Rick Maese on Adam Schefter

It didn't hurt Schefter's credibility. It embarrassed him. If it had been something salacious, an editor likely would have called to ask about it. This was a throwaway note. That's why it got in. That's why it worked.

 

As a guy who lost his father at a young age- I would argue the opposite.
Work is just bullshit. It is not important.
I don't think it's healthy for any man to let a job define his existence.

 

Apparently, Schefter's starting to feel like he got used by the NFL.

http://deadspin.com/adam-schefter-is-fed-up-with-the-nfl-1631937239

 

I am not friends with Adam, but he and I shared some common turf back in the day. I was a sportswriter for the Michigan Daily before he was a student at Michigan. In regards to his recall of people, the first time I ever met him he commented on a bunch of the stuff I had written for the U-M student newspaper that he had read from the archive room. I originally did not go into journalism out of college, but went back into sportswriting about six years later and I was covering high school sports for the Chicago Sun-Times at the same time he was doing so for the Chicago Tribune (I think he was at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern at the time). We covered some of the same prep games at the time and would sit together. The game that stands out was a high school football game in a terrible part of town between a predominantly white school and a predominantly black school in which an epic bench clearing brawl broke out. Adam was standing next to me on the sidelines of one of the teams and as the monstrous brawl erupted, Adam went charging onto the field like a bat out of hell to get an up close view of the fight to report on it. I was in awe of his instinct to put himself in the center of the brouhaha as a reporter. Not much later, I ended up at Pro Football Weekly and Adam landed in Denver. I followed his writing and what people forget was that he was a fantastic wordsmith in addition to being a great reporter. His takeout features were works of art. Pretty quickly I recommended that he become the PFW Bronco correspondent even though he was only the #2 guy on the Bronco beat for his paper. When I became the editor-in-chief at PFW, Adam was one of my go-to correspondents for unique, in-depth pieces. Certain beat guys I would give much more space than usual (Adam in Denver and Michael Silver then on the 49er beat come to mind) because I knew that they could write their ass off. What amazed me is that if I called Adam with a feature assignment that was a little off-the-beaten path that he probably had not already done for his paper, he would turn the piece around quickly with quotes from tons of players and coaches. He seemed to have access to people that was very unique. And the story would always be written like a real wordsmith. That's the thing that really amazes me about Adam. He was a great writer who could have been a tremendous lead columnist had he taken that path, yet he went on to become the leading information guy in the NFL. His multi-dimensional abilities do not, in my opinion, get mentioned enough. He is no one-trick pony. To me he is a rare talent.

 

¶

 

Schefter?

Not so impressive.