Motley Fool Money - 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

Hi everyone, I'm Charlie Cox. Join us on Disney Plus as we talk with the cast and crew of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. What haven't you gotten to do as Daredevil? Being the Avengers. Charlie and Vincent came to play. I get emotional when I think about it. One of the great finale of any episode we've ever done. We are going to play Truth or Daredevil.

What? Oh, boy. Fantastic. You guys go hard. Daredevil Born Again, official podcast Tuesdays, and stream Season 2 of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again on Disney Plus. 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 about 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, I 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 Kimes 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, 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. I was very lucky to get placed in the then Time Inc internship program where they put you at a magazine. And, you know, I was interested in sports.

I was interested in music, arts. I wanted time, Sports Illustrated, or sexy titles. And I got placed in a magazine called Fortune Small Business, which kind of, 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. 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 kind of the

focus of that magazine, but just reporting. And when they offered me a job as a reporter there after college, I was thrilled and started there as soon as I graduated. And stayed in and for a while. I mean, you were in, you were a business journalist for seven years, eight years. What takes you from Fortune to Bloomberg? First I had to make the lead 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 kind

of like a little spin-off. And it was a really cool magazine. I mean, small business, as you know, some of the stories are the most fun stories you can write. I mean, it's 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 it affects it. But in, I believe it was 2008, before the financial crisis, forced to small business, It 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 economies, you know, crashed and there were cuts, and it was, 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 in an investigative, pardon me, joining their investigative theme. Did your experience as a business journalist, did 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, what, 20 to 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, you know, just learning. I mean, honestly, like in college, if you would ask me, how do bonds, where 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 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 like day trading, but, you know, being very selective about funds and ETS and that kind of thing and doing all the things that I think, yeah, people in their early 20 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, NESPN.com. And clearly you're very passionate about it. sports, but I am curious, given what you had accomplished at that point as a business journalist, not just as a skill set, 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 work, 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, you know, there are 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 like a company where there's people. and then there's sort you have sources and whatnot and there's documents and that are very different and 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

didn't 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 Dorel Rivas, that was my very first cover story, ESPN, I remember. I don't have to immediately, I don't have to turn it around in one week. I had a couple 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 Luca Donchich. 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. So as a writer, I continue to write about a pretty wide variety of topics, you know, 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 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 brought? broken through? I think there's a few reasons. One of which is, I'd say primarily, it's just NFL has such a stranglehold on talent. And there are so many NFL players, right? It's not

like basketball where the rosters are much smaller, although 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, 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 restricted season, is still, you know, a year-long sport, right? So if you're an aspiring NFL player and you're hanging around in 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'd probably have to see some give and take with the NFL, similar to 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.

And 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 Plus. 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 Plus. 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. And on the surface, NFL Plus looks like, actually, our end game is, we're going to have all of this ourselves and no one else is going to have this. So I'm not a complete expert when it comes to the subject, but I don't think that's the endgame with NFL POS. I just think there's so much money coming in from now the tech companies, but also obviously the legacy media companies. As I understand it, it seems to be just more than taking all of their digital products and kind of putting them under one roof, whether that's, you know, a game pass or all the things you get when you should describe to various NFL properties.

It seems like they're still pretty content to be in bed with all of us. And 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 is 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. And 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? God, it really sure seems like nothing. I mean, the NFL is such a juggernaut in it. 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 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 you never want to use that as a catch-all for saying, well, it's okay 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. I think going forward, that 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 future years or is, I would say, 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 media partners, everyone in around the sport, thinking about is interest on the part of young consumers. I'm sure you know that kids these consumers and below, their attention is a lot more segregated. 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. And so 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. 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, 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 broadcast and that kind of thing, programming around it. I think I imagine their hope and also the hope of, I guess, people, the media companies,

is it 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 was saying, those of us who are 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

the field, what's happening, and next-gen stats, which provides this, basically was able to take all of 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, 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's a very much. 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.

You know, players like Jimmy Garoppel, for example, always have a very high expecting completion percentage because Kyle Shanahan, the 49ers play caller is so brilliant that he sets up, you know, pretty easy opportunities for him. So instead of just looking at completion percentage, which is a pretty dumb stat and saying, you know, oh, he's a four and nine, you know, 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, you know, who do we think is going to make it to the Super Bowl? Can the Bengals repeat of, you know, the run that they had last year? Is there, you know, whether whether it's a particular chip on someone's shoulder that you find more interesting than maybe some of your colleagues do?

Well, the biggest storyline that kind of permeates a league is 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 and Indianapolis. So I think it's going to be fascinating to see how these various quarterbacks play, who are, you know, well, 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 and 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 trout, how much of the credit goes to you throwing the opening pitch? Because to me, it's greater than zero. I know. You know, a lot of people are saying that, so I appreciate it. 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 a pretty, it's knock on wood, but it's a pretty exciting time to be a Mariners fan. You know, 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 ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Chris Hill. We'll see you tomorrow.