Rick Maese on Adam Schefter

The kid's not his and his wife is a 9-11 widow, so his wife is probably willing to put up with a lot.

 

This will sound insensitive, but that is a great start to a sentence, the entire sentence to a novel.

 

Pretty sure he had another marriage annulled, sometime in the 1995-96 range. I don't know specifics, it was just the second time I knew of a non-celebrity getting an annullment.

 

You're right, of course. But seriously, there is very little to be gained as a reporter from covering football games. There's no pregame access. Postgame access is choreographed to an inch of its life. (This was college football, but we weren't even granted access to coordinators. Players who played poorly were never made available, either.)

I see a lot of posts here from young writers looking to break in who discuss what events they have covered, and even after years of this, I looked forward to those three hours on Saturday. I admit it. But they should repeat this mantra every day in the mirror: Adam Schefter does not go to games. The sole reason a lot of people want to go into this business, and one of the best around does not partake in it.

 

Of course, you have to go to games for 25 years to get to the point where you don't have to go anymore.

 

I think that's less true of football than the other sports, though.

 

Maybe. I know quite a few NFL beat writers who rarely watch practice, show up just in time for the end so they can pull an assistant GM to the side and the next thing you know, those of us who were standing there taking roll and seeing if there were any changes in the lineup, would get our asses kicked because that writer was working the phones.

Schefter wasn't like that though. He was always at practices when he was covering the Broncos. He'd be the guy in the custom 3-piece suit while everybody else was standing around in shorts and T-shirts.

 

ESPN has an army of NFL reporters who can watch practice for the minutiae. Information guys likes Schefter, Mortensen, etc., are better served working the phones.

 

My experience covering the NFL -- which is what is being discussed here because that's what Schefter covers -- is that only the podium after the game is choreographed. Once the locker room opens, everyone's fair game. Of course, players could skip out, but the same thing would apply to MLB/NBA/NHL/etc.

 

This is correct. NFL locker rooms are open. The players don't always want to talk to you, but reporters have access to everyone after a game.

When I started covering the league a few million years ago, most teams had open practices, too, and they arranged the daily open locker room period at a time when players would actually be there. And you could grab guys as they came off the field after practice, too. You could actually talk to the starting quarterback every day if you needed to.

Today? I don't know what it's like league-wide, but the team in my area only opens practice for the first 15 minutes or so -- long enough to watch them stretch and that's about it -- and the room is usually quite sparsely populated during the open period. The big names designate one day a week when they'll talk to media.

 

Of the national NFL reporters, Glazer gets more of his info from players than the other guys. He's got a good in with them because he works out with them.

Schefter was super tight with Terrell Davis when he covered the Broncos. He wrote his autobiography. He wrote Shanahan's too.

I know Schefter pretty well and he was always very nice to me. I know others who just fucking hated him though, and many of them had very good reason to feel that way.

People always said, "Oh, he only gets this because of Shanahan." when he covered the Broncos or. "He only got this because he's at NFL Network" and then he goes to ESPN and breaks more news than all of the other NFL people there combined.

I wish Maese had reached out to Barry Forbis for that story. Forbis could have told some killer Schefter stories.