Adam Schefter had some news to share. On this morning, the audience numbered only one: an AFC executive who had just called.
“Well, I got a few things for you,” Schefter said. “Number one, you got the Titans and Eagles, both very anxious to trade for a wide receiver. They’re both in the wide receiver market. So they’re looking and my understanding is your team is loaded at receiver. . . ”
Schefter was in the back seat of a silver GMC Yukon. His driver, a buddy who lives nearby on Long Island, was behind the wheel, navigating the state roads that lead to ESPN’s sprawling campus. Schefter, the sports network’s ever-present NFL news-breaker, had a BlackBerry in his right hand — his “texting” phone — and the iPhone to his ear.
From a media standpoint, the NFL is covered unlike anything else in American sport, and somehow Schefter’s reporting rises above the din. He’s perfected the formula perhaps better than any NFL reporter who’s ever preceded him: a tireless work ethic, the bully pulpit of ESPN and the leveraging of information from sources as a commodity to get more from others.
“He’s crucial because he basically has become sort of this omnipresent guy who seems to know everything,” said Peter King, the veteran Sports Illustrated writer and proprietor of the site TheMMQB.com. “And if he doesn’t know everything, it takes him only 10 minutes to find out what he doesn’t know.”
Schefter attended zero games last year and rarely talks to athletes face-to-face, yet he’s the reporter who keeps beat writers up late at night, the most prolific news-breaker in America’s most popular sport. As the NFL season prepares to kick off Thursday night, According to Adam Schefter has become a phrase every football fan knows all too well.
“There’s a myth out there that people think somebody else gets the majority of the stories. That’s baloney,” said Chris Mortensen, Schefter’s ESPN colleague. “If we’re talking batting percentages, Adam is Tony Gwynn times two.”
With more than three million followers, Schefter, 47, has a larger Twitter flock than any other ESPN personality — and nearly double that of any other NFL reporter. Social media exists somewhere at the crossroads of Schefter’s high motor and a nation’s endless appetite. Others certainly contribute important reporting to the game’s biggest headlines, but on a day-to-day basis, whether a transaction impacts your favorite franchise or just your fantasy team, no one is more important than Schefter. He lives, breathes and eats the NFL. If he slept, he’d sleep it, too.
“We used to joke he should just put a charging dock in his head, like a cyborg,” said the NFL Network’s Rich Eisen. “[His phone] is already basically attached to his ear.”
“He’s constantly moving, but that’s how he’s comfortable,” his wife, Sharri Schefter, said. “I always say to him, sit down, relax. I don’t know if he can do that.”
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