Many professionals who seek to foster careers in sports media often recognize it at a young age and then tailor their college experience towards doing everything possible to gain a foothold in the industry. Whether it is participating on live game broadcasts, producing television shows or writing in a local newspaper, the goal is to reach a point where being hired after graduating is a facile task. Conversely, there are others who know that they have a passion for sports. Yet, they do not immediately forge a path to working professionally because of its plausibility and an exiguous chance at success. Matt Miller can be considered a combination thereof since he wanted to work in football in his youth but did not begin his push to find a niche sector of the industry until his days in college were complete.
At the age of 8, covering the NFL Draft was Miller’s dream. He began compiling draft boards, participating in mock drafts and writing scouting reports. It never dawned on him that most of his peers were not embarking in this practice at the time, nor did all football fans have a vested interest in the annual occasion.
“You know when you’re asked, ‘If money was no object, what would you do?’?,” Miller said. “[My answer] was, ‘I’d write about football.’ It just seemed like the perfect job to be able to analyze teams and players, and then share your opinion and get paid for it.”
Unlike most people’s college experience, Miller did not walk across the stage and receive an undergraduate degree. Instead, he left Missouri Southern State University early upon receiving a lucrative job offer working in customer service marketing, aligning with his focus in business studies. It made more sense for him to make money working professionally than it did to continue to pay tuition.
Simultaneously, he started his own independent football scouting company – New Era Scouting – where Miller focused on outlining football prospects with the hopes of reaching player agents, teams and fans. In fact, Miller aggregated the mailing addresses for as many National Football League general managers as possible and mailed them a copy of his draft guide. Even he is surprised that he received some feedback from various team executives, guiding his future endeavors.
“I think I was able to hone in on evaluating players, but also how to take those evaluations and present them to the public,” he said. “There’s a difference in evaluating players for the general public and evaluating players for an NFL team – or, in my case, I was doing it for the CFL and the Arena League.”
In practicing how to be concise and proffer his opinions to a broad audience, Miller drew inspiration from the work of industry experts, such as Paul Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated, Peter King of NBC Sports, and Chris Mortensen of ESPN. Yet Mel Kiper Jr. of ESPN always stood out to Miller as someone who was working his dream career and a role model on which to engender his future undertakings.
Akin to Miller, Kiper founded his own company while he was in college and moved to cover the NFL Draft for ESPN, appearing on the network since 1984. Through his research and analysis, he aims to provide viewers a comprehensive, yet compendious insight into the world of professional scouting.
“He is this industry,” Miller said of Kiper. “I know there were some other folks that were doing it, but from a TV perspective, he’s the guy that you could always look to of, ‘There’s someone who’s actually doing this for a living.’”
Outside of writing for his high school’s newspaper, Miller had little to no journalistic experience. Therefore, he sought to cultivate his skills by writing for his brand, New Era Scouting.
There is a difference in writing for a generalized audience when compared to creating content for football executives, and Miller had to work to understand how to best appeal to whom he desired to communicate. Creating, maintaining and producing content for the website helped him become a more effective talent evaluator while accentuating his innate ambition.
It positioned him to land a role with Bleacher Report in 2010 and eventually become the most read author in the history of the digital platform. Before taking the job with the brand, however, he had to do his own research as to what it encompassed since he had never previously heard of them. At the time, the brand was five years removed from its inception and gradually garnering space amid a crowded content ecosystem.
“One of the big things was they wanted somebody who was a self-starter and could kind of operate on their own,” Miller said of Bleacher Report. “There weren’t really day-to-day editors checking your work and coming up with assignment ideas. That all came later. It also taught me how to become a journalist – how to come up with story ideas, how to write a headline so that people would want to click on it, how to manage a schedule.”
When Miller was with Bleacher Report as its lead NFL Draft writer, he helped facilitate part of the company’s evolution across various platforms of content production. For example, when the company began experimenting with crafting content specifically for visually-based platforms, he was asked if he could begin appearing and divulging his work in that manner. Then as the popularity of podcasts grew, he paired with Connor Rogers to host their own titled Stick to Football, catalyzed by the success colleagues Chris Simms and Adam Lefkoe had in the medium.
“It was a 30-minute digital show so you had to learn how to write for a show versus writing an article or writing a podcast script,” Miller explained. “Bleacher Report gave me the opportunity to learn how to do a lot of different things and kind of find out what worked and didn’t work.”
Miller left Bleacher Report in 2021. Once he departed the company, he was not sure the best path to take, nor if he ever wanted to work for another brand.
Throughout the course of this transition period, Miller worked fastidiously to cultivate a trusted platform and communicate his developed expertise to an audience. He never completely removed himself from the bonafide mainstream of the industry though, as he appeared on ESPN as a video contributor and spoke about the NFL Draft.
Miller officially joined ESPN on a full-time basis as its year-round NFL Draft analyst in February 2022. As part of the role, he contributes to ESPN’s content across multiple platforms, including regular appearances on shows such as NFL Live and SportsCenter. Moreover, he creates content tailored to ESPN+, the company’s over-the-top subscription service.
The transition from working independently to joining ESPN made things purportedly easier, as the network has what seems like an interminable archive of college football footage and the resources to perform substantive research. In addition to this, the colleagues he has across The Walt Disney Company offer him alternate perspectives.
“There’s a lot of times where I’ll reach out to guys who played in the NFL for a decade and say, ‘Hey, what are your thoughts on this player or this team?,’” Miller delineated. “The networking aspect of it is fantastic.”
As an NFL Draft analyst, the preparation for the event itself is all-encompassing. It’s a process that takes well beyond a calendar year. Even with the 2023 Draft just a few weeks removed, Miller is already amassing a list of players to watch for next year’s draft and collaborating with a variety of sources to ensure he does not miss any key names. Once the season begins, he watches a lot of college football and NFL games and takes notes. Combined with the viewpoints from primary sources, Miller tries to decode the puzzle of how that year’s NFL Draft will play out. His accuracy in being able to do that is one of many determinants that encompass his definition of success.
“It’s kind of a long game of judging your success [in] evaluating players,” Miller said. “Some of it is instant – if there’s a player you like and he gets drafted earlier than anyone else thought they would, I think there’s some validation in that even if it’s a little bit short-lived.”
Miller had never appeared on television during an NFL Draft, but Mel Kiper Jr. pushed for ESPN’s vice president of production Seth Markman to add him to the broadcast. Considering Kiper Jr. was someone from whom Miller drew inspiration when he was younger, that validation left him speechless.
“There’s some expectations [when] the guy who is the godfather of this industry vouches for you and says, ‘Hey, I want him on coverage,’” Miller said. “You really want to not let him down – not only because he is a mentor and the person who started what we do now – but when somebody goes out on a limb for you, you don’t want to mess it up. That was in the back of my head a little bit.”
The NFL Draft attained an unduplicated audience of 54.4 million viewers with an average audience of 6.0 million viewers, a figure up 12% from last year.
Miller appeared on ESPN during the event’s final day. The moment starkly contrasted the first time he covered the event as a credentialed media member from Radio City Music Hall in New York in 2012.
“It was a whirlwind experience,” Miller said. “I had never done anything like that before where you sit down and you’ve seen people do what you’re about to do, but you’ve not done it yourself. I think it took a little bit to get caught up to the rhythm of it.”
With a majority of sports fans viewing the NFL Draft, Miller aimed not to think about the sheer size of the audience. He remembers his son telling him that a lot of people watch the draft, a statement to which Miller replied, “I’d rather not think about it.”
There are a variety of unknowns as it pertains to the NFL Draft, perhaps highlighted by the New England Patriots’ sixth-round selection of quarterback Tom Brady in 2000. The event itself consists of seven rounds, and Miller was on the air for Round 4 through Round 7 on ESPN.
Miller was placed alongside the aforementioned Kiper Jr, along with Todd McShay, Rece Davis and Louis Riddick. It was a colossal achievement for him and a ground on which to build, and he thought about everything he did to reach this pinnacle when he took his seat at the broadcast desk. He was driven to succeed not only because of his love for the game of football, but because of being afraid to fail.
“I felt like once I got to ESPN, I felt like that’s the pinnacle of this career,” Miller said. “I don’t want to let myself down or my family down. I don’t want to let down the people who hired me at ESPN coming off a 10-year run at Bleacher Report and having never appeared on TV outside of some guest hits in places.”
At the same time, the motivation to progress at his craft is driven by an innate competitive drive. There is a cacophony of places to find content, and Miller’s goal is to continue to grow his presence in the time leading up to the NFL Draft. ESPN announced that Miller will return to the airwaves for the 2024 NFL Draft, and many industry professionals are starting to believe he may be the successor to Mel Kiper Jr. once he retires. While he is only penciled in to cover the third day of the event next year, Miller hopes to become a regular presence on ESPN programming and have a chance to join the broadcast for additional time.
“This is what I’ve always wanted to do, and I think about the fact that there are a lot of people just like me who’ve always wanted this job,” Miller said. “You can’t let yourself get lazy or complacent or those people will come catch you and end up taking your spot.”
