BSM Writers
Have Faith In Bomani Jones And His Audience
“Your audience can handle more than you think your audience can. Your audience just wants entertaining content, and entertaining content can come from a broad range of people”
It was 2006. The Carolina Hurricanes were on their way to the Stanley Cup Finals. Versus, the pre-cursor to NBCSN, carried the games and made a big deal out of just how into hockey Raleigh had become.
Bomani Jones lived eleven miles west of Raleigh in Durham. He was writing for ESPN’s Page 2 while attending grad school. Where he was, not only was there not the hockey fever the national media was describing, he never even noticed the games on at bars when he would go out at night. Like any good writer, Bomani turned that into content.
At that time, I was hosting the morning show at 96 Rock in Raleigh. Our sister station, an oldies station called Y102.9, was the team’s flagship, so most of the ra ra stuff fell on us. I saw Bo’s article and knew we had to get him on air. That was the beginning of a friendship that has lasted 14 years. I think it was also probably the last time we talked about hockey. That friendship, I would guess, is the reason he agreed to appear on a panel at the BSM Summit in New York this week.
I wasn’t the only one that called Bomani to talk about that column in 2006. Adam Gold and Joe Ovies were hosting the afternoon show at what was then 850 the Buzz. That was Bo’s first exposure to a sports radio audience.
“Joe Ovies called me and said ‘we want to get you in studio on this’ and then Adam Gold found out I lived in town and was like ‘Okay, we need to have this guy in more.'”
For a guy that is as smart and thinks as quickly as Bomani Jones does, it would be easy to think talking about sports was a lifelong ambition.
“Nope. Never considered it even for a moment,” he says when I ask if that in studio appearance was the first step towards one of his goals.
Bomani eventually went on to host shows on 620 the Bull in Raleigh and Durham, the Score in Toronto, and ESPN Radio. Now though, his audio content is off the airwaves and on the internet. That is why I wanted him to be on stage at the Summit.
Bomani is smart. He is creative. His takes come from consuming diverse sources and considering the points laid out in front of him. Radio may not be hurting necessarily, but the national sports talk scene is a lot less interesting without him. As his television show High Noon was about to launch, Bo realized that if he wanted to keep doing The Right Time, it would have to move out of afternoon drive on ESPN Radio and into the podcasting realm.
“It was just the time constraints that came up when the television show started. Three hours per day, five days per week of radio. I didn’t really realize until I stopped how consuming it was and how much energy it took,” he told me.
When Bomani speaks about why he moved away from radio at the BSM Summit on Wednesday morning, one thing that will undoubtedly come up is the lack of diversity on sports radio. He told me that not only did it effect the way programmers looked at him, it made some of them skeptical of his content choices.
“Program directors get so obsessed with programming to who they think their median audience is: someone middle aged and usually white. What has always frustrated me about radio programmers is they don’t have much faith in their audience’s ability to deal with somebody that is not like them.
“I swear, I have seen enough to indicate this to me, man. Your audience can handle more than you think they can. Your audience just wants entertaining content, and entertaining content can come from a broad range of people. Now, you do need someone that can relate to the audience and understands where they come from, but I could relate to those audiences through shared experiences. Me being black and them being white didn’t mean that we didn’t have things in common, and I think that a lot of programmers struggle to recognize that can be the case.”
With The Right Time podcast, Bomani has found a place for his audience to get his show exactly how he envisions it.
“Since it’s an opt-in product, we get a lot more flexibility on what it is that we can do,” he says. “Part of what I think makes me good as a radio product is the ability to go and do a bunch of different stuff and talk about different things that maybe aren’t exactly in sports, but are tangentially connected. Maybe it has nothing to do with sports. Now we can do that on a podcast, because we aren’t worried about somebody scanning the dial on a sports station, hearing a tech story and wondering ‘what am I doing here?’ With a podcast, they know what they’re doing there.”
That audience has a potential ceiling in Bomani’s eyes though. That is why it was so important the show came out of the gate strong and maintained a consistent level of quality when it transitioned away from being a radio show. With podcasting, Bomani doesn’t have the advantage of catching the attention of someone just scanning the dial.
“You really really need the first people who listen to love it. They can’t just like it. They have to be out here telling everybody ‘Man, this is a great show’ every time you send it out.”
Make no mistake though, Bomani Jones doesn’t hate radio. He isn’t the type of guy to tell you radio is dying. In fact, he was quick to tell me that he still considers himself “in many ways, a tried and true radio dude.”
That is why, in addition to reconnecting with old friends, Bomani has a list of people he is excited to meet and hear from at the BSM Summit in New York. He speaks glowingly of Pat McAfee. The duo share an agent but haven’t really interacted very much, so he is looking forward to getting some face time with another ESPN star.
And then, there’s the Sports Pope.
“I just want to see Mike Francesa in the flesh,” he says laughing. “I’ve never met Mike Francesa. What he is is your standard local radio guy. It’s just his local has 20 million people. I am really fascinated by the idea of that and how you sustain that.”
Radio still, very much matters in the eyes of Bomani Jones. He even says if all things were equal, he would still be doing a radio show. “No question.”
It’s not that Bomani doesn’t believe in the digital space. He will be the first to acknowledge that podcasting isn’t just the future. It is the present for a large audience. Maybe in said future radio won’t have the impact it once did, but in 2020 radio matters, particularly in the sports world.
“I think about some of the long, flowing things people have written about Dan Le Batard’s radio show. They aren’t doing that if that’s just a podcast,” Bomani says of the praise heaped on his former TV partner. “Radio still carries a caché. It still has that intimacy. To me, the best part of radio will always be the connection with the people that listen to you.”
When Bomani talks on Wednesday about why he chose to move away from radio, it won’t be with animosity or bitterness. This is a guy that clearly loves the medium and the format. He just wants to see the voices we don’t hear from enough get a microphone and room to grow and thrive. Creating that environment and improving the sports radio landscape is something he says is “hugely worth the fight.”
Demetri Ravanos is the Assistant Content Director for Barrett Sports Media. He hosts the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas. Previous stops include WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC. You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos and reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
BSM Writers
Robert Griffin III Wants to Tell Your Story the Right Way
“Even if I do know you personally, I’m not going to bring that to the broadcast because that’s not my job.”
During last season’s VRBO Fiesta Bowl, Robert Griffin III was part of ESPN’s alternate telecast at field level alongside Pat McAfee. Suddenly, the Heisman Trophy winner took a phone call. Once he hung up the phone, Griffin divulged that his wife had gone into labor and proceeded to sprint off of the field to catch a flight. An ESPN cameraperson documented his run and jubilation as he returned home to welcome his daughter, Gia, into the world. It encapsulated just what motivates Griffin to appear on television and discuss football, and why he is one of ESPN’s budding talents with the chance to make an impact on sports media and his community for years to come.
“This was an opportunity for me to go out and be different in the way that the media covers the players and truly get to the bottom of telling the players’ stories the right way,” Griffin said. “I look at this as an opportunity to do that.”
Griffin was a three-sport athlete as a student at Copperas Cove High School, and ultimately broke Texas state records in track and field. In addition to that, he played basketball and was the starting quarterback for the school’s football team as a junior and senior, drawing attention from various schools around the country. He ended up graduating high school one semester early and quickly became a star at Baylor University in both football and track and field.
Robert Griffin III’s nascent talent was hardly inconspicuous, evidenced by being named the 2008 Big 12 Conference Offensive Freshman of the Year and then, three years later, the winner of the Heisman Trophy. In the end, he graduated having set or tied 54 school records and helped the program to its first bowl game win in 19 years.
Ultimately, he transitioned to the NFL in a career with many trials and tribulations, but through it all, he never lost his sense of persistence. Nearly a decade later, he returned to college, but this time as a member of the media covering the game from afar. Unlike a majority of former players though, Griffin did not formally retire from playing football when inking a broadcasting contract with ESPN.
“I haven’t retired yet at all,” he said. “I tell everyone that asks me the question that I train every day [and] I’m prepared to play if that call does come. I’ve had some talks with teams over the past two years; just nothing has come to fruition.”
While Griffin’s focus as a broadcaster is undeniable, he never thought about seriously pursuing sports media until his broadcast agent pushed him to do so. He was urged to take an audition at FOX Sports. Griffin broke down highlights and called a mock NFL game alongside lead play-by-play announcer Kevin Burkhardt. He was not prepared for that second part, but impressed executives and precipitously realized a career in the space may not be so outlandish after all.
Griffin then moved to ESPN where he experienced a similar audition process, this time calling a game with play-by-play announcer Rece Davis. Once the audition concluded, it was determined that Griffin would not only begin working in the industry, but that he would be accelerated because of his ability to communicate in an informative and entertaining style.
As a player, he saw the way media members covered teams – sometimes bereft of objectivity – and therefore saw assimilating into the industry as a chance to change that. Now, he is focused on telling the stories of the players en masse while being prepared to pivot at a moment’s notice.
ESPN’s intention was to implement Griffin on its studio coverage, but once executives heard him in the broadcast booth, the company had a palpable shift in its thinking. He was told he was ready to go out into the field and start calling games immediately, something of a surprise to him. FOX Sports felt similarly. This led to a bidding war between the two entities, which ultimately concluded with Griffin inking a contract with ESPN. He appeared over its airwaves plenty of times as a player, and even participated on a variety of studio shows in 2018 where he was almost permanently placed on NFL Live. This time around though, Griffin was suddenly preparing to work with Mark Jones and Quint Kessenich on college football games. He did not have time to consider the implications of the decision, instead diving headfirst into the craft and remaining focused on what was to come with producer Kim Belton and director Anthony DeMarco at his side.
“These guys took me under their wing, and I’m beyond indebted to them for that,” Griffin said of his colleagues. “They taught me everything that I know about the industry. They taught me everything I know about how to present things to the masses to where it can be easily digestible. They’ve allowed me to allow my personality to shine through.”
Demonstrating his personality was a facet of his makeup Griffin felt was inhibited by playing professional football, but he knows it would have been considerably more difficult to attain a chance to cover the game had he not laced up his cleats. Calling college football games with Jones accentuated his comfort in the booth because of Jones’ adept skill to appeal to the viewers and penetrate beyond the sport.
“He has the way to connect different generations of listeners to hear what he’s saying and perceive it in the same way,” Griffin said. “To me, that’s what we all strive to do in this industry is to be able to find the connective tissue between the fan who is 60 or 70 years old, and the fan who’s in their late teens or early 20s.”
From the beginning, everyone told Griffin to be himself and not adopt an alternate persona in front of the camera. That advice has guided him as he approaches his third year working in the industry.
“It is so hard to maintain a character or try to be someone that you’re not, but if you are who you are every single day, then every time you show up on camera you will be that person,” Griffin said. “I’ve made sure that when I stepped foot in front of that camera, I was going to be myself.”
Griffin identifies his style as pedagogical to a degree, critiquing players as if he was coaching them on the sidelines. He will never look to penetrate beyond football with his criticism, as drawing conclusions and using unrelated parlance could be viewed as indecorous. In short, Griffin III knows what it means to represent ESPN.
“We’re not a gossip website. We’re supposed to be critically acclaimed, prestigious journalists, and at the end of the day, that’s how I try to approach the job that I do. That’s why I got into the business – because I felt like there was a little of that going on, especially during my career, so I would never do to somebody else what was done to me.”
Over the course of his NFL career, Griffin was subject to immense criticism that went significantly beyond the gridiron. For example, sports commentator Rob Parker suggested that Griffin was not fully representative of the Black community and proceeded to question if he was a “cornball brother.” The incident resulted in Parker receiving a 30-day suspension from ESPN, and after he defended his comments and blamed First Take producers in a subsequent interview, the network decided not to renew his contract.
“My goal as a member of the media is to tell players’ stories the right way, and if I don’t know you personally, I’m never going to make it personal,” Griffin said. “Even if I do know you personally, I’m not going to bring that to the broadcast because that’s not my job.”
In addition to broadcasting college football games with Jones on ESPN and ABC, he also appears on-site for Monday Night Countdown, the network’s pregame show leading up to Monday Night Football. Making the decision to add NFL coverage to his slate of responsibilities meant that Griffin would be able to tell more stories and utilize his knowledge of players during their collegiate careers to enhance the broadcast.
The energy that he felt attending tailgates and interacting with fans at the college level gave him a unique skill set to translate to the NFL side, leading him to present the production team with an unparalleled idea for Week 1. He wanted to race Taima the Hawk, the live game mascot for the Seattle Seahawks who flies around Lumen Field prior to the start of each home game. It was an outlandish idea, but one that made sense for television because of the visual appeal it can present.
“If you know anything about hawks, they can fly up to 120-140 miles per hour, so they’re like, ‘There’s no way he’s going to beat this hawk in a race, but we’ll do it,’” Griffin said. “To that crew’s credit, they never once balked at any of the creative ideas that I brought to the table because they want to try different things and be exciting and have fun on the show.”
Griffin ended up winning the race, commencing the new season of Monday Night Countdown with immediate excitement before the Seahawks’ matchup against the Denver Broncos. He thoroughly enjoyed his first year on the show and having the chance to work alongside Suzy Colber, Adam Schefter, Booger McFarland, Steve Young, Larry Fitzgerald and Alex Smith.
“They always tell me, ‘Hey, anything you’re not comfortable with, you just let us know and we won’t do that thing,’” Griffin said of the show’s producers. “My answer always back to them is, ‘Well, I won’t know if I’m uncomfortable with it if I don’t try.’”
While Griffin had what looked like a seamless assimilation into the broadcasting world, he had a difficult moment when using a racial slur on live television in discussing Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts. The clip quickly gained traction across the internet, and Griffin issued an apology on his Twitter account for using the pejorative language and claimed that he misspoke.
“I was shocked that it came out in the way that it did, and I immediately jumped on it and apologized because there’s no need to deny,” he said. “You messed up. You move forward, and I think that’s the easiest way to get over those types of things and to get back on your feet.”
The football season at both the college and professional level is undoubtedly a grind, and it requires a combination of dedication, passion and persistence few people possess. Robert Griffin III has garnered the reputation of being an “overpreparer,” often partaking in considerably more information than necessary to execute a broadcast. The information he consumes and conclusions he draws combined with his experience at both levels has cultivated him into a knowledgeable analyst who makes cogent, intelligible points on the air.
“I over-prepare for everything, and 70% of the information that I soak in going into a game or going into a broadcast for Monday Night Countdown, I don’t use because there’s just not enough air time,” Griffin III said. “There’s not enough opportunities to talk on it all.”
At the same time, he makes a concerted effort to make the most of his time with his family and separate himself from the field, engaging in activities including playing ping pong, going to the movies and supporting his children. He also embarks in charity work through his RG3 Foundation and strives to teach his daughters the importance of giving back. The mission of the nonprofit foundation is to discover and design programs for underprivileged youth, struggling military families and victims of domestic violence, and it has made a significant impact since it was launched in 2015.
“Trying to end food insecurity; making sure that our under-resourced youth have access to the things that they need just to survive – talking about food, clothes, books, the ability to learn [and] putting on these after-school programs,” Griffin elucidated in describing the organization’s mission. “We want to have an impact on our community. We mean that with everything in us and have shown that to be the true case of why we do this.”
Griffin’s wife, Grete, serves as the executive director of the foundation and also runs her own fitness business. Staying physically and mentally in shape is something they actively try to accomplish in their everyday lives, and lessons they are passing down to their daughters.
“I’m 33 years old right now, so if I want to continue to train every single day, I can do that for the next 10 years if I need to,” Griffin said. “Not taking hits and being physically fit is also a good thing for your own health, which is something me and my wife are extremely passionate about.”
Although his experience is in playing football and working in sports media, Robert Griffin III does not believe in limiting himself and would consider exploring opportunities outside of sports and entertainment. He wants to become the best broadcaster possible no matter where he is working in the industry and continue finding new ways to be distinctive en masse.
“We’re storytellers,” he said. “We’re here to break down things [and] to tell people a story the right way; things that people are interested in, and that expands across all media levels. We’re not closing the door on anything from that standpoint.”
While he was playing in the NFL, Griffin dealt with a variety of injuries that ultimately kept him off the football field and made it difficult to display his talents. Ranging from an ACL tear, shoulder scapula fracture and hairline fracture in his right thumb, staying healthy was a challenge for him over the time he played in the NFL.
Through surgeries and rehabilitation, he learned how to face and overcome these challenges. It has shaped him into the broadcaster and person he is today as he looks to set a positive example to aspiring football players and broadcasters everywhere.
“The eight-year career that I was able to have thus far didn’t come without roadblocks in the way [and] didn’t come without adversity. Learn from the adversity that you go through and learn from all the things and the lessons that you have that sports teaches you, and then go be able to present that to the masses.”
Derek Futterman is a contributing editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Sports Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, find him on Twitter @derekfutterman.
BSM Writers
Pac-12 Pushing Enhanced Access, Deion Sanders Reeks of Desperation
What good is enhanced access for TV broadcasts or the star power of Coach Prime if those game telecasts aren’t seen?
Ian Casselberry is a sports media columnist for BSM. He has previously written and edited for Awful Announcing, The Comeback, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, MLive, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation. You can find him on Twitter @iancass or reach him by email at iancass@gmail.com.
Ryan Brown is a columnist for Barrett Sports Media, and a co-host of the popular sports audio/video show ‘The Next Round’ formerly known as JOX Roundtable, which previously aired on WJOX in Birmingham. You can find him on Twitter @RyanBrownLive and follow his show @NextRoundLive.