Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media! This post is free for everyone thanks to our premium subscribers, who you can join here for $5 a month or $50 a year. This is an unusual one, spotlighting five podcast episodes from Steve Bennett of The Sports-Casters over the years, many of which may be of interest to anyone curious about the sports media realm.
Five Sports-Casters episodes well worth checking out
One of the podcasts I've long enjoyed in the sports media space is Steve Bennett's The Sports-Casters (Podfollow, Spotify, Apple, Soundcloud). Bennett has been running that independent podcast since 2011, which is incredible longevity in this space (for reference, that was the year before I joined Awful Announcing). He's in his 15th season now, and has produced almost 500 episodes (as per the iTunes archive for his feed, although some of those are a separate wrestling podcast). And a lot of those have been over the past few years, as he was at 333 when I wrote about his 10th anniversary in 2021.
I've guested on The Sports-Casters a few times over the years, including in this week's episode discussing the various announcer rankings I've been running for Awful Announcing over the past few years (as a staff editor until I was laid off this summer, on a freelance basis since then). The latest version of those, on NFL local radio announcers, is here, and is an interesting look at how site readers evaluate the league's local radio booths, and it was great to get Steve's thoughts on that and the larger-scale rankings projects. He was also very kind to discuss my newsletter project here.
But, beyond this particular episode with myself, I wanted to spotlight a few of the interviews Steve has done over the years (sometimes with co-hosts, especially early on with Don Russ) that may be of interest to those who care about sports media and haven't previously come across them. (He didn't ask me to do this; it came to my mind as something worth mentioning, and hopefully more valuable to readers than just a link to an episode with myself.)
There are a lot of notable interviews and comments in those episodes, some of which I've previously written up over the years. And a great element of this podcast and these interviews is that they tend to hold up years after the fact. While these interviews sometimes touch on current sports developments, most of these topics and discussions are timeless. So, with that in mind, here are five episodes I think are worth checking out. (Of course, it would have been easy to list more, and the full archive is worth exploring for subjects any individual listener might care about.)
1. S1E1, Jeff Passan (2011)
It says something about the different media landscape of 2011 that a podcast's inaugural guest might be someone of the caliber of Passan (then known for his Yahoo work and his co-authorship with Dan Wetzel and Josh Peter of the influential Death to the BCS book, now known for his ESPN work), but it also says a lot about the preparation Bennett went into this podcast with that he was able to convince Passan to be a guest for the first edition. And another notable theme established in this one is that Bennett's guests often seem to build a strong rapport with him, with many of them coming back. That's certainly the case with Passan, who's appeared a lot over the years (including this February). But this first episode's a good look back at how this show started and what sports media was like in 2011; the podcast's only gotten more polished since then, but this one is still worth going back to.
2. S6E23, Bruce Feldman and Danny Kelly (2016)
While they're perhaps not as widely-known names as the announcers who have shown up on this show, many of the writers featured on The Sports-Casters stood out even more to me. This podcast was a particularly notable one for featuring famed college football writer Feldman in 2016 during his time at Fox, with some interesting comments from him on how that company was evolving their college football coverage. It also grabbed Kelly, a NFL writer I've always liked, shortly after his move from SB Nation to The Ringer, and got some significant insights on those companies' differences and what The Ringer was looking to do in the NFL space.
4. S7E15, Sean McDonough, Stewart Mandel (2017)
This episode generated one of the show's most newsworthy quotes, with McDonough (then calling Monday Night Football for ESPN) explicitly pushing back on the then-common discussions that ESPN management encouraged particular political commentary from talent by saying he had "never been involved in any one conversation with any management person about it." He also called that idea of management directing political commentary "a bunch of nonsense." But beyond that, this episode remains notable for McDonough's discussion of MNF (he was heading into his second season on that broadcast, following Mike Tirico), and for Mandel's discussion of what he wanted to do with college football coverage at The Athletic.
3. S11E22, Katie Baker and Jeff Agrest (2021)
Speaking of writers, this episode grabbed two great ones. Baker's shown a tremendous versatility across her work at Grantland, The Ringer, and beyond, and she spoke well here about covering hockey, television, and movies. And Agrest has long been one of the most insightful sports media commentators with his work for The Chicago Sun-Times, with this particular episode getting some good thoughts from him on the new era of national NHL coverage from TNT and ESPN.
2. S15E8, Kenny Albert (2025)
Albert has been a repeated Sports-Casters guest over the years, but this episode was particularly notable for grabbing him less than 24 hours after he called Alex Ovechkin's record-breaking 895th NHL regular season goal for TNT. That leads to some great almost in-the-moment insights on what happened here and how Albert called it.
1. S15E12, Bob Costas (2025)
This was Costas' second appearance on the show, and it was another good one. This not only had some notable thoughts from Costas on sports (Aaron Judge, Paul Skenes) and non-sports (work on Cheers) topics, but also thoughts on baseball movies and a reflection on his remarkable broadcasting career. It's well worth a listen.
Thanks for reading! You can check out these and more Sports-Casters episodes on Podfollow, iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud, or beyond.
