On the surface, sports media coverage would appear to be the best it has ever been. ESPN’s First Take, widely considered the premier sports talk show in the country, has received record levels of viewership recently, with a high of 524k daily viewers in October of 2024. The Herd, Fox’s premier sports talk show, crossed a new high of 167k daily viewers in September of 2025. In fact, things are going so well that well-known and polarizing figures like Stephen A. Smith and Colin Cowherd are starting their own personal talk shows and racking up millions of daily views across social media platforms. However, this rise in viewership has nothing to do with an increase in the quality of the output from these networks, as sports media as a whole is producing some of the worst content it ever has.
The lowest common denominator. This is who the major networks like Fox and ESPN are attempting to appeal to when they go on air with their sports talk shows every day. The best example of this can be seen in arguably the most popular and controversial sports commentator in the game today, ESPN’s Stephen A Smith.
After a non-descript basketball career at Winston-Salem State that ended prematurely because of a knee injury, he graduated from the institution with a bachelor’s degree in mass communications in 1991. From there, he began his career as a sports journalist in print media, writing for the New York Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer. His first major role in television came when he began to be featured on ESPN’s NBA Shootaround, now known as NBA Countdown.
Smith’s career really took off when he began to have daily appearances on ESPN’s First Take alongside fellow sports media personality Skip Bayless, who is also controversial in his own right. The show became a massive ratings success in large part due to Smith and Bayless’ knack for making outlandish and boisterous takes that would grab the attention of viewers easily. However, the show’s success would spell a future of doom for viewers in search of high- quality sports television.
Social media also plays a key role in this equation. With the quick 15-60 second length of short form content that lives on Instagram, X, and Tik Tok, all platforms with billions of accounts each, the goal of the major sports networks is to get as many clicks as possible. The easiest way to do that? Loud, boisterous personalities who make claims so outrageous that they are bound to catalyze mass discussions in the comment sections, only furthering the view counts of these videos.
With short form content ruling the world nowadays, it gives Smith and Fox’s Colin Cowherd, another personality known for being outspoken and often wrong in his takes, the platform to dominate sports media coverage. This is reflected in the numbers, as Cowherd’s show “The Herd” is watched for 80 million minutes every month across all social media channels. Smith draws even bigger numbers, as he has a combined 12 million followers across his personal social media accounts, with that figure even excluding the ones of First Take (4.5 M). Each video gets around a million views or higher, and has helped land Smith a $100 million contract extension with ESPN.
Consequently, with so much viewership being dedicated to a small number of personalities who care more about engagement than articulating actual facts, the sports commentators who are actually doing a phenomenal job are underappreciated more than ever. Prominent names that come to mind are Josh Pate and Joel Klatt, both college football analysts who are independent and work for Fox, respectively. Both analysts pour countless hours into watching game film, going to games, engaging with fans, and preparing for their analysis to conceive a product that is based on a level of knowledge that is not demonstrated by either Smith or Cowherd.
While both Klatt and Pate command respectable audiences, with Klatt having close to 300k subscribers on YouTube and Pate having just surpassed 500k, these numbers still do not compare to the viewership that ESPN’s and Fox’s premier programs draw. The issue is that with so many people turning to social media for their entertainment consumption, they prefer short- form videos full of outrageous takes instead of long-form content of analysis.
It’s not all bad, as there are several programs at high-level networks that do a great job of breaking down their sport in both a knowledgeable and entertaining way. Namely, ESPN’s and formerly TNT’s Inside the NBA, composed of NBA legends like Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley, draw tremendous viewership and praise from both fans and critics alike. Fox’s NFL Sunday, composed of Hall of Famers like Terry Bradshaw and Michael Strahan, is one of my personal favorite sports shows and similarly to Inside the NBA, balances knowledgeable analysis with light-hearted fun.
The common theme of what makes sports talk shows great is passion. Joel Klatt was a former college football quarterback and repeatedly states on every one of his podcasts episodes how much he loves the sport. Josh Pate, while not a former college football player, loves the sport so much that he took his show independent in order to “avoid corporate interference,” as he likes to call it, and run his show with the pure intent of sharing his passion with fans. Shaq and Charles Barkley were former players, now Hall of Famers, and love talking basketball not only on air, but even with the people that they interact with every day. Terry Bradshaw and Michael Strahan are long removed from their playing days, but they love discussing the up and coming NFL players of today and comparing them to the best players from their day.
So what’s the solution to this ever-worsening problem? Provide analysts like Klatt and Pate with the national platforms to expand their audiences tenfold. Keep giving programs like Inside the NBA and FOX NFL Sunday the opportunity to do what they do every week. And stop pretending that what guys like Smith and Cowherd do is journalism. Having them on the network is fine, but create a separate category for these guys entitled “sports entertainment,” so that fans like myself won’t click on their videos hoping for actual analysis.
The best work, regardless of profession, comes from the heart. And if you promote people with an actual desire to share their passion with the world, then you will end up with programs that rooted in knowledge and experience, which is exactly what the world needs right now.
