Inside Paul Pabst and Andrew Perloff’s new NBC Sports show

Paul Pabst and Andrew Perloff hadn’t recorded a single episode of Not So Fast yet, but they gave me a preview anyway, intentional or not.

The show, officially announced this week, will pair the two longtime Dan Patrick Show fixtures in a noon-to-1 p.m. ET slot on NBC Sports NOW, picking up the moment Patrick’s own broadcast signs off. It’s part of a broader lineup shuffle that also brings John Fanta’s Fanta in 60 to Mondays and, a few weeks later, Jac Collinsworth’s 10/10: NBC Sports Ranks to Fridays.

Before any of that airs, though, I got a chance to talk with Pabst and Perloff about how the show came together.

We’d scheduled a Microsoft Teams call for 9:30 a.m. ET on Friday. I logged on and traded small talk with NBC Sports PR and Andrew while we waited on Paul. No sign of the longtime Dan Patrick Show executive producer — until, suddenly, there was. And the second Paul appeared, Andrew vanished. Perloff, forever “McLovin’,” tried to reconnect, dropped again, tried again, dropped again. On the fourth attempt, the connection finally held.

I hadn’t even hit record, and I already had my lede. Watching the two of them try — and fail, and try again — to simply share a screen told me more about their chemistry than anything they could have said on the record. These are two of the defining Danettes of the last two decades: Pabst, who’s run the operational engine of The Dan Patrick Show almost since its inception, and Perloff, who broke away for CBS Sports Radio and the Infinity Sports Network before circling back to the exact orbit he started in. If you’ve ever wondered what actually happens behind the scenes in that Milford, Connecticut man cave that’s produced one of sports radio’s longest-running shows, this is close. It looks like a glitchy Teams call on a Friday morning in August, or it looks like Perloff wandering back into the studio, no hello, just an immediate verdict that the new coffee machine sucks.

Which is all to say Not So Fast with Pabst & Perloff is going to look like a lot of things once it’s actually on the air. It will look like the Dan Patrick Show, sound familiar in the same rooms and rhythms. But it’s not trying to be that, either.

“It has the DNA of The Dan Patrick Show, for sure, but we want it to stand alone,” Perloff told Awful Announcing, “because it’s more about mine and Paul’s chemistry. It’s a different vibe in the sense that it’s two old friends debating sports, whereas The Dan Patrick Show is a complete universe, but very much has the DNA of The Dan Patrick Show.”

The Dan Patrick Show has always operated as a radio show that happens to be on television, built around the cadence of live radio with cameras along for the ride. Not So Fast is built the other way, a television show that’s on television, designed from the start around pace and visuals rather than adapted to fit them after the fact.

“More importantly, it’s fast, it’s fun,” says Pabst. “It’s got a little different structure than The Dan Patrick Show, but the sentiment, or like Andrew said, the DNA — have fun talking about sports; be serious when it needs to be serious, be silly when it needs to be silly; don’t take yourself too seriously, and always be journalists; always be respectful to the craft of journalism, even when talking about sports and goofing around.”

That freedom to build something different wasn’t something they had to fight NBC for. The network’s only real instruction, Pabst said, was to put together a show in the same vein as Patrick’s. There’s no daily oversight to speak of, which Pabst framed as a compliment, the same hands-off trust NBC has extended to Dan and the guys for years, stepping in with notes down the road rather than steering things day to day. NBC told Pabst and Perloff the same thing: put together something you believe in and want to have fun with, and we’ll let you know if we’ve got notes.

Left to fill in the blank themselves, Pabst didn’t have to think hard about who he wanted next to him.

“I’m a kid, I’m from the South Side of Chicago, Irish Catholic, Notre Dame, Bears, all that stuff, C students, state school,” Pabst said. “Andrew is from the Philadelphia area. He probably went to a private school. He tells me he went to high school with Kobe Bryant about every three weeks. He went to Dartmouth. He told me Stanford was a safety school. So we don’t really have a lot in common, growing up, or what we like about sports, and our debates are real.”

Those debates include, but are not limited to, one of the friendship’s more enduring grudges that saw Pabst ready to push Perloff out of a moving vehicle. To this day, Pabst recalls hearing, with disgust, that after sharing his affinity for Tony Gwynn, Perloff asserted that he’d rather have Adam Dunn on his team.

“His takes are quite bothersome,” Pabst quipped.

“You have to understand, I had to explain OPS in very simple terms to state school Paul,” Perloff tells me. “I had to explain WAR. I’d say half the show is me explaining analytic terms to Paul.”

Perloff adds that Pabst makes him sound like such an “elitist” because he is one.

“If you watch me on The Dan Patrick Show, I do pull out the Ivy League card on occasion, but most of the time, I’m actually a step behind all the other guys,” he continues. “We have a very different viewpoint on sports. If you go to a college football game, I want to go in and watch the NFL Draft prospects. Paul, you have to drag out of the tailgate because somebody has a good BBQ station. We definitely view sports differently.”

They don’t see the business any differently, though — it just took Perloff longer to arrive there. He first had to break free of The Dan Patrick Show’s gravitational pull, where he spent 11 years as a producer and Danette known as “McLovin’,” before carving out his own identity alongside Maggie Gray on Maggie & Perloff, the CBS Sports Radio program he helmed from 2022-25.

“I gotta be honest, I learned a lot,” Perloff said. “This is maybe not exactly about the show, but Dan Patrick took a lot of bullets for us that I didn’t even realize, and Paul knows; Paul’s been with Dan for a long time. You’re sitting there watching Dan run the show like, what does that guy do? The guy is like a maestro. Dan makes it easy to be around the show. When I left, I was like, oh, this is a lot of work to keep a show flowing and listenable. You really have to prepare a lot; you have to keep it tight, know what you’re going to say, and have an intention. You watch The Dan Patrick Show, and you think, oh, this is just guys having fun.

“Paul knows this better than me because he’s been the executive producer for many years. There’s a lot of work that goes into looking like you’re having fun. It was a wake-up call when I left the show. I’m like, oh, the whole sports media world is like this. You get up out of your seat and somebody’s cooking barbecue for you in the back, then you go shoot hoops, and there’s eight guys who are good friends in the back, and Dan is Dan, taking anything and putting it in the right direction. It was a wake-up call on how hard this business actually is, to be honest. I became a better broadcaster by leaving and really appreciating everything that is The Dan Patrick Show. I didn’t even appreciate your job, Paul, sometimes, because you do it so effortlessly, but the whole world ain’t The Dan Patrick Show.”

And neither is Not So Fast.

“It’s not a recap of The Dan Patrick Show,” Pabst maintains. “It’s our version on stuff in sports, and we’re going to poke fun, we’re gonna get serious, we’re also going to bring in Dan in from time to time. Dan’s going to be right down the hallway. Let’s say Dan does a really serious interview with whoever, and it goes sideways, or it goes really well, we’re just going to — in the middle of Not So Fast — give Dan a wave there like a third base coach, ‘Come on down here. Chat with us about this.’ And that’s a great option to have, being down the hall from The Dan Patrick Show – literally down the hall. ‘Hey Dan, give me a little feedback on what happened there,’ and it’ll be a great little tidbit of a possibility when during the show that what could happen, Dan could just pop in.”

“Dan’s also, by the way, underrated in giving advice to other broadcasters,” Perloff adds. “Well, maybe not underrated, but I remember when I started on The Dan Patrick Show, I met Dan and Paul through Sports Illustrated, and Dan decided to pull me into the show. He actually sat me down at a Super Bowl in Tampa. It was the Steelers-Cardinals Super Bowl. He’s like, ‘Andrew, I want you to come in. I think this is how you should be on air, and this is how you should work with the guys,’ and he laid it out very simply for me. And I think it worked really well. And Dan’s been great, and he’s let Paul and I develop the show on our own, but also he’s come in with some advice, and he’s got a good eye for, I think, what works. And, you know, it’s a big benefit to have Dan down the hall.”

I was going to ask whether they worried about manufacturing that old Dan Patrick Show chemistry, and whether it might come across as two Danettes idly bantering back and forth. But they’d already answered the question for me. I watched them prove it right there on the call, effortlessly riffing off each other, practically co-hosting an entire show while I was supposed to be the one conducting the interview.

“You ever have a college friend or a high school friend, you don’t see him for 10 years, then you go visit, and it’s like the conversation just got compressed? You’re like, ‘Hey, man, blah blah blah.’ That’s how Andrew and I are,” Pabst says. “We talk, we text almost daily. It’s weird, but he left the show. I know it’s been a few years, but he walked back in a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, ‘Hey, dude, I left some stuff in the fridge,’ and it was like he just left a minute ago. It was like a memento. And so chemistry is the least of our issues. That’s the one issue we don’t have.

“Like, when we did Leisuremen, we did 100 Leisuremen shows and podcasts back at NBC, so they knew us. And we jumped in the studio, Andrew and I, the other day, and we’re just kind of doing lighting. They’re testing the lighting. They just wanted us to sit in the seats and test the lighting. I go, ‘You want to just talk about, should Mendoza start or not?’ He goes, ‘Let’s go.’ And no one was even recording. We just did like 10 minutes about Mendoza without the cameras being on or them recording. And I was like, ‘This is what we want to do.’ I look forward to this show. I’m looking forward to doing an hour every day with Andrew because we do this already. We text, we call.”

 

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Back in 2016, Pabst and Perloff branched out to co-host their own weekly show on NBC Sports Radio, The Leisuremen: Pabst & Perloff, airing 6-9 p.m. ET and ranging well beyond sports into food, drink, cars, travel, and whatever else came up. Even then, with an actual topic list in front of them, neither one scripted out who’d argue which side. They’d sketch a general game plan for the segment, Pabst said, but never rehearsed positions or divided up who’d take which stance beforehand. The whole point was to hit the gas and let it go wherever it went, each of them genuinely uncertain what the other was about to say.

Pabst sees a familiar blueprint in that approach, one he watched play out firsthand decades ago at a much bigger network.

“I was there at ESPN when the Wilbon-Kornheiser PTI thing happened out of nowhere,” Pabst continues. “I saw the whole backstory of it, and it was destined to happen because these two guys from different areas, different backgrounds, kind of like us, always talked sports every day. They were either calling each other or texting each other. Tony had the radio show, and Wilbon would call in during the breaks, and they would argue with no audience. And that’s a big part of how PTI happened.

“PTI happened because it had to happen. And so I always look at a show like that, it’s like, they love talking sports with each other for 30 minutes a day, [Tony] Kornheiser and [Michael] Wilbon, or they would have stopped doing it a long time ago. That’s probably still their favorite part of their own days. And that’s kind of how we look at this. It’s like, we love talking sports with each other. Now there’s just some lights and some cameras, and I gotta, you know, brush my hair.”

Perloff then asked if we had seen the headline about ESPN moving away from its “Embrace Debate” era, which I had, considering I’d written it. That idea also resonated with him and Pabst, who had kicked around an alternative title for their show: Keep It Friendly.

“Yeah, we actually had an alternative title we were thinking about calling the show Keep It Friendly because Andrew and I like to debate, but we easily walk away from the debate. We definitely disagree on many, many things. We see the sports world differently. But at the end of the day, we’re still good friends. So that is important.”

That, in the end, might be the whole pitch. Not so fast, indeed, on writing off two guys who’ve spent the better part of three decades circling the same orbit, one of them never leaving it. Pabst has manned that control room since 2002; Perloff wandered off to CBS Sports Radio and Infinity before finding his way back, not to Dan Patrick’s show, but to Dan Patrick’s producer. They aren’t trying to reinvent sports talk radio. They’re just trying to have the same conversation they’ve always had. Now there are just some lights, some cameras, and, as Pabst put it, some hair to brush.