Could “Mind the Game” Change the Way Sports Are Covered?

There comes a time in every sportswriter’s career when they realize they have no idea what they’re talking about. The game they watched as a child, it turns out, is far more complex than it appeared to be on television. The players and coaches speak in impenetrable jargon and the front-office nerds spend their time poring over proprietary spreadsheets that you can’t find on the Internet. Like a child who has brought a beloved action figure to a sleepover only to discover that his new friends, people he idolizes, have long since moved on to video games, the writer realizes that all his beloved sports clichés—about the “will to win,” or whatever else—are embarrassing.

And yet conventional wisdom within sports media holds that the writer’s audience still believes in old-fashioned narratives, rather than spreadsheets, and wants the game presented in simple terms. So begins a career of negotiating one’s discoveries about the actual game with the supposed desires of readers. Along the way, the sportswriter might even find that some of those childhood narratives, in fact, are real. There are moments—Tiger Woods’s improbable win at the Masters in 2019, say, or LeBron James’s performance in Game Six of the 2012 N.B.A. Eastern Conference Finals—when athletes summon up everything inside of them and embody the old truisms about greatness. The best sportswriters learn to serve as both translators and therapists. They tell you what you’re watching in relatable terms, and they also tell you why you cried when Woods hugged his son after walking off the eighteenth green at Augusta National.

But what if there were no need for a writer to translate? What if the players themselves could simply tell you about all the intricacies of the game, break down the lingo, and explain to you in illustrative detail what was happening in the sorts of moments that gave birth to those clichés? This, it seems, is the idea behind “Mind the Game,” a podcast hosted by J. J. Redick and LeBron James. Throughout the show’s first five episodes, Redick and James have talked hoops in a way that challenges the assumed demands of the audience but also gives them the emotional, great-man moments they want. “Mind the Game” is also released in video form, on YouTube, shot in an intimate style with a lot of wine bottles littered around the set. It starts with Redick, paper or whiteboard in hand, laying out a glossary for what’s to come. Terms, such as “floppy,” “top lock,” and “short roll,” are explained so that when the meat of the show arrives—James and Redick meticulously breaking down particular plays, including some of the most iconic of James’s career—the audience can follow along. The most frequently asked question in sports media is some version of “What was going through your mind when you did that thing?” Redick and James discuss the same question, but they provide long-form answers.

This approach to commentary appears to have been on Redick’s mind for a while. Earlier this year, he appeared on ESPN’s “First Take,” and went on a rant about the incentives in sports media, seeming to bemoan the fact that fans were less interested in his breakdowns of plays than they were in fights between coaches, players, and media personalities. “Do fans actually want to be educated or not?” he asked. “Mind the Game” reads as Redick’s attempt to prove that the problem is not actually fans but what he calls the “ecosystem” of sports media, which prioritizes silly debates and drama. The show’s gambit is to bring star power and the perspective of real insiders to analytical commentary, renegotiating the sportswriter’s balance between geeky shoptalk and the audience’s love of narratives. Can sports media be smarter?

This, too, is a well-worn question. Earlier in my career, I worked as one of the first editors and writers at Grantland, a sports and pop-culture site overseen by the former ESPN columnist Bill Simmons. Like Redick, we were trying to create a new type of sports media, one that elevated analysis and valued quality writing. We hoped that Simmons’s popularity could help us bring both nerdiness and good prose to the masses. During the early days of the site, I was editing one of our football writers, who brought a stats-driven approach to his work, and he wrote a piece about how, judging from the numbers, it was mostly luck that determined which team, in a given set of games, recovered fumbles most often. It wasn’t a matter of having players who wanted the ball more, he concluded. Seeing as the outcomes of N.F.L. games often hinge upon turnovers, a team with a decent record that had been recovering an unusually large share of loose balls was probably benefitting from a few lucky bounces, and outperforming its actual talent level. I recall thinking that the writer was correct on the merits but that there was something depressing about approaching football as a series of random fluctuations, and that he should perhaps deëmphasize fumble regression in his future writing.

To the writer’s credit, he didn’t listen to me, and has gone on to a fruitful career as a smart N.F.L. analyst. I was wrong to push him in that direction and was responding to old-fashioned instincts about what sports fans wanted. This doesn’t mean that the incentives in the industry have suddenly changed or that drama and the Dallas Cowboys, by far the most popular discussion topic in American sports, will suddenly disappear from the programming rundowns of sports-media shows. Nor does it mean that Redick and James have invented an entirely new form of show. “Mind the Game” is the synthesis of many things that have come before it. Athlete-driven content has become wildly popular in the course of the past five or so years. “The Pat McAfee Show,” for instance, hosted by the gregarious former punter for the Indianapolis Colts and featuring a collection of other current and retired N.F.L. players, including Aaron Rodgers, became a sensation on YouTube and was eventually licensed by ESPN for eighty-five million dollars. “All the Smoke,” a show featuring the former N.B.A. players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, pioneered an intimate interview style that allowed guests to talk more candidly than they ever publicly did during their playing careers. James himself has tried the conversation format before with his show “The Shop,” which aired on HBO for four seasons before moving to YouTube and which aimed for a collegial barbershop vibe. And Redick has his own podcast with Tommy Alter, in which he talks about the N.B.A. at a granular level, trying to break down some of the intricacies of the game.

I’m a fan of this new wave of player media, particularly the hilarious “Club 520 Podcast,” hosted by the former N.B.A. guard Jeff Teague and two of friends from his home town of Indianapolis; “The Pat Bev Podcast with Rone,” co-hosted by another N.B.A. guard, Patrick Beverley, and the battle rapper Rone; and the “Podcast P” show, which has revealed the future Hall of Famer forward Paul George as one of the most talented interviewers in all of media. Shows like these strip away the scrim of translation and replace confused writers such as myself with the voices of the principals. But I mostly watch clips on TikTok and Instagram, which seems to be how a lot of fans experience them. I have also noticed—it’s impossible not to—how many of these podcasts are sponsored by sports-betting companies, which are currently in the throes of an intense customer-acquisition battle. At some point, the money will stop flying around, and, as has happened elsewhere in the media, a few winners will emerge, and the abundant variety of this era will give way to something more polished and, probably, predictable. One thing I learned in my time in sports media is that it is an industry unusually impervious to certain kinds of change. We, the fans, still mostly want to hear about the Lakers and the Cowboys. And I’m fairly agnostic on the question of how much, and in what ways, the industry has to change. I appreciate thoughtful analysis, but, much of the time, I just want the drama and yelling.

Still, “Mind the Game,” more than any of the podcasts and shows that have come before it, brings a degree of authority that might create a shift, however slight, in the contours of sports discourse. It places James’s very famous brain on full and unprecedented display. In the 2015 N.B.A. Finals, James, playing without his two best teammates, almost beat the juggernaut Golden State Warriors in what should be seen as the most heroic losing effort in the league’s history. In the first three games, he slowed down the pace of the game to a crawl, orchestrated the entire offense by himself, and threw off the Warriors’ quick and calculated rhythm. It was the type of intellectual mastery that inspires rare emotions in fans: a great player, with all the odds stacked against him, trying to think his way to victory. And yet, despite having revisited that series dozens of times, I still do not know what was going through James’s mind. In those moments, we, the fans, even if we try to be smart and informed, are like Salieri looking at Mozart’s sheet music in “Amadeus.” We can see the evidence of genius, but we cannot figure out how it was done. Listening to “Mind the Game” is probably as close as I have ever been. ♦