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" With year-round coverage and an audience whose appetite for the game seems inexhaustible no matter how many scandals come down the pike, the matter of the National Football League&amp;#039;s cultural dominance is settled. If you were to introduce a fan from twenty years ago to today&amp;#039;s NFL offerings, they&amp;#039;d either think they&amp;#039;d gone to football heaven or tell you that we&amp;#039;ve all lost our minds. Or maybe a little bit of both.  No one has had a better perch to observe the way the game, not to mention how we cover and consume it, has changed over the decades than Rich Eisen. The longtime anchor and host has been everywhere, from his days hosting SportsCenter with Stuart Scott to his current gig with the NFL Network. He now hosts Total Access, NFL GameDay Highlights, and Thursday Night Football. As if he didn&amp;#039;t have enough on his plate, for the past two years he&amp;#039;s also been putting in three hours a day on The Rich Eisen Show, a sports and pop culture program that airs on the AT&amp;amp;amp;T Audience Network and Fox Sports Radio. Ahead of the NFL&amp;#039;s season kickoff tonight, Eisen spoke to Esquire about the changing face of the NFL, how to make it in sports media, and the insanity of Deflategate. When you were devising this show, what were some of the things you set up to differentiate it? I&amp;#039;ve always been interested in the art of a conversation, whether it was watching Johnny Carson growing up, or David Letterman or Jon Stewart. I think the main differentiator for anyone whose name is in the title is the person whose name is on the title. My fingerprint is different from everyone else&amp;#039;s, and I hope my personality is the same way. This format is a challenge, though, because I don&amp;#039;t strike myself as being an opinionator for a living, and that&amp;#039;s what this format sometimes calls for the host to be. There are some people who do this for a living because they love hearing their opinions come out of their mouths. I&amp;#039;m not always comfortable with that role.   You&amp;#039;ve talked in the past about SportsCenter changing from &amp;quot;the what&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;the why.&amp;quot; Do you think that&amp;#039;s symptomatic of sports media, and media in general? Oh yes. Because &amp;quot;the what&amp;quot; is known in a far more immediate fashion than television can compete with. That&amp;#039;s why you&amp;#039;re seeing so many television networks move to having an app. But more often than not, these days, I am learning about what has happened based on a Twitter feed or a video I see on social media, rather than sitting down and watching appointment television. I was at SportsCenter when that first started to change, and the show has changed since, no doubt about it.  Do you say that with negative implications?  I use wistful more than negative. It was a simpler time when the written word was a premium on a sports show. Whereas the hot take is now a premium.  Would you say it&amp;#039;s important for young journalists to avoid the allure of the hot take? No. Opinions are always welcome, as long as they are nuanced and researched and backed up. Pardon the Interruption is one of my favorite sports studio shows of all time. The opinions are from people whom I respect and find entertaining, and whom I don&amp;#039;t find in-your-face and grating. But if somebody is getting into the business, obviously you need to build up your credibility before you can become an opinionator.  In terms of building up your credibility, I would say: Be yourself. And never take no for an answer, because there&amp;#039;s a lot of people out there who will tell you no. Don&amp;#039;t try and have an opinion just because you&amp;#039;re trying to become that person who sits on the split screen with a hashtag under it. Have fun with what you&amp;#039;re doing, and\u2026don&amp;#039;t be an asshole.  You&amp;#039;ve been with the NFL Network since its inception. How has it changed? When we first started, everybody thought the idea of having a 24/7, 365 channel on the NFL was crazy. They thought it would never work in what people called the offseason. But we quickly showed that the offseason is really the non-playing season. There&amp;#039;s a lot to be discussed, and now every channel has live studio shows, multiple ones.  Do you think there&amp;#039;s a tipping point where it might be too much coverage? We haven&amp;#039;t found it yet. Mark Cuban\u2014and I love him by the way, he&amp;#039;s one of the smartest guys in the room\u2014but he calls the NFL a hog that&amp;#039;s getting ready to be slaughtered. Thursday night, Sunday night, Monday night. But every league is expanding and trying to make money. Everybody thinks the tipping point is going to be the way the NFL conducts its business with players like Tom Brady, and perhaps that the fanbases of their teams might vote with their remote controls. But it hasn&amp;#039;t happened yet.  Do you feel free to criticize the NFL? I&amp;#039;ve said on my show that I think Deflategate has been a complete mess. I wish the league had not conducted an inspection of footballs without prior protocols in place for how and when to do it. I wish they hadn&amp;#039;t chosen halftime of the AFC Championship game to do it.  The way things were leaked that turned out not to be the case, and the week that followed, helped mushroom this thing. The investigator clearly did not understand the culture of football in some of the decisions he made\u2014how he viewed autographing sneakers as trying to sway the person to stick needles in footballs.  I also wish Brady had handled it differently. When he was asked at that Thursday press conference if he was a cheater, he paused and said, &amp;quot;Well, I don&amp;#039;t think so.&amp;quot; I defy any man to use that with his wife as an answer! I wish he had just come out there and said, &amp;quot;Look, man, I tell these guys I like the football a certain way, so does every quarterback in the league. If it turned out to be an illegal PSI I am unaware of that. I don&amp;#039;t cheat with the footballs, and the one that started this thing got intercepted, so you tell me.&amp;quot; The whole thing has been a mess, and the NFL has been complicit in it. That said, it&amp;#039;s become something completely beyond the ball-deflation scheme. It&amp;#039;s become about the power to discipline.   It seems like it didn&amp;#039;t work out well for players going forward. We&amp;#039;ll see if some of the players want to make it as big of an issue as some of them seem to. Because when the collective bargaining agreement came down in 2011, the NFL kept this commissioner power stuff off the table the entire time. If the players want that on the table, there&amp;#039;s going to have to be some form of concession. Do they want to go into a nuclear winter over something that sometimes appears arbitrary and capricious but only affects a small percentage of the player base? I find it hard to believe you want to forgo paychecks for that. What about the concussion issue? Do you think they&amp;#039;ve dragged their heels on trying to figure this out? Back in the day, you could absolutely say there was some heel dragging. I&amp;#039;ve definitely noticed a culture change over the last five years in the way concussions are viewed and handled. I&amp;#039;ve met people in the front office in the NFL who truly wring their hands over this issue. The player-safety commission that&amp;#039;s been put together, Steve Mariucci, he is not the type of guy who would be part of something that was set up as a sham. Improvement absolutely can be made, but there&amp;#039;s no doubt in my mind it has changed for the better.  What&amp;#039;s the best era of SportsCenter in your opinion?  The best hosting team? Well if I don&amp;#039;t say Stuart and I, I think he would be very upset with me. When I first got there in &amp;#039;96, it was Dan Patrick and Keith [Olbermann] doing the big show. Robin Roberts, Bob Ley, and Charlie Steiner were doing the early SportsCenter, and there was a collection of other anchors, with [Craig] Kilborne in the mix.  One day I started seeing Stuart Scott sitting next to me more often than not, and suddenly we were a tandem. I was talking about Dan and Keith and how good they are, and he said, &amp;quot;Yeah, they&amp;#039;re good, but we&amp;#039;re better than them. We can do that show.&amp;quot; And that was Stuart&amp;#039;s sort of bravado, that he believed in. The same way that when he tried out for the New York Jets one year, he thought he was going to make it. He would always say, &amp;quot;Iverson thinks he&amp;#039;s the best. That makes him the best.&amp;quot; So I said, &amp;quot;Ok, I got it.&amp;quot; So I&amp;#039;ll go with me and Stu.  Who do you like this year in the NFL? Do you think my boy Brady is going to get one more before all is said and done? If I knew that I&amp;#039;d be in a desert town that doesn&amp;#039;t have a signpost. I definitely think Brady is going to come back with a vengeance. That&amp;#039;s what Matt Damon said when he was here\u2014that he&amp;#039;s got a chip on his shoulder, and he wants to take that trophy from the commissioner in front of the free world in Houston. It may just be a repeat of the first Super Bowl the NFL Network ever covered. That was in Houston, between New England and Carolina, when Brady won his second. That&amp;#039;s an entirely possible scenario, that we see those two battle it out. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/interviews/a48423/rich-eisen-interview-nfl-kickoff/>