Tune into a sports show on the radio or television and you enter an echo chamber. It’s not so much how loud it is in there, although it’s very loud. It’s that the echo chamber reverberates in something like perfect harmony. For all the unfortunate things about the cookie-cutter climate of sports media, few are more deadening than the fact that seemingly every hot take is served at the same temperature.
One audible medium has always been a little different and resistant to the formulaic nature of sports commentary. In place of First Take-style embraced-debate, podcasts can afford less regimented, free-flowing banter, unbridled audio drops and a higher level of general silliness. Because of this, good podcasts make listening to sports commentary interesting and fun, instead of exhausting and rote.
For a long time, this was epitomized by the ESPN Fantasy Focus podcast, which mixed pure nonsense with thoroughly mediocre fantasy football analysis. For eight years, the football and baseball shows were both supremely popular and consistently entertaining, thanks to work from the likes of The Talented Mr. Roto, the Say Nay Kid, Pod Vader, The Stephania Bell, and Secret Squirrel.
These nicknames aren’t widely known, but one of the great things about podcasts is how little names, or fame, matter in terms of the quality of the thing. There’s nothing avant-garde about these podcasts, but there is nevertheless something special when hosts Matthew Berry and Nate Ravitz start talking fantasy football or baseball, or whatever nonsense is on the day’s docket. Though they could get bogged down in clichés or self-promotion—podcasts are podcasts, and podcasts are imperfect—their show was a verbal dance of rants, negativity, and jokes good and bad, alongside the occasional piece of fantasy advice. Somehow it worked, and it did so, remarkably well.
Not long ago, the Fantasy Focus podcasts, Bill Simmons’ B.S. Report, and a stable of niche podcasts were among the best on the internet; ESPN’s podcasting empire ruled the web, and more or less deserved that success. In just a matter of years, though, the dynasty has crumbled; it’s still incredibly popular (according to an ESPN fact sheet, there were 302 million podcast downloads in 2014) but what was once unique, is simply mainstream. Though the Fantasy Focus Football podcast will still feature Berry and has the potential to still be fun and interesting, once Berry and Ravitz signed off as a team for the final time, the Fantasy Focus ceased to be what it once was. It wasn’t only be the end of this podcast, but the end of the ESPN podcasting that the internet—and even many ESPN skeptics—knew and loved.
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In many ways, podcasting is to radio as blogging is to newspapers. Though many podcasts got their starts as ragtag operations—and while most still are—the business is massive. In 2013, the iTunes Store eclipsed one billion podcast subscriptions.
ESPN jumped on the podcasting bandwagon fairly early in the medium’s ascension, and with both feet. The early results were good: their sport-specific podcasts were engaging, and featured unique personalities and insightful analysis. Shows changed over time and personalities were juggled around with varying success. But, in flagship features such as the Football Today podcast with Ross Tucker or the Baseball Today podcast featuring Keith Law, the content remained interesting and the banter witty. More than most anything on ESPN’s television networks, the podcasts featured the many smart people in the Mothership’s employ being smart, and given a comparatively freewheeling setting to do so.
And it worked. The stable of ESPN podcasts also tended to receive high ratings and positive comments from fans whether on iTunes or other mediums. Fans enjoyed these shows though they featured fairly obscure names. Ivan Maisel, Frank Dale, and Joe Mead were not boldface names on the network, but all emerged in ESPN’s podcast firmament.
More importantly, they deserved to. While ESPN’s broadcast product has been converging on shouty, take-heavy mediocrity for a long time, the podcasts kept alive a different, smarter, funnier ESPN that remained mostly under the radar.
It is hard to underscore the nature of these podcasts compared to other programs, but it is important to try to understand it. Picture an ESPN show on television or radio, or for that matter choose almost any show from a major sports network. Now think about how they do things: the words they use, the style of banter, and their analysis.
Now take note of the intro of the January 13th Fantasy Focus Football podcast, when Ravitz read an email from a listener who was explaining a dream he had of Matthew Berry fighting a UFC fighter in the Octagon. The bit went on for a couple of minutes, culminating in Berry attempting to figure out the best way to forfeit if he was ever in that situation. This is not an Around The Horn insta-take; it’s something like improv comedy, and it’s an example of the humor and creativity that podcasting allows.
Or on a less goofy level there is the now-discontinued podcast “Behind the Dish,” in which baseball writer Keith Law was given free reign to share his vast baseball knowledge; it was a haven for those who are sabermetrically inclined, and dense and dorky in a way ESPN’s televised baseball programs could never be. Or take the NBA Today podcast when it was hosted by Ryen Russillo, who ably broke down the NBA Draft in an insightful manner while playing the role of both expert and fan. All of the above were as different from ESPN’s television identity, in every possible positive way, as can be imagined.
The lax nature of the Fantasy Focus or the unique styles of Law and Russillo aren’t for everyone, which is fine and also part of the point. Over the years they brought an air of entertainment and information that transcended most of ESPN’s shows, in large part because they could: as a free medium their audiences could drop in and out, be smaller, smarter, and in other ways different in a way that the TV audience could never be assumed to be.
Even if BABIP and WAR or learning about the second best small forward prospect coming out of Lithuania aren’t for you, there should be a medium somewhere in the great abyss of sports media in which smart people can talk about sports in this sort of way. It would also be nice if they could do so while not being interrupted by having to flash to the Bud Light Play Of The Day or have to listen to three columnists arguing about whether the Cleveland Cavaliers are out of the playoff race after four regular season games.
In retrospect, there was no way that ESPN’s podcasts could survive as what they were.
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The generation of ESPN podcasts discussed above have been on the final stretch for a while. This rapid decline has coincided with the influx of bigger names. ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, formerly Baseball Today, is now hosted by ESPN.com baseball writer Buster Olney; Football Today is now hosted by SportsCenter anchor Robert Flores; NBA Lockdown, formerly NBA Today, now features ESPN basketball analyst Bruce Bowen. The intrusion of these network personalities has, unsurprisingly, homogenized what was once the last redoubt of distinctively voice-driven and strange content on the network. ESPN podcasts used to be unique, and seemed doubly so given the increasingly monolithic ESPN voice. They’ve since been assimilated, and now seem, mostly, like more of the same.
Nowhere has this been more evident than with the Baseball Tonight podcast. The show underwent a complete rebrand; the name, logo and host were changed. It now embodies the echo chamber that defines the rest of the sports media. Olney gives the same canned takes on the podcast as he does on his morning radio hits, in his column and during his ESPN appearances. The impression is of watching ESPN with your eyes closed, and the show is now a mashup of ESPN’s baseball coverage re-packaged in podcast form.
ESPN being ESPN, the subscriptions have kept up. This is a different thing than saying that listeners are excited about it.
“Basically, Baseball Today featured three smart baseball fans talking about baseball in an accessible, intelligent and entertaining way… It was sabermetrically friendly, it was logical and straightforward and it was 100 percent John Kruk-free. If you hadn’t known any better, you wouldn’t have thought it an ESPN production at all, Will Leitch wrote at Sports on Earth in 2013. “It was, of course, too beautiful to live.”
He added, “it’s not the same as the old Baseball Today podcast. It doesn’t feel like a podcast at all: It feels like a television program, only without video.”
Podcasting is a fascinating medium, it truly is. It provided a home for Bill Simmons unique form of analysis of sports (and more) since 2007. The medium’s free flowing and care free personality fit with Simmons in many ways. With last month’s news of Simmons impending departure the fate that has befallen so many could be on the horizon for the B.S. Report, arguably ESPN’s premier podcast. The B.S. Report was a giant, but regardless of whether the show is assimilated into fabric of the rest of ESPN or the show is gone never to be heard from again, its fall marks a post-mortem blow to ESPN podcasting.
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Though podcasting’s popularity has grown over the years, it still pales in comparison to TV and radio. But there’s something liberating in this, and that relatively small reach gives podcasts the freedom to show what sports media can be, and what it should strive to be—something more insightful, entertaining, outwardly intellectual, and strange, and less reliant on cliché and trending-topic flash.
The ESPN brand name may have brought viewers to their podcasts over the years, but it was the analysis, humor, and wit that kept that audience engaged and listening. To a certain extent, this slack has been picked up by a range of podcasts, including those produced by Grantland, whose podcasts—and website, for the most part—mirror the iconoclasm and intelligence of those early ESPN podcasts, and also shelter under the broader Disney/ESPN corporate umbrella.
Podcasts started out small, and still are; against the background of the behemoth that is ESPN they looked even smaller. As they became more popular, new opportunities for advertising and sponsorship became available. So ESPN did what it does, and assimilated the other, working thing into the broader ESPN approach.
This took the shape of changing podcast brands, the addition of bigger name personalities, and the general homogenization of the medium. This is not just an ESPN thing, admittedly—fans want to know things, and mainstream sports media wants to serve them in the broadest, easiest way possible, which is mostly the dumbest. The buzziest platitudes are repeated for as long as they work; the other conversations don’t generate enough heat to matter. On a podcast, those conversations are fine, and fun. On a network that is more about brand than anything else, those conversations don’t matter.
The result is the result. It’s no fun, but in the end it only needs to work for ESPN. Rote is popular and most importantly it sells, so until it doesn’t sit back and try to find the few stalwarts left. Good luck, don’t hold your breath though.
Daniel Stein-Sayles is a college student and writer, he is a contributor to SB Nation’s Amazin’ Avenue and has written about New York City Politics for both City Limits and the Gotham Gazette. He cares about the Mets, politics, and other silly things like that.