There have been a lot of stories in recent weeks about what the future holds for Scott Van Pelt. He addressed it all Monday in a conversation with Dan Patrick.
He said that Patrick was one of the few people that can understand and sympathize when he says there is a grind to doing SportsCenter. Van Pelt said he is not itching to leave the show. Instead, he was trying to be realistic about his future when Jimmy Traina asked him how much longer he could see himself hosting the show.
“My contract would run through like ten years of doing it,” Van Pelt said. “Ten years seems like a good time to say, ‘All right, is that the only thing you do? Is that what you do?’ Who knows? Who knows? But look, I love that I get to do this. I still am interested in the things that happen and the stories that happen, and the nights where you get to cover the biggest events feel huge. Then the challenge is on the nights when it doesn’t feel like that, can you still paint the corners? Can you still throw strikes?”
Patrick asked what the truth is behind reports that SVP was going to be the new host of Monday Night Countdown. Richard Deitsch of The Athletic tweeted that the job is Van Pelt’s last week, only to backtrack and say that Van Pelt in the chair is the outcome ESPN wants, but nothing is done yet.
Van Pelt said he didn’t want to be coy. It could happen, but he had more sympathy for athletes that protest a story about them that isn’t accurate.
“It was reported that I was the guy, and other than me not having been offered the job or accepting the job that I haven’t been offered, it was spot on,” he said. “People are congratulating me. It’s very strange. You know, you hear an athlete or somebody in sports say, ‘well, that’s just not true’ and you kind of always think, ‘sure, it is.’ Well, this was a situation where something was reported about me which was not accurate.”
