If real estate is all about location, location, location, then life is all about timing, timing timing. For The Athletic and Stadium’s Shams Charania, you might think the timing couldn’t be better. Thanks to COVID-19 hitting the snooze button on the NBA season, the 26 year-old Charania’s contract with both entities ends at the end of the month – smack dab in the middle of the NBA playoffs.
In any other year, “Baby Woj” would have no shortage of suitors for his services because he’s one of the most respected insiders in the business. Now, however, he could become a free agent when millions of people have lost their jobs and sports media executives have begun to examine every facet of the industry in a desperate search to save money during this crisis.
Play-by-play crews are calling games off of TV monitors in a studio. Radio shows and podcasts are being hosted from bedrooms and finished basements across the country. It may simply be a matter of time before a company decides that it can live without a high-priced “insider,” and they wouldn’t be wrong.
The entire world has already been changed forever because of Covid-19, and while its effects on the sports industry are surely the least important of all the reverberations, they will nevertheless be just as permanent. When I was at ESPN in the early 2000s, they would fly different analysts into Bristol from around the country each week, and put them up at one of the many ultra-luxurious hotels in the Bristol, Connecticut area. Why would a company continue to swallow thousands of dollars in airfare and lodging when they’ve been successfully covering sports for months with everyone working remotely?
Professional sports franchises have been paying play-by-play crews to fly around the country in order to broadcast games from the opponent’s stadium. Has the quality of play-by-play dropped off significantly since road teams were calling games from the safety of a local facility? While anyone in the trenches of putting on a show will tell you that having everyone in the same room always leads to a better product, companies the world over have always been willing to sacrifice quality in the name of saving money.
One area that has always forced networks to open their wallets, however, is talent acquisition. Outlets need analysts, and they absolutely have to have insiders. Right?
Not so fast. As technology has changed and teams and players can now communicate directly with fans via social media, the juice that national insiders once had has been squeezed. Most of the content from the big “insiders” these days is actually something a team would release itself a few minutes later. NBC’s Mike Florio has referred to it on the air as “the five minute heads up.”
Take a look at the Twitter timelines of a national insider from any sport. How many of them tweeted or wrote a story about something that a team wouldn’t want people to know about? And while there are exceptions to every rule, do those rare instances justify the cost? The most famous insiders all have salaries that feature multiple commas. How much bang for their buck are networks really getting?
One exception to my blanket statement about national insiders is FOX Sports’ Jay Glazer, who appears to hibernate for most of the year, only to emerge from his cave to break a massive story that changes the NFL season before immediately turning around again and returning to hibernation.
I also keep saying, “national insiders” because I want to draw a clear distinction between the big name people we all know and the local reporters covering a beat. The locals often reveal things teams and players would prefer the public doesn’t know, which is why they’re awesome and I would never criticize them.
Now, I know that the agents of some of these insiders would say, “My guy gets that heads up first,” but here’s a hard truth for them: the only people that care about who breaks news first are other insiders and network executives. The fans don’t care. Hell, they don’t even remember who breaks the story first. When something happens, it appears in their social media feed about eight different times because they follow all the insiders across networks so they don’t miss anything.
When George Kittle agreed to his contract extension with the 49ers last week, the story appeared on my timeline from Matt Maiocco of NBC Sports Bay Area, the NBC Sports Bay Area account itself, Tim Kawakami of The Athletic, Matt Barrows of The Athletic, Niners Nation, Ian Rapoport of NFL Network, Adam Schefter of ESPN, and a ton of other people pointing out that Pardon My Take actually had the story first. And no, I did not put those in any particular order. Furthermore, five minutes after the story hits Twitter all the other insiders confirm it via their own sources, and their networks go with a variation of, “insider X has confirmed that superstar Y has agreed to a deal with team Z.”
So if insiders are mostly passing along announcements that teams and players will make themselves, and fans don’t care or remember which insiders are passing along those announcements, what exactly are networks paying all that money for, again? Unless insiders take a much more investigatory bent towards their jobs, the market for their services could be shrinking.
Sports networks will soon realize that fan bases wouldn’t be any less informed without that five minute heads up. When that happens, executives will realize how much money they could save simply by making one fewer hire.
Rob ‘Stats’ Guerrera is a former columnist for BSM. He has worked as a national radio/TV/podcast producer with the biggest names in the industry on ESPN, NBCSN and DirecTV. Among those he’s worked with include Mike Greenberg, Mike Golic, Colin Cowherd, Dan Patrick, Scott Van Pelt, Ryen Russillo, Mike Florio, Mike Tirico, Kay Adams, and Erik Kuselias. You can find him on Twitter @StatsOnFire or reach him by email at RFGuerrera@gmail.com.
