The Peak Banality of Sports Talking Heads
Stephen A. Smith and Pat McAfee are part of a bigger problem
During the NBA Finals, I used a trick I learned from countless dads when I was growing up: I muted the game I was watching and turned up the radio play by play instead, three-second delay be damned. I did it because I really like how Tyler Murray and Monica McNutt call the games, but also with tensions running high, I got into a conspiratorial mindset that the national announcers were anti-Knicks. It played into the larger, Fox Mulderesque idea that the league, refs, and that viral “Air Corgi” were all working together to make sure the Spurs won, Wemby was crowned as the NBA’s new king, and the series was stretched out as long as possible to maximize profits. Of course, that didn’t happen. Despite what the losing teams all said in the end, the Knicks were the better team since they hoisted the Larry O’Brien Trophy at the end of the whole thing.
Losing teams being bitter and trying to talk up analytics are one thing—although, Victor Wembanyama went from being the future king to the poster child for sore losers in just five games—but the NBA Finals and its aftermath have highlighted one of the biggest problems in professional sports with the continued consolidation of broadcast companies and networks paying big bucks to talking heads who are mostly good at just talking shit that will get people angry. Sports talk, like political “news” shows, has taken a page from aughts-era online media and has a lot of people saying things that might drive engagement. ESPN and whatever other places you can go to if you want to see people “talk sports” all use clickbait tactics now, except it’s in the form of bite-sized videos that can be shared on YouTube or Instagram of people like Stephen A. Smith or Dave Portnoy talking nonsense.
Shows like First Take, Wake Up Barstool, or The Pat McAfee Show offer almost nothing of substance. They’re all basically Fox News programs, but about sports. The big names like Smith, Portnoy, McAfee, and whenever some network gets desperate for a familiar face again, Skip Bayless, get paid a lot of money to just talk shit. They’re almost always wrong, and, maybe even worse, they air their biased opinions to millions. The formulas of almost every modern sports talk show is get some dudes who act really macho to talk about sports they almost likely never played competitively, throw in one or two retired athletes who might bring a little experience into the mix, maybe add a woman—I always assume there’s somebody in the meetings for these shows who points out “representation matters! Especially for ratings!”—and that’s the basic formula. Nothing on these shows counts as news, and in terms of opinions, most of the stuff you hear is about as valid as the dreck Pamela Paul wrote in her op-eds when the Times kept her around likely to finish out her contract instead of firing her for doing a bad job as the Book Review editor.
Portnoy is the one who tends to get the most hate. His whole Boston tough guy schtick, support of Donald Trump, and the sexual assault allegations from a few years ago make him exactly the sort of person people who don’t even care about sports (or pizza, for that matter) love to hate on. He walks, talks, and looks like a human hair plug, and in terms of what he brings to the table when talking sports, he’s biased for his hometown teams, and that torpedoes any chance of getting even small nuggets of wisdom on things happening across the NBA or MLB. He doesn’t come off as an especially heady guy, and I suppose that’s part of his appeal to a big part of his audience. The one thing I’ll say he’s got going that a lot of the other sports talk people of the day are playing catchup on is he’s done a good job making it at least seem like he’s not a corporate shill company man type. His fanbase consider him “real” compared to the rest of the pack, and he’s built his empire while other, older ones crumble. That’s at least interesting to witness in real time when I’m able to strip away personal opinions or biases—but I can only do that for so long before I feel myself getting dumber listening to him babble on about whatever.
The rest of the pack is even worse. I can’t make heads or tails on McAfee, and know more about him from watching him show up on WWE as a commentator who brought nothing to the table except adding an interesting, chaotic, off-the-cuff style that I’m sure gave the people in back nightmares. The guy has Guy Fieri, like he’s really hoping to please everybody and make sure the masses tune in to see him, but it doesn’t take much to see through his I don’t have interest in politics schtick. Not wanting to talk about politics is one thing, and, honestly, I’m fine with more people doing that. The discourse is way too toxic and we’re drowning in misinformation and horrible takes—but you don’t need multiple degrees to figure out what a guy like McAfee believes and supports
Right now, McAfee and Portnoy are the future of sports talk. Stephen A. Smith, on the other hand, keeps looking more like a dinosaur unaware of the comet that’s approaching with each passing day. The guy gets nothing right, and his recent groveling at the feet of Jalen Brunson on television may have been designed to show humility, but it only proved that the guy just talks shit. If he just came out and admitted that he’s paid $40 million a year to be an entertainer, basically the sports talk version of a midcard wrestling heel who just serves to get the crowd riled up, then it would be another story. Instead, he’s just a blowhard. Just some rich guy who mastered being the loudest guy in the room, intelligent answers be damned. (It could be worse, I suppose. He could be Skip Bayless. I shudder to think what Faustian bargain that guy made to have gotten this far and made so much money.)
Watching these shows is a mind suck, but there’s also something nefarious about the way professional sports leagues want fans engaging with this sort of stuff. Guys like Adam Silver and Roger Goodell would love nothing more than to have sports fans subsist on a diet of pure filler, mental junk food that has them doing anything but thinking even a little critically about the culture and business of sports. The deterioration of how sports are reported on and written about is something that’s been happening for decades. The problem was perfectly diagnosed by Pat Jordan in a 2008 piece for Slate:
Writers and fans alike no longer get to know the object of their affections in a way they did years ago. Athletes see us as their adversaries, not as allies in their achievements. They are as much celebrities as rock stars and Hollywood actors are. They live insular lives behind a wall of publicists, agents, and lawyers. They don’t interact with fans or writers. They mingle only with other celebrities at Vegas boxing matches, South Beach nightclubs, and celebrity golf events, all behind red-velvet VIP ropes. We can only gawk at them as if at an exotic, endangered species at a zoo.
Sports might not seem as important as politics, but the way teams, games, and athletes are written about today tends to be about as controlled as a Trump press conference. The leagues, owners, and agents want you to see things one way, and they’ve figured out a perfect formula for that; talking heads like Smith, McAfee, and Portnoy play a big part in that by the way they distract fans from having to really think about sports. They are entertainment without being entertaining, and it further cheapens the experience for people who really love and try to think about sports. Sure, every now and then we’ll be blessed with a Wright Thompson profile, or an employee-owner site like Defector will rise from the ashes of a once-great site like Deadspin, but those things are few and far between. David Remnick filing 3 A.M. dispatches after each Knicks game for The New Yorker was fun, and his use of a Roger Angell quote harkens back to a time when the magazine dedicated some pages to sports every now and then, but Remnick likely wrote those Knicks pieces because he’s the boss and he wanted to. I’m glad he did, and I really enjoy the sports pieces Louisa Thomas writes for the magazine, but sports journalism across the board has been gutted to the point where it feels like a nice little treat we, the New Yorker print and digital subscribers, can have from time to time.
It’s easy to be dismissive and say sports journalism shouldn’t matter with everything else going on in the world, yet, the way it has been turned into either having the option of Smith-McAfee-Portnoy talking heads pap, or an extra option you can pay for a la the New York Times with the Athletic, is part of a bigger problem throughout all of American journalism. Reading about politics, art, music, or books, from smart and relatively unbiased writers is a thing you have to pay extra for if you want it—the same goes with sports. The low-hanging fruit and empty calorie talk you get on TV, the announcers reminding you that every little part of the game has been monetized to the point where a football team punting the ball away could be brought to you by DraftKings or some A.I. company is free, but anything else you need to sign up for. I don’t know what it means for the future of sports that the people who are employed to publicly talk about them by media companies are doing an act more than actually informing people or bringing anything compelling to the table, but it does make me wonder what peak banality will look like, and if we’ll ever move past it.