Over the last several decades at ESPN, Scott Van Pelt has been a familiar face to millions of viewers across different editions of SportsCenter and other franchises. Van Pelt started hosting Monday Night Countdown in addition to his late-night SportsCenter responsibilities last season, and he also hosts a podcast through an ESPN deal with Omaha Productions alongside ‘Stanford Steve’ Coughlin. During the most recent edition of The Varsity podcast, hosted by Puck sports correspondent John Ourand, he described Van Pelt as someone who is on the short list of “needle movers” at ESPN alongside personalities such as Pat McAfee and Stephen A. Smith.
ESPN licensed 235 episodes per year of McAfee’s eponymous sports talk show in a deal reported to be worth $85 million over a five-year term. On top of that, the network has included McAfee as part of the cast of College GameDay for the last two seasons, recently achieving record regular-season consumption averaging 2.2 million viewers per episode. In the morning timeslot, First Take with featured commentator and executive producer Stephen A. Smith has achieved strong ratings and top finishes. Smith, who also appears on NBA Countdown as an analyst, is reportedly in the midst of negotiations for a new contract at ESPN.
With these developments taking place, Ourand was curious to know what Van Pelt thought about what could be available to him in the landscape as he approaches future negotiations. Ahead of officially joining Monday Night Countdown last year, Van Pelt inked a contract extension that is reportedly for four years and nearly $7 million, as reported by then-New York Post sports columnist Andrew Marchand, who now works for The Athletic.
“The old school media that existed were Dan [Patrick] and Keith [Olbermann], and Stuart [Scott] and Rich Eisen, maybe Stuart and me for a little bit,” Van Pelt said. “The tag team of SportsCenter was kind of the pinnacle. Well, it’s a very different time now, so daytime talk and being the CEO of your brand and parceling it out to however many different bidders.”
Van Pelt surmised that Smith could take an approach similar to the NFL in which he allows his brand to be disseminated across many different networks. The league is currently airing games under deals with The Walt Disney Company (ESPN/ABC), Comcast (NBC, Peacock), Paramount Global (CBS, Paramount+), FOX Corporation (FOX), Amazon (Prime Video), Netflix and Alphabet Inc. (YouTube) reportedly worth more than $12 billion per season. If Smith is allowed to do this under a new contract with Disney, Van Pelt averred that he would be interested in asking what it would look like for him.
“I’ve always been pleased with what ESPN has allowed me to do,” Van Pelt said. “Like a decade ago, when they gave me or I earned, however you want to frame it, an opportunity to do SportsCenter in a different way, they’d never done that, right? And so that gave me a chance to explore and try different things, and I think largely it’s worked, and it’s helped create and really further establish my relationship with our audience, so much so that I think we have the ability to do the hardest thing now.”
Referencing Dan Le Batard as an example, Van Pelt emphasized that a number of people in the sports media business have established loyal audiences who will follow them no matter the platform through which they broadcast. Possessing a following of this kind is something Van Pelt discerned as valuable, whether that is to those at ESPN or people outside of the company, and being able to monetize that for both parties.
“I root for Stephen A. the same way I rooted for Pat, the same way I root for everybody in our business, to get the absolute most you can,” Van Pelt said, “and so that’ll be the most interesting thing to me. Not the dollars, because they’ll be staggering, but it’ll be, ‘Where are you doing it and where are you allowed to do it?’”
Van Pelt added that he was allowed to move back to Washington, D.C. after stating that Stephen A. Smith and Mike Greenberg were not working from the ESPN studios in Bristol, but rather at the Seaport District in New York City. ESPN accommodated the request, and he now is able to host SportsCenter from a studio in the area instead of studios in Bristol or Los Angeles.
“I got to go home,” Van Pelt said. “There’s value in that, right? So I’m interested, ‘What is it that the future looks like for the quote-unquote ‘needle movers?,’ and I’m not saying that. If my bosses feel like I am, then that’s great. We’ll have to figure out a way to examine what that means when the time to sit at the table comes, right?”
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