Towards the end of the NFL regular season and through the playoffs, former Philadelphia Eagles offensive lineman and current ESPN analyst Jason Kelce started hosting a late-night program. Ratings for the show, titled They Call it Late Night with Jason Kelce, were mixed throughout the five-episode stretch, averaging 383,000 viewers as per live and same-day ratings data from Nielsen Media Research. Welcoming a variety of special guests live from Union Transfer in Philadelphia complete with a live audience and band, the show produced a variety of memorable moments and presented a new angle of coverage amid a pivotal stretch of the year.
Kelce signed a contract with ESPN to contribute on the network, which is reportedly a three-year deal worth $24 million, and he made his debut on Monday Night Countdown throughout the season. Outside of his work with ESPN, Kelce co-hosts the New Heights podcast with his brother and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The show recently inked a deal with Amazon-owned Wondery that grants the platform global distribution and advertising sales rights to the hit digital program. Moreover, he started making weekly guest appearances on SportsRadio 94WIP within the morning show starring Joe DeCamara and Jon Ritchie.
“I think there’s only two really avenues to stay involved in football once you get done playing,” Jason Kelce said on a recent edition of the Fitz & Whit podcast. “It’s either media or coaching. If you don’t do either of those, you have to like completely get away from this thing you’ve put so much time and effort into fully understanding at a high level and that you love, so that’s something I’m still trying to navigate.”
Kelce emphasized that media provides opportunities to communicate insights and knowledge to an audience, helping them better understand different facets of the game. Later in the show, host Ryan Fitzpatrick asked him how he thought the late-night venture went, resulting in Kelce elucidating the value of being able to originate and cultivate the product despite not having any realization towards which he was becoming involved.
“It was incredibly rewarding to create all of that from nothing and to do that with a bunch of people,” Kelce explained. “Like you said, it was an ambitious show. It would have been much easier to just do a straightforward sports talk show, have great panelists on, and we had some phenomenal guests. The comedy bits was something that I’ve always loved about late-night shows and Conan and stuff, and we went for it, and we had an amazing team of writers – a lot of them worked on Conan (O’Brien) – and it was fun to try it.”
Kelce enjoyed seeing how he improved on a weekly basis, comparing it to watching tape when he was still playing to identify his deficiencies and correct the shortcomings. Fitzpatrick averred that athletes are used to criticism and having people coach them but that it seems people are more afraid to offer these opinions in the world of media. Kelce agreed with this point, articulating that it can be difficult to extrapolate the honesty they crave in this setting, and expressed his appreciation for the candor from those involved in the show, especially within scripted content.
“I think that was a process for me to get better at was going scripted, but there are ways that scripted felt more natural, and I think that was a process we ironed out as a show,” Kelce said. “When there were times where it’s like, ‘Okay, we can be scripted here, but we can be a little more ad-libby here,’ but that was something for me that I just had to get reps at and to figure out, ‘Okay, how can we go from the scripted stuff while also still being off the cuff and loose?,’ and it’s hard to be off the cuff and loose unless you’re comfortable and you don’t feel like you’re trying to be a robot a little bit.”
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