Jimmy), he isn’t to be blamed for The Sports Reporters coming back as something quite alien to what it was. But it will be interesting to see the reception to this “revival,” and to see where ESPN takes the brand from here.

[Jeremy Schaap on X/Twitter]