Inside Steve Smith Sr.’s ‘The 89 Show,’ the NFL’s most-trusted wide receiver podcast

Steve Smith Sr. and James Palmer built one of football media’s most trusted shows without a network, a development deal, or much of a plan at all.

For years, NFL Network flew its on-air talent to Los Angeles each summer for company-wide meetings, the kind of corporate ritual designed to put faces to bylines before the season started. Steve Smith Sr., the three-time All-Pro receiver turned analyst, and James Palmer, the network’s longtime insider, would run into each other at the check-in counter and not make it to their rooms for hours.

“We still have our luggage with us, and we haven’t checked in yet, and we’re just still talking football,” Palmer tells Awful Announcing.

That habit never really stopped. It just found a new home. Today, Smith and Palmer co-host The 89 Show, a wide receiver-focused podcast distributed by Blue Wire that has become something unusual in the sports content economy: a show built almost entirely on credibility, with no algorithm chasing, no manufactured beef, and a three-person staff that includes the two hosts and a single editor.

It is also, increasingly, a show that the NFL itself watches.

“Players tell me they always go back,” Palmer recalls. “‘Steve’s the GOAT at this, man. He’s the only one that called Cooper Kupp.'”

The show’s premise is simple, almost stubbornly so. Smith played receiver for 16 years and evaluates the position with the eye of someone who has run every route being graded. Palmer has spent his career cultivating front-office and coaching sources, which allows him to confirm or contradict what Smith sees on tape. The combination has built some credibility within league circles, and Palmer pointed to an appearance from NFL Network draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah as proof of how far that credibility extends.

“Everybody respects Steve’s opinion on the topic,” Palmer said. “We had Daniel Jeremiah on during our draft season… So DJ comes on, and he’s like, ‘When I talked to Steve, and he showed us, I grabbed my notebook and I grabbed my pen, because there’s nobody better at evaluating wide receivers, in my opinion, than Steve Smith.’ Boom, stop, full stop.”

That’s the reason, in Palmer’s estimation, why the show works. What makes the format work, according to both hosts, is what doesn’t happen before the cameras turn on. Smith and Palmer agree on a topic in advance — whether a prospect belongs in their top tier, say — but they intentionally avoid hashing out their actual opinions beforehand. The reactions are real, which is why Smith’s face has become something of a signature on the show.

“A lot of times when you see my facial expressions, we are really talking in detail with either agreeing, disagreeing, or pausing,” Smith said. “I was shocked by that because we haven’t rehearsed.”

The two don’t share sources, either, which occasionally produces an odd kind of déjà vu. Palmer’s front-office contact and Smith’s locker-room contact are sometimes the same person, unknowingly.

“We literally sometimes will have the same source, and it’ll be the exact same person,” Smith said.

The show’s origin predates Palmer’s involvement. Smith began recording solo breakdowns during the pandemic, inspired in part by an episode of Hotboxin’ With Mike Tyson in which comedian Mike Epps described being held in the same juvenile detention facility as Tyson, years apart, as a kid. It reframed, for Smith, what it meant to actually know an athlete.

“We know these guys, but we really don’t know them,” he said.

The format that followed mirrored the only thing that doesn’t run out of material — the NFL season itself, with a new storyline every week. Palmer came on later, first as a guest, and the two discovered the back-and-forth produced something neither could replicate solo.

Smith is candid that his on-air persona has shifted. He credits—and partly blames—the way he was raised by a single mother in Los Angeles who treated an unspoken opinion as a wasted one.

“You’re gonna speak your opinion, then I’ll get popped in my mouth, but I’m at least gonna know how I feel,” he says.

For years, that translated to broadcasting without much of a filter. Now he describes the goal as honesty without carelessness, a distinction he says matters in an industry increasingly allergic to saying a player isn’t good.

“I’m not gonna sit here and use the word that this generation loves to use as everybody’s great,” Smith said. “There’s some real losers in the world. Everybody’s not great.”

Palmer sees something else underneath Smith’s harder edges. He sees investment, not dismissal.

“I think Steve gets the most passion when he goes, man, if he would just do this, I see it in him, I wish he could become this,” Palmer said. “That’s where I think a lot of that critiquing on our show has gotten really good.”

Players occasionally confront Smith directly about a critique. Most of those conversations, he said, end fine, provided they’re approached professionally. He keeps a running account of praise he’s given specific players, ready to produce it when someone fixates on a single hard line.

“They only hear the negative,” he said.

Unlike the Kelce-brand expansion playing out elsewhere in podcasting — Amazon-built storefronts, sponsor-branded tailgates, merchandise lines stitched into the show’s universe — The 89 Show has resisted scale for its own sake. Smith, Palmer, and their producer, Jon Roemer, handle every piece of content themselves. Blue Wire, their distribution partner, manages sponsorships and partnerships, leaving the hosts almost entirely free of the business side.

“Everyone has their role,” Smith said. “Because of their roles, you’ve seen now our stuff has started to skyrocket.”

That arrangement gives Smith and Palmer veto power over how the show gets monetized. They’ve turned down sponsorship asks they didn’t believe they could deliver on.

“There are some partners we’ve said we don’t feel comfortable, or we may not be able to hit those numbers, so we might have to respectfully decline,” Smith said.

This offseason marks the first full cycle under what both hosts consider the show’s mature format, with plans to break down every projected starting receiver room in the league before September. Palmer has floated the idea of an interview series featuring players from Smith’s own era. Neither sees an obvious ceiling — only a production bottleneck.

“There really is no limit to what we can do,” Palmer said.

What they’ve deliberately avoided is the impulse toward manufactured conflict that drives so much of the sports media genre. Palmer pointed to a 25-minute episode the show devoted entirely to Henry Ruggs III, the former Raiders receiver who remains in prison after a drunken driving crash in Las Vegas that killed 23-year-old Tina Tintor and her dog. The episode wasn’t built around football at all. It centered on fatherhood and personal failure, a subject Smith said hit uncomfortably close to home.

“This show is very organic,” Palmer said. “It’s not clickbait at all, and I think that’s what’s helped us have sustained success very quickly.”

“Nobody wants anybody to fail,” he said. “What I want is for a player that I said I really like him, for him to ball his ass off.”

When he gets one wrong, he doesn’t dress it up.

“I was wrong. Good, he’s playing well.”

It’s a small admission, sure, but it’s the same honesty that has carried the show from a pandemic hobby to something the league’s best evaluators now tune into themselves.