Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
Nuggets!
Nuggets aren’t “news” necessarily, in the same way that Chicken McNuggets aren’t really food. But they have become pleasing, even addictive, components of the fan diet nonetheless. When I was growing up, NFL transactions—like those from the other major leagues—were mostly rendered in agate type in the back of the sports pages. That’s where one would learn, for instance, that the NFL fined Steelers safety Mike Mitchell $48,620 for his late hit on Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith, or that the Redskins were signing kicker Nick Rose or that former 49ers linebacker NaVorro Bowman had struck a one-year deal with the Raiders. These items were packaged as the afterthoughts they were. Even among hard-core fans, the privilege of learning that the Colts had placed running back Robert Turbin (elbow) on injured reserve could wait until the morning. These followers did not have fantasy moves pending—because fantasy football did not exist, and neither did the Internet and neither did Adam Schefter in his multiplatform embodiment.
There is no great Big Bang theory to explain how yesterday’s agate type became the nugget cosmos that Schefty rules. Or, if there is, he isn’t pondering cosmic questions like that. I once asked Schefter whether it bothered him that the half-life of his art form—the nugget—lasted roughly as long as a single dose of Ritalin. “Everything’s fleeting,” Schefter said, shrugging. He checked his phone as if it were an involuntary brain function, like breathing.
Schefter would be loath to waste a second before discharging some morsel of “breaking news,” just as his customers would be loath to learn of a transaction one second later than they had to. With his always-refilling hoard of data snacks, Adam feeds a dynamic market of incremental news in which he is also the chief broker and disseminator.
Schefter is coiffed, suited, and perpetually made up. He cultivates a harried bearing, as if carrying the weight of each follower’s information needs. Increasingly, he is feeding their addiction to fantasy leagues. “There’s been a shift over time,” said Schefter, who joined ESPN in 2009 after five years at the NFL Network and more than fifteen years covering the Broncos for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. “I am rarely asked how a team is going to do, and I am regularly asked whether I should start this player or that player, draft this player, who’s a sleeper, who’s a breakout guy.” Schefter is, to paraphrase Hair Club for Men president Sy Sperling, not only the Nugget Club for Men president but also a client. He is a devout fantasy owner in his own right. His team is called “Per Sources.”
Schefter’s full-on life commitment to the hunt for nuggets is his brand animator. He enjoys the fact of his one-dimensional existence—no hobbies, no time for anything besides job, family, and venti soy chai lattes. He sleeps five fitful hours a night (“in bursts, never continuously”) and tries to get a date night in with his wife on weekends. He works out Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and never without his phone. A driver takes him the two-to-three-hour distance between ESPN’s Bristol, Connecticut, headquarters and his home on Long Island, which allows Schefter to work en route or maybe to steal an extra burst of shut-eye. “I regret to say I am not the most well-rounded individual,” he told me. He barely writes anymore beyond firing off a few lines via Twitter and TV. And that’s fine. “I’m a hit man,” he said. “I hit a story, bounce to the next one.” Schefter no longer ventures into locker rooms and attends just one game a year (the Super Bowl). He engages “per sources” almost entirely by phone and text message. This makes these league gatherings a rare opportunity to lay eyes per them.
Observing Schefter on his manic routine, I was left to wonder: would there be a day when this fully customized insider will be replaced by some Siri- or Alexa-like oracle? Maybe named “Nuggetia”? (“Nuggetia, is Adrian Peterson too injured to start on Sunday?”)
But then you see Schefter working his sources/relationships/friends, and you sense something that approximates human warmth. There is also something earnest, even winning, about how transactional his interactions are. When I interviewed Schefter, he won me over by dismissing my small-talk efforts at the outset. “Okay, you don’t have to warm me up, time is of a premium, I got it,” Schefter said, directing me to turn on my tape recorder. “I’m going to give you whatever I can. I don’t want to waste your time.” By that, Schefter meant he did not want to waste his own time, which is almost always better spent hunting his Big Game—trophy nuggets.
On the sidelines before Super Bowl 51, Schefter was actually seen hugging Bill Belichick. This would earn him a personal foul—15 yards—from certain journalism referees. But damn, you kind of marvel. No one hugs Bill Belichick, certainly not reporters. Schefter should go into the Hall of Fame for that alone.
In Boca, I watched Schefter huddle with Berj Najarian, Belichick’s longtime consigliere—or director of football/head coach administrator (former Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe once had a dozen roses sent to Najarian on Secretary’s Day16). Berj is a jittery presence generally, but particularly so whenever Belichick is not around, like a St. Bernard displaced from his master. He is just the kind of functionary whose cock-blocking and secret-keeping powers make him an essential, even feared figure inside the league. “How many people talk about the consigliere?” the retired Patriots linebacker and ESPN analyst Tedy Bruschi said by way of refusing to speak about Najarian when Bruschi was approached on the subject by the New York Times. Schefter talks to the consigliere, which is all the more impressive. It makes Berj a solid gold source/relationship/friend. Quiet chuckles emanated from the Najarian and Schefter powwow, a sense of a mutual comfort being taken.
Well-barbered ESPN insider Sal Paolantonio stood a few feet away from the duo, also yapping into his phone. “That tanned NFL guy from ESPN” is how an older gentleman in a Chicago Cubs cap described Paolantonio to his wife as they passed by the pack of media busybodies. Paolantonio has a long face and sports suede shoes and a pair of Rick Perry–vintage glasses that make him look cerebral when reporting the latest on whether quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick will return to the Jets. Like many of his Hair Club for Nuggets cohorts, “Sal Pal,” as he is known, is a former print guy. He covered the Eagles for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1990s. But when you see him working insider quorums such as this, Sal Pal brings the strut of someone who has fully “graduated” to TV “personality,” at least tripling or quadrupling his salary along the way. His earpiece might as well be made of gold. “I don’t want this to sound the wrong way,” he told me, “but I feel like I was born to do this.”
Also reporting for nugget duty was another NFL insider, ESPN’s John Clayton, who might have been my personal favorite. Slight and unassuming, Clayton looks like a parakeet with glasses, or maybe a math teacher. But he is also a machine, and one of the small victories of my career was to persuade my bosses at the Times Magazine to assign a Q and A with Clayton on the eve of the 2013 season. (First question: “You just covered twelve different team practices in the last eleven days. What did you dream about being when you grew up?”)
After I summoned the nerve to introduce myself, Clayton confirmed a previous nugget I had extracted from Sports Illustrated’s NFL kingfish Peter King: that a woman wearing an i love john clayton T-shirt had traveled to Indianapolis during the NFL Scouting Combine to track Clayton down and announce herself to him as a John Clayton groupie. “Her name was Candy,” Clayton told me (of course it was). “The whole groupie thing is definitely a little bit creepy,” Clayton added. It’s safe to say that Clayton, who would be let go by ESPN a year later, could still walk through any airport in the United States and get hit up for more autographs and photos than the vast majority of NFL players, U.S. senators, and Nobel Prize winners.
Our quadrant of the lobby had by now also come to include Sports Illustrated’s King and Profootballtalk.com’s Mike Florio. It made for quite the impressive cluster of NFL media yentas from the Nugget Industrial Complex. If God forbid a bomb went off in here and wiped everyone out, we would suffer an immediate nugget famine, necessitating an emergency airlift to fantasy players. Seeing all of them clustered, waiting to do their “stand-ups”—or “hits”—my mind jumped to the ESPN ad tagline “We Are Men Wearing Makeup Talking About Sports.” That is indeed what they