As Sal Paolantonio walks into a football locker room, he places his notebook in his pocket and tries to forge connections with athletes, coaches and executives by having natural and authentic conversations. Rather than congregating among the cadre of journalists striving to gain insight from star players, he likes to reside near the back of the room and find offensive lineman and defensive players who are sometimes unoccupied at their locker. Talking to them on background before asking permission to interview them for pieces to air on ESPN platforms is a formula he has found to engender success over the years rather than ambushing them with a microphone and camera.
Working as a national correspondent for NFL coverage on ESPN, Paolantonio aims to show up to every assignment prepared, conveying professionalism and not being afraid to make his reporting personal for the audience. Paolantonio has been articulating salient information developing in real time surrounding the sport for several decades, and he executes the role with poise and aplomb based on principles gleaned from his multifarious portfolio.
“The real estate is shrinking on TV for reporters, so what you have to say has to be concise, it has to be very clear and it has to be compelling, and that sometimes is just through a gimmick,” Paolantonio said. “You show a football, you show a cleat, you show a newspaper headline – I like to do that all the time. Television is show and tell, and so I kind of learned that skill sort of on the fly.”
While viewers yield the final product of Paolantonio’s reporting, a concealed facet of the job is in establishing and maintaining invaluable connections with personnel. Throughout his broadcasting career, Paolantonio has allotted time to author handwritten thank-you notes to every interview subject and person who helps him in the role. The distinctive messages are crafted on ESPN stationery and delivered by mail, a vintage practice rooted in kindness and appreciation that has elicited plaudits from recipients. One of these occurrences took place shortly after New York Giants defensive end Michael Strahan collected a pick six in overtime to defeat the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 8 of the 1999 NFL season.
“He was running back from the end zone and I was on the field with a camera, and he stopped and said in front of everybody, ‘I’m talking to Sal because he wrote me a thank-you note,’” Paolantonio explained. “That happened, and Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, many guys have said to me, ‘I’m only talking to you because you wrote me a thank-you note.’”
Paolantonio seeks to gather intel, interviews and other original content to create enterprise stories that generate interest and supplement NFL on ESPN coverage. With the Eagles in contention and vying for a second Super Bowl championship in seven years, he primarily covered the NFC East team during the year. Paolantonio had the chance to conduct exclusive interviews with players while also collaborating with other network field reporters from around the country as a regular presence on Sunday NFL Countdown. The show recently completed its first year under new host Mike Greenberg and averaged 1.34 million viewers per episode, indicative of an 8% rise from last season.
“We have a great cast, we’ve got some fantastic producers,” Paolantonio said. “I thought the show was great in every respect – I thought it had a lot of snap, crackle, pop [with] a lot of information. I love the way the guys break down film, [and] I love being part of the show.”
As the football world descended on New Orleans, La. for Super Bowl LIX, Paolantonio noticed a continued exponential proliferation of media outlets covering the championship event, but he arrived prepared to fulfill his role and serve the audience. While on the ground, he discovered new storylines around the game and reported on the synergy among the team, aligned in its goal of winning the league championship.
“[It] felt like it was unfinished business from Super Bowl LVII and they wanted to get it done this time, and talking to them prior to the game about just how much it wasn’t about emotion, it was about determination,” Paolantonio discerned. “I thought that was pretty clear – the attitude they had going into the game from the top down.”
There were many ESPN reporters assigned to provide coverage pertaining to the game, several of whom have reporting presences within print and audiovisual mediums. Over the years getting to know and collaborate with many journalists, including Chris Mortensen, John Clayton, Brooke Pryor and Mike Reiss, has paid invaluable dividends in his profession. Even though there are occasions when Paolantonio will break news, the preponderance of reporting on transactions, injuries and other league matters is generally communicated by ESPN senior NFL insider Adam Schefter.
“I would always let him go first,” Paolantonio said. “I think that’s really important that the audience hears one voice, but if he said to me, ‘Hey, this is your piece, you do this,’ and a person like Adam is extraordinarily good at sharing and has been terrific.”
Paolantonio has been the host of NFL Matchup for the last 20 years, a studio-based program produced by NFL Films that explores fundamentals through astute film study, esoteric conceptualization and perspicacious forecasting. The show tapes new episodes every week from Mount Laurel, N.J., and it has endured through several iterations, the current of which includes analysts Greg Cosell and Darius Butler. During his debut on the show in 2004, Paolantonio started to watch film with former quarterback Ron Jaworski and started to recognize deficiencies in his football knowledge.
“I started with Merrill [Hoge] and Jaws, and [they] could be somewhat free-wheeling and the interplay between them,” Paolantonio recalled. “I always like to say my job at that time was to make sure that I landed the plane after 30 minutes and to keep them out of trouble between the two of them, but they had great personalities [and] had been together for years before I got on the show.”
Paolantonio feels that hosting NFL Matchup has made him a better reporter, granting him a cognizance of the sport extrapolated through synthesizing film and conversing with those who have tangible playing experience. The program attained its best regular-season audience since 2019 with an average of 320,000 viewers per episode, representative of a 7% year-over-year increase. Although the personalities on the show have changed, the format has stayed relatively consistent and looks to meet audience expectations of detailed film pieces and extensive breakdowns.
“When you watch it and you do study it and you do begin to understand what goes into NFL practice and NFL plays and how to do them correctly and how to correct them when they’re wrong, you really begin to understand what players go through in a weekly basis,” Paolantonio articulated, “and you get a greater understanding for the game and for what the players have to do, the challenges that they have in order to get it right and stay professional football players over the long term.”
Paolantonio recognizes ESPN coverage of the NFL spans beyond his work and is able to effectively work with others on a team. The network has brought him to its Bristol headquarters to speak with NFL Nation reporters about the job, and he also occasionally teaches at a scholastic broadcasting school in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Moving into sports reporting in the first place was a decision made for him by an editorial team at The Philadelphia Inquirer led by executive editor Gene Roberts.
In an effort to produce stellar journalism with new perspectives on matters, he often experimented with beat reporters and ended up transitioning to the Philadelphia Eagles beat after reporting on two presidential campaigns and a mayoral race. Upon becoming an Eagles beat reporter, he quickly thrived in the role by leveraging the skillset gleaned through other ventures.
“During the week of the football season, you have a gameplan that you put together, and that gameplan is pretty secretive, and it’s the same thing as covering a political campaign,” Paolantonio said. “You have a gameplan, you put it together, you try to keep it a secret from your opponent, and it’s your job as a reporter to sort of unearth what’s really going on in the political campaign, as well as during the week leading up to a football game, so there’s a lot of similarities.”
While he did not struggle to network or develop sources, the difficulty was in getting people to trust him against veteran reporters in the space. Drawing an analogy to the job, he depicted the work as visiting a neighbor’s kitchen, sitting down and asking them to divulge all their secrets to later be revealed to the masses. The plight therein is in obtaining an invitation to come back, but the inexorable pursuit of accurate, verifiable information is an assignment towards which journalists remain staunch.
“You have to go into the locker room and ask these players and these coaches to tell you things they probably don’t want to share with the world and then go back the next day and do it all over again and be welcomed back there,” Paolantonio said. “It’s not an easy thing to do.”
Paolantonio is thankful to the Eagles organization for allowing him to report from the NovaCare Complex as he continues to work in the region, and he has covered four trips to the Super Bowl for the franchise. Whenever he travels around the country, primarily on the east coast, he contacts reporters and other personnel in the locales to collect information and ultimately benefit the audience. Paolantonio has become closely associated with the league and network, never taking an appearance on any show for granted and staying on air virtually until kickoff with Sunday NFL Countdown.
“I was given a lot of chances to do some features this year that were kind of interesting,” Paolantonio said, “and I’ve got to tell you, just following the ups and downs of the Eagles season, which was in the news quite a bit, that was enough.”
Even though Paolantonio has been with ESPN since 1995, the luster of appearing on platforms owned and operated by the venerated broadcast entity has not faded. Every time he travels to a game, he looks to obtain at least one piece of information that no one else possesses, something that he acknowledges has never been harder to achieve. Embedded in a panorama endowed with an assortment of content creators, the specific platforms of dissemination notwithstanding, Paolantonio holds immense credibility with a substantial track record. In spite of that, he does not equip highfalutin logic or display a condescending attitude towards the viewing public.
“I enjoy the interaction with fans for a lot of reasons,” Paolantonio said. “They’ll always ask me a question, like, ‘What’d you think of the game?,’ and I go right back at them and ask them what they thought because I don’t believe that I have a monopoly on what’s important.”
Less than two weeks after the Eagles hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy victorious as Super Bowl champions, Paolantonio was still jotting down thank-you notes and mailing them to impart his unfeigned gratitude to those affiliated with the game. As the football offseason commences with conventional activities such as the NFL Scouting Combine, free agency and the NFL Draft, he remains invigorated and energized to cover the league and its teams. With an avidity towards consumers and the league, Paolantonio is not yet ready to figure out why he keeps going as he remains part of a media rights partnership dating back 45 years.
“My goal is to make sure that the audience responds positively to what I’m saying or reporting on TV or radio,” Paolantonio averred. “I think that’s the most important thing, and to do the job the right way”
Derek Futterman is a former associate editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. Find him on X @derekfutterman.
