10/30/2025 This article was published in conjunction with the 2025 Awful Announcing Sports Podcast Power List. To about the sports podcast and digital video space and the people guiding it right now, click here. Every social media and online content vertical has the same cycle. Whether it’s MySpace, blogging, Vine, Twitter, TikTok, or podcasts, we’ve seen the same pattern play out over and over again. The platform gets popular. Everyone jumps on board, convinced they’ll succeed. A handful of people find success, with 0.00001% finding mega-success. Everyone else kinda just subsists, if that. Eventually, the zone is flooded with so much mediocrity and boring content that it loses what made it enjoyable in the first place. A shiny new platform comes along, and the whole process begins anew. The athlete-hosted podcast appears to be in the final part of that cycle. That’s not to say there aren’t popular or well-done athlete podcasts. There’s no denying that there are and that they seem primed to continue succeeding in the years ahead. The Kelce brothers’ New Heights keep reaching higher and higher. The Pat McAfee Show stretches the boundaries of what still qualifies as a podcast, but it has roots in that space and therefore must be considered one of its success stories. A quick perusal of the Apple Podcasts charts for sports podcasts reveals that Jeff Teague’s Club 520, Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay, Will Compton and Taylor Lewan’s Bussin’ With The Boys, Ryan Clark’s The Pivot, Matt Leinart’s Throwbacks, and Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s All the Smoke are among the most listened to at the moment. It’s also worth noting our own Sports Podcast Power List is dotted with athlete-driven shows. Credit is due to those who do it well and understand how to speak to an audience and captivate them. For every successful podcast hosted by former athletes, there’s a truckload of others that flounder or fade into the background because the person at the center of it doesn’t have as much to say as they thought. Or worse, they’re just not as interesting as they thought they were when they were captivating audiences with their physical prowess. Like so many companies, websites, and podcasts in the sports media space, it often feels like these things exist for the people at the center to feel important, not for an actual audience. Even now, many of the new athlete-hosted podcasts that launch make you wonder, “Who wants this?” As Front Office Sports recently noted, just in the last few months, we’ve gotten new podcasts from Indiana Fever star Sophie Cunningham, Billie Jean King, Abby Wambach, Julie Foudy, former Patriots Brian Hoyer and David Andrews, tennis icons Venus and Serena Williams, and Fox Sports’ Mark Sanchez (though we think that one might be on hiatus for a bit). Embattled former NFL quarterback Brett Favre debuted his podcast this week, avoiding any of the topics that might have made it an interesting listen. The road to podcasting success is paved with announcements about new athlete-hosted podcasts that no one even remembers a month later. Back in 2022, I wrote about how basketball’s “new media” — led by Draymond Green, Patrick Beverley, CJ McCollum, Kevin Durant, and others —wasn’t reading the room. So convinced that the world needed to go directly to them for information rather than to media members, they attempted to hijack the medium for themselves. In some cases, it works. Green continues to find success across several media platforms, including his podcast. JJ Redick parlayed his one-foot-in, one-foot-out approach into becoming a bona fide NBA head coach. But in most cases, they came off as whiny, complaining, and bitter, with many of them burning media bridges along the way. And for all these players’ complaints about what audiences really want, Stephen A. Smith, Chris Russo, Nick Wright, and Dave Portnoy are all still yelling their way to the bank. It’s not unlike the prevailing notion that independent creators no longer need traditional networks or broadcasters. That those days of the “suits” are over. It makes for a great story or pull-clip, and it’s something a lot of content creators have to tell themselves, but it’s not actually true.