Jay Glazer recalls going head-to-head with Adam Schefter for CBS NFL insider job

Jay Glazer has become a mainstay of Fox’s NFL coverage as their insider since 2004.

It’s easy to forget that he got his big break with CBS, which hired him away from the New York Post in 1999 to serve as its NFL insider.

He recently shared the story of how that went down with sports media insider Andrew Marchand, noting that the job came down to him and some guy named Adam Schefter.

When Jay Glazer got his CBS NFL insider break, the other candidate was … Adam Schefter.

Glazer gets emotional thinking about it

Glazer was amazing on the pod https://t.co/y8SVu1aH44 pic.twitter.com/68aj1pdzDk

— Andrew Marchand (@AndrewMarchand) January 21, 2026

“A CBS job opened, and it went down to me and Schefter,” Glazer said on The Main Event with Andrew Marchand. “And I’ll never forget, I’m out there. There’s a driving range on Randall’s Island. I’m with Tiki Barber. And I get emotional still about this because it’s 11 years after I started. Think about this, man. Eleven years, man, being turned down for a freaking job. Where you don’t know where you’re literally going to get a meal from the next week.

“And [my agent] calls. He called me up says, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘I’m on a driving range with Tiki Barber.’ He says, ‘Okay. We finally got to a full-time job.’ I was like, ‘What? With who?’ He said ‘CBS, they got the NFL back. It’s year two. They’re wiping everything out. You’re going to be their NFL insider…’ And I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ He said, ‘Don’t you want to know how much it’s for?’ I said, ‘I don’t give a f*ck,’ because it’s validated.

“It’s validated me. Look, I get emotional when I talk about it because that’s my moment, because it’s only a couple of times in life you really get to find out who the f*ck you are. And it’s times like this. I didn’t stop. 11 freaking years of the mind games I had to play with myself. But it validated me, despite everybody telling me I had it wrong, I had it right all those years ago.”

Glazer added that the role initially paid from $50,000.

Perhaps apocryphally, Glazer once said that a big part of the reason he got the job was that he was already based in New York, while Schefter was working out of Denver.

As for Schefter, things seem to have worked out for him as well. Plus, he and Glazer have become friends over the years, given their shared work.