Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Mina Kimes on NFL Business, Underrated Stats, and Starting on Wall Street

Episode Date: August 21, 2022

Before her current job as an NFL analyst for ESPN, Mina Kimes broke into journalism on Wall Street. Host of the popular football podcast "The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny", she shares: - her move from Bloomberg to ESPN - insights on the business of the NFL - the NFL entering the streaming video wars - the stories she's watching this season - stats that fantasy football owners might want to keep an eye on You can find "The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny" on your favorite podcast app. Host: Chris Hill Guest: Mina Kimes Engineer: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And I remember when I started covering investing, every day I would read the Wall Street Journal investing section and just stop anytime I didn't know something and pause and try to learn it. So as you can imagine, it took me about three hours to read the paper every morning for a while. But it was a tremendous, very quick education. And of course, yeah, it did spur my own interest in managing my own money. I'm Chris Hill, and that's Mina Kimes. She's an NFL analyst for ESPN, and host of the Mina Keim Show featuring Lenny. Every week, she talks all things football with special guests and contributions from her football-loving dog, Lenny. But before all that, she was an award-winning financial journalist. We caught up earlier this month to talk about

her leap from Bloomberg to ESPN, the business of the NFL, and something that every fantasy football fan will want to know before picking a quarterback this season. Mina started working for a division of Fortune magazine right out of college, and I began our conversation by asking her what it was about financial journalism that she found interesting. The thing that was interesting to me was that I was offered a job as a business journalist, or actually, more accurately, an internship. So when I was in college, um, I only really had two concrete aspirations.

One was to be a writer in some capacity and the other was to not spend a summer at home in Arizona. Um, I was very lucky to get placed in the then time Inc internship program, uh, where they put you at a magazine and, you know, I was interested in sports. I was interested in music arts. I wanted to time sports illustrated or say sexy titles. And I got placed in a magazine called fortune, small business, which kind of, um, I would say my reaction was quizzical at the time in college. I had not studied business in any way. I had not taken economics. I knew

nothing about business much forget small business, but I did accept the internship of course, and ended up having like a really illuminating summer. Um, it was a fantastic internship. I think in part because it was a smaller magazine, so I was given more to do. I learned a lot about not just business and entrepreneurship, which was the focus of that magazine, but just reporting. When they offered me a job as a reporter there after college, I was thrilled and started there as soon as I graduated. Stayed in it for a while. You were a business journalist for seven years, eight years. What takes you from Fortune to Bloomberg? First, I had to make the leap to Big Fortune, as we called it.

Was that really what it was called internally, Big Fortune? Just by, I think some of us at Fortune Small Business, because Fortune Small Business is a little spinoff. It was a really cool magazine. Small Business, as you know, some of the stories are the most fun stories that you can write. Literally, you're writing about people's hopes and dreams. And of course, it touches on pretty significant microeconomic issues. And I learned a lot about everything that went into running a small business and the policy that affects it. But in, I believe it was 2008, before the financial crisis, Fortune Small Business didn't shut down yet, but it shrunk in a pretty big way. And it was then that I decided to make

a leap to Fortune magazine. I really had a temp job there at first, actually. I didn't have a full-time job. And I was immediately put on the investing beat. And I think it was the spring of 2008. So as you can imagine, it was a pretty interesting time to start covering the markets. And for me, I hate to say it's fortuitous because the entire economy has crashed and there were cuts, but there was so much opportunity and so much room to learn there. So, I loved it. I loved covering that beat. Eventually, I moved into an investigative beat of Fortune, and then from there, moved to Bloomberg in 2014, also joining their investigative team. Did your experience as a business journalist get you more interested in investing?

Less interested? Did it have any impact? Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, I knew nothing about investing coming out of college. And it's kind of funny to think because I was 22, 23, ostensibly giving investing advice in some of these. But I really wasn't. I was just asking smarter people, you know, money managers for investing advice and then relaying it really. And, um, you know, just learning, I mean, uh, honestly, like in college, if you would ask me how, how do bonds were, I wouldn't have been able to answer that question. And I remember when I started covering investing every day, I would read the Wall Street Journal investing section and just stop anytime I didn't know something and pause and try to learn it. So as you can imagine, it took me about three hours to read the paper every morning for

a while, but, um, it was a, it was a tremendous, very quick education. And of course, yeah, it did spur my own interest in managing my own money. Now, when I say managing my own money, I don't mean day trading, but being very selective about funds and ETS and that kind of thing, and doing all the things that I think people in their early 20s should do with their money. I was looking through some articles about your career in business journalism. You were clearly very good at it because you were winning multiple awards. and this is over a seven, eight year period. And in 2014, ESPN comes calling and hires you to write for the magazine and ESPN.com. And clearly you're very passionate about sports,

but I am curious, given what you had accomplished at that point as a business journalist, not just as a skillset, but essentially equity within the industry, you'd made a name for yourself, did you wrestle with the decision to jump from business journalism to sports? Yeah, you know, I was pretty apprehensive about shifting, not just shifting beats, you know, but really just shifting my entire paradigm of how I worked, of losing that institutional knowledge, of not having institutional knowledge as I took on a new challenge. You know, in some ways the tools are the same. You're a reporter and a writer and how to gather information and structure stories is pretty similar, but, um, you know, there's so many little things I

didn't know. Like if you wanted to interview an athlete, what does that even look like? Who do you call? You know, who do you, it's not, it's not like a company where there's PR and then there's sort of sources and whatnot, and there's documents and that are very different. And, um, so I was a little bit nervous about having to learn all that on the fly, but I had one, I would say benefit, or I guess something that made it easier, which is I wasn't transitioning to sports as a beat reporter covering a team or anything like that. I was a features writer and a columnist. So that meant I wasn't responsible for doing that many stories. So I had time to think, okay, well, if I'm in my first stories on Darrell Rivas, that was my very first cover story,

ADSPN, I remember. I don't have to immediately, I don't have to turn it around in one week. I had a couple of months to figure things out and go about it that way. So yeah, it was daunting for sure. But it's similar to, I guess, starting in business journalism, a lot of learning on the fly. At what point did you really start to settle into the NFL? Because you were covering a lot of different things, as you said, as a features writer, you get the opportunity to go in a bunch of different directions. But at what point did it, you know, did you really sort of settle in on like, this is the area I'm the most interested in? Well, you know, I settled in on analyzing football. To the end of my writing career, I was writing about different sorts of things.

I think actually, you know, one of my final features, not final, but near the end was a story on Luka Doncic. I got to go to Spain and watch him play basketball as a teenager, which was one of the coolest experiences of my life. But I would say around 2016 or so, I started doing football podcasts. My friend Bill Barnwell has a podcast at ESPN that's pretty X's and O's centric, doing football radio. As a writer, I continued to write about a pretty wide variety of topics, e-sports, Korean baseball, the Olympics, whatever. But then as an analyst, I zeroed in on football as being my primary interest around then. Let me ask a couple of questions about the business of football. From a big picture

standpoint, it's overwhelmingly the most popular professional sport in the country. Toward that end, why do you think there's never been really a viable competitor, professional competitor to the NFL? People have tried with the XFL, the USFL. Why do you think that is, that nothing has really broken through? I think there's a few reasons. One of which is, I'd say primarily, it's just the NFL has such a stranglehold on talent. And, you know, there are so many NFL players, right? It's not like basketball where the rosters are much smaller, although, you know, basketball, there's not obviously a competitor either.

But because there are so many players on NFL teams and because every super talented player from high school on aims to be in the NFL, it stands that obviously any competing league is going to have lesser talent. There might be some names that you recognize and guys who maybe will go, you know, back and forth between those leagues in the NFL. That's something we saw with the XFL, which is pretty cool. But for the most part, it's there's obviously a pretty big disparity between the caliber of players who are available to those leagues. Also, because the NFL, even though it has a restricted season, is still, you know, a year long sport. right so if you're an aspiring nfl player and you're hanging around the practice squads you're

not going to go play for a spring league in you know or what have you the other thing i think is just yeah the money you know football is a very expensive sport because of the size of the rosters and everything that goes into it so we've seen time and time again that financially it can be really challenging for these spring leagues to say afloat because of that because of the costs and the overhead. I think for it to work, most likely you do, you'd probably have to see some give and take with the NFL, similar to like what basketball has with the G league. But even that is not something, you know, it's not a massive business of course. But yeah, it's just so big and so dominant in, I would say from a labor and capital perspective, it's just so hard to compete.

One of the things we've watched over the years on this show is what we refer to as the streaming wars. As streaming video becomes more and more prevalent, we've seen major streamers make their way into professional sports. We've seen this with Amazon Prime, with Thursday Night Football, Apple has got baseball games on Apple+. I don't want to speak for all of my colleagues, but a lot of us were scratching our head at the recent announcement that the NFL has decided to enter this very crowded space with their own streaming service, NFL+. What was your reaction to that news, and what do you think is the aspiration? Because on the surface, it seems like the NFL has done quite well, sort of parceling out its rights to different networks

and different streamers. On the surface, NFL Plus looks like, actually, our endgame is, we're going to have all of this ourselves and no one else is going to have this. I'm not a complete expert when it comes to the subject, but I don't think that's the endgame with NFL Plus. I just think that there's so much money coming in from not the companies, but also, obviously, the legacy media companies. As I understand it, it seems to be just more them taking all of their digital products and putting them under one roof, whether that's Game Pass or all the things you get when you subscribe to various NFL properties. It seems like they're still pretty content to be in bed with all of us. When you look at the

dollar figures, it's not hard to see why. I was looking through some notes of an interview I did years ago with Lee Steinberg, and one of the things we had talked about was a topic that still gets a lot of attention, but it seems like it may have peaked a few years ago, and that is concussions, player safety, player health. There was a point in time where the attention around concussions in the NFL in some ways seemed like this is the threat. This is the business competitive threat to the NFL. I don't know if that's still the case anymore, but I'm curious, just to put your business journalism hat back on, what do you think is the biggest threat to the business of the NFL these days?

It really sure seems like nothing. The NFL is such a juggernaut and it seems to steamroll Anything that stands in its way, including self-created problems or, as you just said, you know, the concussion crisis, which, you know, I would say public concern about that has waxed and waned over the years around the mid and around 2009, 2010 is when I think the depths of the issue and also the NFL's attempts to obfuscate what was happening really emerged. And I think since then, as there's been more transparency and I think greater understanding on the part of the players of what they're participating in, although that's you never want to use that as a catch all for saying, well, it's OK now that this still happens and that this is still a problem. But I will just say from a business standpoint and from a public standpoint, it seems to capture less interest and concern than before. Um, I think going forward that I, I actually do still think that is a potentially existential problem for the sport, especially, and this is a really, you know, 50,000 foot view if participation drops, you know, in, in future years or is, um, I would say, um, separated by class and that sort of thing outside of that, you know, I think I would say

probably the one thing that i imagine the nfl is thinking about and uh media partners everyone in around the sport are thinking about is interest on the part of young consumers i'm sure you know that kids these days zoomers and below um their attention is a lot more uh segregated um you know people always throw out video games example but it's not just video games it's the internet it's everything. It's streaming, it's all of that. I haven't seen what the numbers are like in terms of interest amongst the younger generation, but I think that would probably be the one thing. When you look to live sports generally and whether they can keep growing, that probably is the single biggest issue that I imagine people with a much higher pay grade than me

are thinking about. Chris Hill Where does sports gambling fit into all of this with respect to the NFL? Is it an opportunity that the league is looking to embrace? Is it something they are cautious about? Oh, it's definitely something they're embracing, which is remarkable because it's such an about face from, I don't even remember, it was, I want to say like five or six years ago when they got Tony Romo for hosting an event at a casino or something. And he got in trouble for that. And since then, now you're obviously, you're seeing just an explosion of, obviously as a legalization of gambling happens content promoting and that's not just in the NFL

that's in all NFL adjacent content and broadcasts and that kind of thing programming around it I think there I imagine their hope and also the hope of I guess people the media companies is it is kind of has the same effect as fantasy football where you know so much of the I wouldn't say a ton of the growth of the NFL, but certainly a lot of interest in it has been driven by fantasy over the last decade or so. It's undeniable. It keeps people engaged and makes them more excited about games that they wouldn't necessarily be excited about and players. And it really just functions as an incredible marketing tool. So I have to think from a content perspective, the league and its partners probably hope that gambling has the same effect. Speaking of fantasy football,

I want to see if we can help out our listeners who are fans of fantasy football, because on your Twitter bio, you've included the line, wins are not a QB stat, which is something you appear to be very passionate about. I've seen you talk about this in different forums. To that end, what is an under-the-radar stat that doesn't get as much attention? Because you're right, I mean, quarterbacks do weirdly get credit for an overall team win, but for people who are looking ahead to their fantasy draft, what is a stat or two they should be looking at when evaluating players? Well, a quarterback stat that I do like, and a lot of us have, not a lot of us, I would say, those of us who like numbers have embraced

a bit more is something called completion percentage over expectation cpoe so essentially you know as players now are chipped they've been chipped for a while but we have so much data about where they are on the field where the ball is on the field what's happening and next gen stats which provides this basically was able to take all that look at where the quarterback is the difficulty of throw where the defender is and say okay here's what the completion percentage should be in this situation. It's the expected completion percentage based on, you know, millions of throws that millions of court, well, not millions, but of quarterbacks, but a very large sample size, which is always, of course, an issue with football relative to baseball. And then you look at that

and you say, okay, well, here's the quarterback's actual completion percentage. And it shows you, I think, whether it's really useful because it shows you whether the quarterback has outperformed what was available to them based on both where the players are, the defense, et cetera, but also the scheme. Players like Jimmy Garoppolo, for example, always have a very high expected completion percentage because Kyle Shanahan, the 49ers play caller, is so brilliant that he sets up pretty easy opportunities for him. Instead of just looking at completion percentage, which is a pretty dumb stat, and saying, well, he completed 70% of passes, you can see, well, did he exceed what was expected? I think that's really useful.

Are there storylines going into this season that you're particularly intrigued in? Not just sort of the obvious, who do we think is going to make it to the Super Bowl? Can the Bengals repeat the run that they had last year? Is there, whether it's a particular chip on someone's shoulder that you find more interesting than maybe some of your colleagues do? well um you know the biggest storyline that kind of permeates a league because there's been a lot of change in quarterbacks switching teams this year you have russell wilson going to denver now you have baker mayfield in carolina you have matt ryan in indianapolis um so i think it's going to be fascinating to see how these various quarterbacks play who are you know i would say

certainly with wilson and ryan for example have the potential to be on playoff teams and to see kind of how they perform new spots. So that's always interesting to me because, you know, I think you get a sense of, you know, it's so hard to separate quarterback play from their surroundings. And when you see a quarterback in new surroundings, you kind of get a better sense of who they are and you can really take stock of their careers. I'm going to switch sports for a second. And I know this is going to be a little bit painful for you, but it is a fact that the longest playoff drought in major professional sports in America is your team, the Seattle Mariners. However, in early June, they're five games below 500, and they have a home game

against my Red Sox, and you threw out the opening pitch for the Mariners. And as of this conversation, the Mariners are eight games above 500. And so my question is, if they make the playoffs and end that drought. How much of the credit goes to you throwing the opening pitch? Because to me, it's greater than zero. I know. A lot of people are saying that, so I appreciate it. No, I'm just kidding. I wish I could. It would have been a little bit cleaner if the Mariners didn't have a losing streak right after I threw that pitch. But you know, it's baseball. You got to really back up and look at the entire body of work. Yeah, it's knock on wood, but it's a pretty exciting time to be a Mariners fan. Try to keep your expectations in check, but things are looking

pretty good. The Seattle Mariners are still hanging in with a shot to make the playoffs, so good luck, Mina. Check out The Mina Kime Show featuring Lenny wherever you get your podcasts. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Chris Hill, thanks for listening, we'll see you tomorrow.