Nobody in sports media has to “stick to sports” anymore.
After years at ESPN in which talent was suspended over political posts on social media and hosts claimed they were being silenced by management, it’s all fair game now, no matter what network you look at. All the biggest sports hosts now weigh in on the news. Freedom feels great, but everyone is realizing it’s not a part-time job.
Dan Le Batard said he launched Meadowlark Media in part to ensure his show’s freedom during this election. Stephen A. Smith recently called hosting a live political show “incredibly appealing.” While Colin Cowherd loves to take jabs at ESPN for how its viewership fell once hosts started talking politics on air, he chimes in constantly on big political news since launching his podcast. On ESPN, Dana White joined The Pat McAfee Show in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump in Pennsylvania and called Trump “one of the greatest human beings I have ever met.”
The issue? Most of these people absolutely suck at covering politics. In sports talk, clever takes and fierce debating grab an audience’s attention. Sports hosts can play the role of the average fan to appear relatable. But politics is the arena of the experts and the everyman. You can’t fake your lane.
Longtime ESPNer Pablo Torre recently laid out the landscape in an interview with Sports Illustrated’s Jimmy Traina, saying the audience now feels “numbness” around criticism toward Trump and the far right. At ESPN at least, criticizing the former president is fair game.
When John Skipper ran the company during Trump’s first campaign, his main concern was “tolerance.” Skipper once told ESPN public editor Jim Brady after handing down punishments for Hill, Schilling, Cowherd, and Mike Ditka that “tolerance is not a playing-it-down-the-middle issue or a journalism standard. It is a cultural imperative at our company.”
Back in this period, sports talkers felt a moral imperative to stand up for their vision of the country. Trump wasn’t the only force they were standing up to. Hill’s second suspension came because she went so far as to describe how to boycott the NFL, while Le Batard called ESPN itself cowardly for not doing more to maintain the sanctity of the country.
Those rules disintegrated in 2020 when a global pandemic froze out sports entirely and a social uprising around the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police took over the national conversation — all during a re-election campaign by Trump. Issues like race, class, and culture burst to the fore in and around sports. It became impossible to cover anything without including that stuff.
That May, Bill Simmons and Ryen Russillo showed another risk for hosts trying out political punditry. Their empty discussions around the uprisings against police violence focused on the optics of the looting and rioting in cities like Los Angeles, inspired internal strife at The Ringer, and drew significant apologies from each host.
While harmless, Simmons and Russillo’s views checked neither that expert nor everyman box. They had no real personal connection to the issues and didn’t do enough homework to get up to speed.
Bill Simmons apologizes for “misreading the moment” during a discussion in the George Floyd protests with Ryen Russillo: pic.twitter.com/J0U5QnTR6g
— The Podcass (@thepodcass) June 3, 2020
Sports hosts often take the perspective of the fan or the outsider in order to make arguments about the games and leagues they cover. Reporters, hosts, and analysts are in theory stand-ins for fans, asking questions and taking positions based on what the viewers at home are thinking. In the political realm, it’s close to impossible for a rich dude who runs a media company or hosts a big show at ESPN to do that.
Sure, rich political anchors like Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, or Sean Hannity do exactly that on news networks every night. But what they might lack in relating to the average American voter, they make up for in researching issues and hosting conversations that make up for their blind spots.
Inevitably, sports hosts run into a dead end here. While he is diligent about bringing on plugged-in guests, Smith’s solo political segments are just mazes of references to talking points he heard from pundits or generalized talking points, like the “lack of decorum” of model Amber Rose speaking at the RNC last month.
Cowherd is blatant that he thinks there’s no difference between sports and politics — to him, it’s all about power and money. Yet he doesn’t exactly deep-dive on how politicians accumulate power or where the money is coming from.
Instead, Cowherd paints himself as a centrist. There, he casts down his rulings on how his fellow moderates view issues, such as how Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer really “gets things done” and how the twice-impeached Trump is better at “not stepping in it” than he used to be.
Since forming Meadowlark, Le Batard has at least made it a point to develop an informed stable of guests, but ends up out of his league quickly, like when he went completely off the rails catastrophizing about the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict last October. This is all stuff sports hosts actually devoted time to over the past year!
All these hosts insist this election is too important and impactful to ignore on their individual platforms. That’s their call, and all hope isn’t lost for useful conversation among hosts with what are admittedly among the biggest platforms in the country. Bringing on guests isn’t the only workaround. There are plenty of people who could actually want to hear what Smith, Cowherd, Le Batard, or anyone else thinks about the issues of the day.
A good template came last year during the Republican primary when Shannon Sharpe took Nikki Haley to task about her approach to discussing race on Nightcap. Sharpe found a point of connection to the story, which is that Haley’s father taught at an HBCU when he first immigrated to the U.S. from India. As an HBCU alum and supporter, Sharpe grounded the conversation in his own experience and ripped Haley for trying to run away from and deny her identity.
Sound familiar? It’s exactly what the best hosts do when talking about sports: make an argument, back it up with storytelling or analysis, and relate to the audience. It’s why your Chris Russos and Angelo Cataldis are beloved in their local markets. The diehard audience sees itself in the old guys yelling on the dial.
Unsurprisingly, Le Batard is most effective in discussing immigrants and outsiders — he knows that world. Barstool founder Dave Portnoy learned a long time ago that being crass and confrontational is relatable. Smith does a hell of a job describing the roots of American racism and the importance of diversity. Cowherd does know a thing or two about business and money. Even Simmons, discussing President Joe Biden stepping down last week, was relatable while relaying how difficult it can be for older folks to leave their identity behind.
But too often, today’s hosts can’t relate at all when they put their Walter Cronkite mask on and weigh in on every story. It’s hard to blame them. This isn’t their arena. Yet those who have expanded beyond sports commentary have valuable lessons for those trying to do it now.
Bomani Jones and Pablo Torre are contributors to CNN and MSNBC, respectively, where they have carved out clear niches. Jones can speak eloquently about history, race, and class in America, while the younger Torre embraces the Stoner Scholar role, caustically bringing the world of memes and Zoomers to the old heads on TV.
“DEI hire?”: @VanJones68 and @bomani_jones react to rhetoric from the right as Kamala Harris enters the race. pic.twitter.com/ruj94yP4au
— Abby D. Phillip (@abbydphillip) July 23, 2024
Bob Costas and Charles Barkley are on speed dial at newsrooms across the nation as well. Costas has an established history of covering issues of science, society and safety across sports and is a careful, journalistic voice trusted by audiences. Maybe it’s the accent or years of viral moments among the people, but Barkley brings a believable populism to the news that cuts through the polls and politicking. Even TNT is using that to its advantage in its David vs. Goliath battle with Amazon over NBA rights.
Perhaps the difference between the top dogs and these talking heads is their job descriptions. Smith, Cowherd, Le Batard, and McAfee aren’t paid to cover the presidential horse race or America’s evolving class politics. In theory, news network contributors like Jones and Torre — and their elder predecessors Costas and Barkley — are. Instead, like Simmons before them, this class of executive hosts is covering the election and world events out of a purported sense of obligation — and a need to fill time.
McAfee grew his product organically on YouTube, where he understood the algorithm needed hours on end of live content and interesting clips to gain subscribers. Smith is doing the same now. Cowherd is the owner and face of The Volume, facing the question of what to say on his podcast three times a week that he isn’t already covering on The Herd for three hours a day. Perhaps Le Batard feels the pressure of being looked to by his audience and the sports world to weigh in on the big stuff without always knowing how.
Competing for the audience and its time means wading into any and every topic, going long, and never holding back. Some personalities today are relatable and polished enough to have an opinion on everything without issue. But most likely, those folks are significantly younger than the guys who started their careers at newspapers and local radio in the 1990s.
Without a guiding light like tolerance or Trump and without the helpful confines of structure in online content, the sports world is whiffing. Nobody is enforcing a mandate to stick to sports anymore. Taking advantage of that is proving to be easier said than done.
