When you watch Good Morning Football on NFL Network every weekday morning, Peter Schrager is usually going to be the one that brings you the most information as the insider on the roundtable, but he also learned that it is good to show personality while on the panel as well.
On the latest episode of The Press Box, Bryan Curtis had Schrager on as a guest. Schrager mentioned that in the first year of Good Morning Football, they wanted to turn people that weren’t already known into stars and bring a different feel to the show.
“I’m the schmoozer. I have good relationships around the league,” he said. “Our first season, it was our goal was to make lesser-known players into stars or let’s make the GM’s characters…That was the stuff we were doing. This show really gave me a runway of 3 hours, 5 days a week. You can’t just be doing transactions on TV and looking at your phone, you have to have a little bit of personality too.”
With four voices on the panel every morning, it’s not easy for everyone to be heard compared to the two-person debate shows.
“You see some of these Skip Bayless and Shannon Sharpe or even Stephen A. Smith monologues and you’re like wow, they are talking for 8 minutes straight. That’s what their show is. In our case, we have four different mouths to feed and for it to be a conversation, we need to leave a little wiggle room where I can jump Kay, jump Kyle, and I can push back on Mike where he says something and it’s like, let’s hit that again.”
During the podcast, Schrager talked about his early years of getting into the business, including the time he tried out for Dream Job on ESPN. While the show was looking for the next SportsCenter anchor, it wasn’t something he always wanted to be because he loved writing about sports:
“Al Jaffe, who was running a lot of the talent for ESPN at the time, pulled me aside and was like here’s Howie Schwab, our lead researcher. I feel like you two would be kindred spirits. Howie, to his great credit, was like here are the people you need to know on the .com side, opened some doors, and then it really became a possibility that I have a potential pathway to write about sports.”
