Was getting into bed with the gambling industry just part of a plan by NFL owners to recoup millions in talent wages? Asking for Calvin Ridley, who’s having an especially rough week.
On Monday the league sidelined the star Atlanta Falcons receiver for the 2022 season after an internal investigation revealed Ridley had bet on games during a five-day stretch late last November. In the wake of the news Ridley admitted to betting $1,500. He was slated to make $11m this fall.
If this isn’t the worst loss in gambling, it’s a sure sign of impaired judgement. Never mind that Ridley says he doesn’t have a gambling problem. “Yes you clearly do!” Bomani Jones roars. “Whether you have an addiction, that’s a different discussion. But a problem? The problem is why we’re all here.”
You’d be hard pressed to name a pundit who’s better suited to tackle this story than Jones. Besides being a sports savant and a sharp cultural critique, the 41-year-old pundit is also thoroughly engaging. Now in addition to his protracted run at ESPN – where he stands out for his longform, nuanced takes on television, radio and as a podcast host – Jones will be moonlighting on HBO as host of a new late night show called Game Theory, which debuts on Sunday. The plan is to export the casual infotainment vibe of his hit podcast, The Right Time, to premium cable –where the Emmy winner joins a heavyweight card that includes much-admired sportscaster Bob Costas and the no-bullshit interviewer Bryant Gumbel. Talk about a gamble.
The notion of a sports-themed TV satire modeled after The Daily Show has been tried time and again. The late Norm Macdonald saw his half-hour Comedy Central series, Sports Show, cancelled after nine episodes in 2011. In 2017 ESPN invested heavily in relaunching its 6pm SportsCenter block around smart aleck-y scribes Jemele Hill and Michael Smith, only for network executives to abandon that effort after a steep ratings decline that started with Hill picking a Twitter fight with Donald Trump. Even Snoop Dogg and Kevin Hart gave the format a go during the Tokyo Olympics for Peacock before only to eventually drop sports from their Ridiculousness-style highlight show completely.
Decades on from Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann’s arch run anchoring ESPN’s ‘Big Show’, it’s clear that parodying sports is a lot harder than it looks. “Sports fans take this stuff really seriously,” Jones says. “You’re not just gonna get in here cracking jokes. They need it to come from somebody they take seriously.”
Few ESPN personalities come off more sensibly than Jones, the Atlanta-born, Houston-raised son of university professors who boasts a master’s in economics and, for a time, pursued a doctorate. Meanwhile, he got his big break at ESPN.com as a columnist for Page 2 – the culture-oriented vertical that featured narrative nonfiction masters David Halberstam and Ralph Wiley and also launched the career of Bill Simmons. (“My dream job at that point,” Jones says.) When ESPN let him walk in 2007, Jones gigged around the sports talk radio scene in North Carolina’s Research Triangle before launching his own show, The Morning Jones. That started him rotating through ESPN’s afternoon block of opinion-based week-daily news programs, which likewise attempt the tightrope walk between serious and silly. After stints as a panelist on Around the Horn and a co-starring role with the Miami Herald sports columnist-cum-radio host Dan Le Batard and his father on Highly Questionable, Jones was tapped to co-lead an experimental chat show called High Noon that struggled to distinguish itself after two years on air.
That forced Jones back to his radio roots, but as host of The Right Time, a three-times weekly engagement that finds Jones riffing on the big headlines, making broader connections to cultural issues and cracking wise on everything in between – a knack that especially endeared him to ex-ESPN boss John Skipper. “He believed that I had quite the gift for being provocative without getting in trouble,” Jones recalls.
Meanwhile, his recent HBO contributions alongside Costas on Back on the Record primed the pump for Game Theory, which gets a six-week trial. Armed with a crack team of producers (the omnipotent Adam McKay) and writers (ex-Deadspin editor Tommy Craggs), the show hopes to offer a window into Jones’s particular way of looking at and thinking about sports. Jones better than anyone understands the difficulty in that task and is giving the show the grace to take shape naturally. “Some things are good in the room, but not great in application,” he says. “And when you see that it’s not great in application, you go to something else. The pressure is not about the preciousness of that idea. The pressure comes if you don’t think you have another one.”
Reassuringly, that’s not a problem here. When it comes to Jones, smart ideas are always in supply. And between HBO’s estimable sports bonafides and Jones’s unimpeachable status as the thinking fan’s sports pundit, well, you’d have to be a Ridley-grade fool not give Game Theory a sporting chance.
