The Press Box - Instant Reaction Pod: Adrian Wojnarowski's Retirement and the End of the Woj Bomb

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David immediately react to Adrian Wojnarowski’s retirement from ESPN (0:30). They reflect on: His commitment to bell-to-bell NBA coverage (2:40) Being the first iPhone alert sports journalist (11:40) How his NBA draft day tweets changed when he began at ESPN (14:45) How the “Woj bomb” caught on (17:30) The NBA media in the post-Woj era (22:39) Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey y'all. Sirot Sohi from The Ringer here, and I wanted to let you guys know about a new show that I'm hosting. The Ringer WNBA show. We're going to be talking about all the biggest personalities, breaking down and analyzing the latest happenings that make the W so fascinating, featuring some of the best guests and experts from around the league. Tap in with us on the brand new Ringer WNBA show feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Yes. We're here for an emergency podcast. And in this case, the overworked Twitter joke is also the news. Yeah, that's right.

Thanks to our friend Peter Kafka for flagging that. Adrian Wojnarowski. ESPN NBA Insider dropped what is apparently his final Woj bomb. He is leaving ESPN immediately. Yeah. He's going to be the general manager at St. Bonaventure. Wodge is a St. Bonnie's grad and at least for now

the Wodge era of sports writing has come to an end. What are your first reactions? My first reaction is a question. Who else would we have done this emergency podcast for? Would Schaefter? Definitely not Schaefter. Okay. We would not be sitting here at an odd hour

in the middle of the day to do an emergency podcast by Adam Schaefter. attack. Again, let's just say, for the record, exempting tragedy or, you know, some sort of surprising medical issue, something that would prohibit someone from doing their job tomorrow, right? If Troy Aikman stepped down the day before an NFL broadcast, okay, yes. But exempting tragedy. Just a pure sports media walk away. Yeah. Is there anybody else that we would have done this for? We could probably find somebody. but it's a really tiny list.

Incredibly small. And in sports writing, as opposed to sports broadcasting, this may be the list. Yeah. It is unbelievable. We're a month-ish out before NBA season. Yeah.

Woge has a great job, which is also, I think, a great, terrible job. Mm-hmm. He said in his statement here that he is walking away because I understand the commitment required in my role and it's an investment that I'm no longer driven to make. Time isn't an endly supply and I want to spend mine in ways that are more personally meaningful.

It's always one of the things that just blew my mind about his job. You had to be on all the time. Yeah. There's kind of no way to do his job halfway, right? I mean, you can't, you just got to be responding to texts, reaching out to people, you know, keep just, you have to have a million irons in the fire to do his job as well as he does it. Jimmy Pitaro of ESPN release his statement. We'll get into that later. But let's stipulate that Wodge couldn't do the job he wants to do his job halfway. But I wonder if there was a halfway job that ESPN would be willing to allow him to do. You know, we saw Rachel Maddow famously take a step back and just sort of like cut her on air duties, you know, by a fraction. or into a fraction of what they previously have been. And Woj is, you know, such a big name.

You know, it would seem crazy that, I mean, it would seem hard to believe that ESPN wouldn't be willing to find some means of him continuing on to, you know, with a somewhat reduced role. However, maybe Woj is just a realist who knows that that's not possible. I mean, it's pretty, we all just like to just kind of assume that Woz is just a, you know, robot that could, you know, some sort of cyborg that just deals with all of these communications and all this information with minimal effort. But clearly, this is a job that requires, you know, 18 hours a day of constant attention. I like the idea of Woge doing the Madhouse schedule where he's just an NBA insider on Mondays. I'm not breaking scoops Tuesday to Friday

or on weekends but on Monday I have some news for you yeah Peter King kind of got there during his career well it's funny that you mentioned King because he's on the list of people that might have gotten an emergency pod if he were at the peak of his powers when he stepped down right?

Yeah that's a good that's a good one I think that that's what I think that that's part of what makes Woj his situation so interesting is that he's, I mean, he's never been more integral to our discourse. I mean, there's a lot of pretenders out there. And there's, you know, of course,

Shams, whose name will come up a million times in these reactions, who does what he does to a comparable degree. But, I mean, there's just nobody like Wojch, who recreated the form, created the form,

reset our expectations. And then, continue to do the job at the highest level. Let's talk about creating the form because that to me is one of the most interesting parts of his career. Woge is a product of and a lover of newspaper sports writing. So when he is coming up in the business, he has his eyes on the best job in newspaper sports writing, which is columnist.

I want to get to New York City and I want to be the next Mike Lupic. Mike Vicaro, Dick Young, name whoever you want to put in that slot. I want to be on that Mount Rushmore like those guys. Because that was the best job in sports writing. Yeah. Got paid the most money. And though it seems insane now, it was the only job at the paper, or at least in the sports section, where you got to share your opinion about things.

Yeah. You get your picture in the newspaper. Get your picture in the newspaper. This is pre-Twitter folks. Like you got to have an opinion. And so Woja's like, that's it. That's where I'm going. That's where I want to be.

Then the world begins to change. He goes to Yahoo. He's sort of a combination columnist insider at Yahoo. He either invents or popularizes the sidle, which is the move sports writers do when they sidle up to an athlete as they walk out of the arena and get lots of inside. I think you popularize the sidle, to be fair. I think Mark Stein may have named the sidle, but Woj and Woj was, Woge was using the sidle for all that it was worth.

And then at Yahoo, it becomes an insider. A pure insider, an NBA insider. And all of a sudden, David, guess what? The insider replaces the columnist as the biggest job in sports right. Yep. And a guy who wanted to be a columnist is the guy who helps that. transition happened. Yeah.

Now, that probably happens anyway just because of the way the world is changing. But to me, whatever we want to call that, there's that book about, is it about Shakespeare called The Swerve? Yeah. It was so big. I mean, to me, that is sports writing swerve. Yeah. Where all of a sudden he becomes an insider, becomes the biggest job in sports writing,

and then people coming up behind him are like, I want to be like that guy. that's the job baby and it's not just the sham's NBA insider tier it's also people like Tim Bond Temps who also went to St. Bonnies by the way and his pals with Woage they're like that's the guy yeah I may do it differently I may not be you know have a fully woge bombed product but I want to be in some ways like him and that rewires the whole industry yeah completely And we can talk about how it did, but it's like all of a sudden the woge bomb becomes the basic unit of sports writing. Absolutely. Not the column, not the 800 word.

I'm going to get that coach or that star player. I'm going to show him a thing or two. No, no, no. It's the wodge bomb that is the thing we open Twitter to go find. Yeah, absolutely. It's the urgency implicit in it, right? It's a thing, you know, it's breaking news. Um, it, I mean, you know, the direct forbearer might be the ESP and crawl.

But in terms of what we, how we took it, I mean, how we, we digest it. Um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, he, he is the first, you know, iPhone alert journalist. Sports journalist. Period. Not just sports journalists? Well, sports journal. I mean, listen, I, I, I, by name, I mean, certainly there are more people that have New York Times alerts popping up on their phone than Adrian Woosznarowski tweets. But I would struggle to come up with a single name of someone whose tweets are more, who more people have set to tweet, to get alerts for their new tweets than Adrian Rojurowski. Yeah. Maybe Maggie Haberman had to run in the late, 2010s where she was at least in the conversation. Yeah, but, but again, I mean, part of what makes him so special is that he was, he was separate from ESPN, even when he was a part of it, right? It's like you were, I mean, that's why ESPN paid him all that money, because he was an

institution unto himself that you would follow Woage and then, you know, you could appreciate the fact that ESPN employed the man, but you did, but when they hired him, you didn't say, oh, now I can, now I can stop following Adrian Wojurowski on Twitter and just follow their NBA Twitter account. No, you just, you followed him. Yes, he was the thing. Yeah. Yeah, and we should, we should just to underline for people who are not as steeped in Woj mythology as people in sports writing. He was kicking their ass at Yahoo.

Yeah. In this, in this very narrow way, right? I'm going to break all the news. You at ESPN aren't breaking the news. So now ESPN says, okay, we got to hire you. Yeah. We run the world for football because we had Schaefter. We had more still at that time.

Jeff Pass and another product of the Yahooverse was coming. But we want to have the major insider in every sport. Yes. I mean, was there any, I mean, you know this history much better than me. Was there any reluctance to hire Woge from some of the old timers at ESPN? Because his competitors are the people who ran he? No, by the people who, well, both, I guess it would be interesting to hear. But there was certainly a more sort of like, maybe deliberately, maybe not, a more sort of like bald-faced, you know, transactional aspect to his reporting that I can just imagine some of the old guarded ESPN sort of finding reason to take exception to when he was, when he was separate from them. It's a good question. I don't remember offhand that, being expressed, at least to me or reading it.

He was like the football. I mean, they would have seen him, like you said before. It's just the basketball version of the football guys they already had. Yeah, and ESPN, you know, at that point is still, is starting to change into, you know, the sort of glory days of ESPN as a online text product, which briefly, what do we want to call that, you know, like late odds to through the teens? end of Grantland. That's sort of changing, right?

And what's happening is the people who are doing well there are writers who are helping program ESP and chat shows, which is one of the big reasons. Woj's and Schefter Scoops are so important to them because, okay, there's the A block. There's the B block. There's the C block.

We just done it. And you and I've seen the downstream effects of that. Every podcast. or at least every podcast that doesn't have its own ideas about things. It's like, oh, we have some news, folks. There is some news on Twitter. This gives us something to talk about today. Yeah.

And I always find that funny. I was like, you and I could come on press box twice a week and be like, okay, some insider on this beat, either the sports part of it or the Brian's stelter part of it, there's a transaction that happened. David, there's a new president of ABC News. What do we think? Yeah. because that's like that's a thing that happened.

It's news. Now people listening, people would be like, president of ABC News, I didn't know who the last president was. What are you talking about? Yeah. But that was one interesting thing about the Wodge Bomb.

You and I, I think, noticed this a decade plus ago was it didn't have to be like a famous basketball player that was changing teams. No. It didn't have to be his scoop about the warriors clearing room so that they could sign Kevin Durant,

which when you read that, it was like, what the hell? Yeah, the world is stand still. Yeah, how does he know this? It could be like a guy that frankly, I have never heard of, and it has 750 retweets. Yeah. Yeah, because the fans of that team are really into it.

Some of them might just be box employed by the agents. By the way, going back to the transactional aspect of it, again, it wasn't hiding anything. But it seems like the lower level the wojvom is, the more terms. the more clearly transactional it is, right? Like when the Chicago Bull signed their 12th man, it's as told by, or they list the agent's names, the full dollar amount,

if it's impressive, how to get in touch with the agents, if necessary. You know, I mean, it's a, that's always right there for the taking. It's a whole different language

in the language we've seen in other tweets. Do you think, to what degree when people start doing the, I mean, they already have the overworked Twitter jokes the week about Woge, is what percentage are the draft tweets? I'm not allowed to report this. So I'm, so I'm obfuscating what I clearly know with flowery language. How much of his legacy is that at this point? So that, and it goes to the point you were just talking about where he's not just of ESPN.

He has his own thing. Because ESPN had the rights to the NBA draft. They're like, hey man, you work for us. So you undermining all the drama of television. Yeah. Is probably not great for our television product. You can't tip the picks. And so he had this just increasingly hilarious list of, would you call it verbs? Yeah. I mean, verb is the right word.

Well, were there, yeah. He wasn't, he wouldn't say so-and-so is going to pick so-and-so. He would have them lasering. in on yeah targeting is infatuated by you know like whatever you could say

it really didn't matter what he said which was the funny thing like he could have literally tweeted you know the Detroit Pistons ate Cade Cunningham for dinner last night like as long as the team

and the player are in there everybody gets the point but the fact that he chose to go purple with it just made it so much more amazing I have the list here it's from 2018 a team is

locked in on, is tantalized by, are enamored with, are unlikely to resist. Yes, unlikely to resist. Are focused on, have no plans to pass on, which is pretty funny. Yeah. And this was a great one. The player's also funny too. Jaron Jackson, Jr. has grown comfortable with the prospect of Memphis drafting him. Mm-hmm.

That was one of his best moments. Is the implication there that he got the intel from the agent? and not from the team? Or does it matter at all? I don't know if you just wanted to switch the subject around. Yeah. Of the sentence. Instead of the Grizzlies are lasering in on,

you have Jaron Jackson is comfortable with the idea of the grizzlies lasering in on him. Yes. Should we pause for a moment to talk about why the Wojbaum became such a thing? Oh, sure. because I think if you had told us not all that long ago that that would be the basic unit of sports writing. It would have been a little bit surprising, especially when it dealt with less than super famous basketball players. Do you have theories about why it caught on the way it did? Well, I mean, you've written about this a lot.

I mean, I think that there's a kind of obvious and kind of inexplicable degree to which transaction became more interesting the transactions became more interesting than the games themselves. It's like a, it's, you know, it's NBA 2K, you know, it's like it's the video game or the trading card game version of sports. And in some ways,

a lot more easy to wrap one's head around or at least to be outraged about than, you know, one win or one loss in the middle of the season. Obviously a lot of this stuff is during the offseason when there's when there's the absence of other basketball. moves. Of course, I mean, but the trade deadline isn't, so whatever. But, but yeah, I mean, I think more than anything else, the format is, it's, it's drugs. It's, it's mainlining, like,

it's the column that you used to read, the job that Adrian Wollerowski initially set out to do, and it's like distilled highest impact form that's just being mainlined into your vein. right? You read 140 characters from Woj about whoever's signing with whoever and the column just materializes in your head anything you wouldn't get you would have gotten out of that

is either there or in the replies, right? I mean, it's it's, it's, it changes the way that we interact with, with, with journalism because it, it's, it's just, you know, it's the column as haiku,

you know, it's like this is the, this is the part that matters. Yes. I think that's totally right. I mean, it says like, look, the rise of Twitter. Twitter starts in 2006. So you're seeing those early years of Twitter is when he's really starting to come to the four. When this is the new vehicle for scoops. Yeah.

Not a printed piece or even, as you said, the ESPN bottom line or the TV hit. This is definitely part of it. What you said about sports fandom is also interesting because sports fandom became way more nationalized over the last couple of decades. Yeah. where you started to care as much about what was happening in the rest of the league as you did your own team. That's related in part to fantasy. It's related to gambling.

But that is part of the appeal of the Wodgeball to me. I remember a couple of years ago, it was an NFL Sunday, and Blake Bortles got benched by the Jaguars. Remember Blake Bortles? Yeah, of course. and I remember just looking at Twitter and that news was probably broken by an insider but just looking at Twitter

and all of Twitter was about Blake Bortles being benched. And I was like, I want to build the world's biggest time machine and take all of you back to 1995 or 1985 and give you a local newspaper and tell you where the news of Blake Bortles being benched would have been printed.

Yeah. It would have been on page like C-18 of the Dallas Morning News. it would have been Cowboys Cowboys Cowboys Cowboys Cowboys Southwest Conference more Cowboy more Cowboys Okay now by the way in tiny type Blake Bortles got benched because why would you possibly care about this? But the world changed so much because of Woge and also Woge benefits from this that you suddenly care about players on other teams as much as you do your own team even obscure players. Yeah. and that create and that's part of why the insider becomes the figure it does and he becomes the figure he does.

It's true. I mean, I think that just honestly, the rise of video games and the internet to a more abstract degree have made us familiar with the names and identities of players across the sports that we wouldn't have known necessarily otherwise. You know, whereas when we were kids, the, you know, 10th man on the Pacers, is a last name that's often misspelled in a box score on page 10 of the sports section. And now, yeah, and now, like, my son knows exactly who he is because he's on his, he's on his two K team or whatever, you know, like he's, like it's, it's, uh, he does what he looks like, knows what kind of shot he shoots, knows, you know, where he went to school, the whole thing. So it does make the lesser players of, of all sports, you know, more significant. But, you know, and it's also, it's all, it's more manageable. I mean, it's more understandable.

I know what I remember Blake Bordels. I know who he is vaguely. It's understandable and it's material, by the way. It's material for your next tweet, for your next joke, for your text message to the group chat about funny thing that happened in sports. You know, it's fodder in a way that, that, you know, more traditional news stuff isn't always. Yeah, it's a wire machine, right? Like they used to have in the old newspaper. I look, this.

The bells rang. We got, we got something here. The 10th man on the Indiana Pacers has strained his, uh, MCL and he's out for a couple weeks. Mm-hmm. Let's get this. What do you think of the, what do you think the post-WOGE NBA media?

I think it's interesting. I mean, as much as we talk about Wodging champs, like being in direct competition and how there are many people, other people who are information brokers in the basketball world, it's surprising that there aren't more people on their level just because there's an unlimited amount

of space, you know, on the internet for that to exist. Clearly, I mean, obviously there's a counterfactual in which Woz never goes to ESPN and they would theoretically have to create or hire one and maybe that opens up in a, you know, more space. But, you know, I mean, obviously there's other career paths too, right? I mean, like Chris Haynes, someone who's broken a whole lot of news in his time, but is now doing like sideline reporting and, you know, there's different people. for very good reasons, follow different career paths,

maybe some for the same reason that Woj is leaving his job. But it does seem like there will inevitably be a person or person to fill the Woj void, partly because we're used to there being a set number of voices. And also because, I mean, listen, Wodge and Shams competed for news very frequently. But they also often had totally separate sets of sources. And sometimes those sources, sources are, you know, sometimes you can't, you know, they're proprietary in a certain way, right? You can't

necessarily have two sides of the same argument on speed dial for a lot, you know, a lot of reporters don't, or a lot of information brokers don't. And so there, I think there's going to be sources that are like left there by Woj to, for the claiming in a certain, you know, it's like there, that plot of land is like, or that, whatever, I'm stuck in the old West in my metaphors right now. David doing the westward hole movement. Oh, this, this, this, this, this, this, this or mine is yours for the taken. I'm moving. But so I do think that there will be other people. And I do think that there's probably going to be, you know, I mean, people were immediately asking if this means that like shams is going to be, if ESPN is going to target shams. You know, maybe they will. And maybe they feel like they can create their own at this point. You know, I mean, it's.

the way that they the way that they can take, you know, famous people and make them even more famous. Maybe this is just an, you know, maybe this is something that they feel like they can manufacture. It's really hard to imagine, though,

because this goes back to the very first question I asked you. Who else would be doing this for? Almost nobody in sports media that is an institution the way that Woj is, you know? I mean, Shams could break. If you told me right now,

you look back at the data and Shams broke four times as many stories is Woj in the past 12 months, I would still say, maybe I would still tell you it doesn't matter. Woge is the institution, you know, and we would not be doing this podcast for, for Shams. So it's, it's really just hard to imagine how one replaces him, even though in some ways it seems like it should be the easiest kind of reporting to replace. It's clearly not because he's one of one. Yeah, and there's not many people who are in the group of people that did it. I mean, especially look at the NFL. It's like Adam Schaefter and then also Ian Wrappel. It was Woj and Shams both got big stuff and

then there were people who got little bits here and there. I mean, I think what you're saying is it's going to be a, it's going to be a universe of Woge bombs by a different name or maybe just the same name, but broken by different people. The part of the insider's employment at ESPN was always interesting because so much of what they were doing was on Twitter. Yeah. they were a face on the ESPN pregame show maybe. Yeah. Having a little moment, like, here's some news. Shepter goes out with the NBA show, or the NFL shows.

But it was always, it was always interesting to me thinking about Jimmy Burtaro, especially like you're in this weird moment of transition, right? We only have so much money. So are we going to pay so much just so we can say broken by ESPN so-and-so? Right. I mean, you're, yes. So there's this sort of like, the looming question always

when discussing these things is like 75% of this of the breaking news is news that you would have found out the traditional way two minutes later. Right? It's just like how your insider can match the news almost immediately. They can't break the news. Let's say David Shoemaker and Brian Curtis

are ESPN's two new NBA insiders. Thank God. Just a great buddy comedy of sports writing if there ever was one. and we watch Shams break something from outside the fortress. You and I probably together could get it confirmed pretty quickly. Yeah. Well, it would take a while, but let's say within six months, we could get it confirmed pretty quickly.

Yeah. So would it be just so humiliating for ESPN as the worldwide leader in sports, even though they don't call themselves that anymore, to have somebody else just breaking everything and them having to credit people outside the, like they once did with Woge himself? I don't know. You would know that answer better than me. I mean, I think that before we get too far away from it, the answer that I neglected, I mean, the one potential answer about, you know, the post-woge landscape that I didn't mention is just aggregators. I mean, if it's not one wodge, if it is like you said, multiple woges, or it's just back to the insiderdom of old where it's like the local beat writers are tweeting things out the second they know it, have we gotten to a point where hoops hype is as significant, you know, as, as, as, as wages on his own. And I don't know.

if that works for ESPN's on-air product to have, you know, an army of aggregators working under their own umbrella. But it can, I mean, conceivably, I feel like that's where a lot of the Twitter follows are going to go, right? It's just like NBA news with the Z or whatever. That's, that they already take, those kind of places already take up a lot of, a lot of the oxygen. But yeah, I mean, so much of what you get from the news. news brokers is not urgent news per se. Like, you know, from the minor players that you were talking about before to just the fact that like, you know, like you said, the wire will be breaking these things imminently and you just got it out there two seconds early. Just like the picks, you know, like the draft picks case.

But there is, I mean, but to have Woge on TV, to have Wojj looking down at his phone on TV, can. conveyed a certain sort of authority that you would think ESPN would be, you know, reluctant to give up on. Because it's never, it's not like Woj was ever just like the best broadcaster in the world, right? I mean, he was, he was very good at what he did. But it was the authority that he conveyed that was really valuable to ESPN. There was a moment years and years ago where I was like, oh, the new power in television

is the ability to read your phone on camera. That's how you know you've really made it. I think at the time maybe it was Schaefter with a Blackberry. But I was like, this is by any definition of the founders of the medium, the worst TV imaginable. Somebody is on television looking at their phone. But that meant in a way that you had arrived. Yeah.

Because the important thing here is that we have the insider and we have their magic newsmaking machine, and it is in a way more important than our camera. Yeah. They need to look at it because any moment, a team could be lasering in on a new prospect. And that needs to be expressed on camera just immediately. It's like when you're out to dinner with your wife,

and she's like, are you really looking at your phone in the middle of our anniversary dinner? And you're just like, sorry, honey, we've just retired, I guess. This is important information. Were you at an anniversary breakfast when we interrupted you to do this podcast? No, no, I was not. But yeah, but the sentiment is real.

Anything left for us to cover with Woge, at least on our first pass here? What do you think about the post-Worge landscape? I think it'll be run by a single insider or maybe two insiders. And I think it'll look a lot like it does. I just think the template that he helped create is just the template now. Yeah. I don't think there's any going back. I was talking somebody about this this morning,

and I just think our brains have been wired to such a degree or rewired to such a degree that this is the way we look for things now. Sure. And it's not just basketball or football. It's all of American life. You know, I've seen it happen to my beat a lot. And I'm like, again, I think one of those things is always as somebody who's in the business, you just have to think about what am I, is my job going to be reacting to these

things. Certainly some of it is, right? Because some of that's like, man, this is huge news. I'm Brady's going to go be a broadcaster at Fox. Joe and Troy are going to ESP. Like, you know, there's stuff like that. You're just like, wow, this is big. Yeah, I mean, and it's changed the way that we, I say we, but like can, you know,

traditional writers do their jobs too, right? It's you, you, you start on your column as soon as that tweet goes out as opposed to, you know, 12 hours later or, you know, whatever. Like, you become more reactive too. Absolutely. And, you know, I mean, the thing, and we probably neglected to say this earlier, but the jobs of the people in the business who changed the most because of insider culture and the rise of insiders were local beat writers. Because all of a sudden you weren't competing for scoops on your own beat anymore. Yeah. You know, you were sitting there waiting for this Olympian figure in Bristol or New York or wherever to weigh in.

And to tell you, because those scoops were going to. them. Very, very few scoops were going to you. You know, start in everything from like a draft pick, a signing, a star player is injured. It isn't going to play on Sunday. Yeah. That wouldn't that, you know, it happened from time to time, but by and large, those scoops were going out of the house.

So all of a sudden you had this like beat job that just became really, really weird. Yeah. You're going to practice. You're hitting your sources. You're talking to people. But then you were waiting for someone who is not standing. next to you at practice to break the story. Yeah.

And that I think is an interesting rewiring, probably a discussion for another time, because the people that do well at that job now just reimagine the job completely. Yeah. They're like, if my job is just to be like, I can confirm what Adrian has already tweeted, then what's the job? Yep. You know, like, okay, well, he was right. Okay, that sounds great.

You know, it's like having to be more imaginative and just do it in a totally different way while still fulfilling the demands of the old job. Yeah, I think the world's going to look pretty much the same. I really do. Now, again, it may be that there is not a person as you say who's just as singular as him, who has the name ID, maybe split between two people. Maybe Shams, who we should not neglect to say was trained in part by Wojj, who worked with Wojah, who just becomes the King Insider and is hired by ESPN because he's the most logical person to do it. I don't know. But I feel it looks more like the old world than it does like some different universe. And how do you feel the St. Bonnie's basketball team's going to do this year?

That's my final question. You like him for a turning run? Yeah. I mean, well, it depends on how much time Woj has to dedicate to the job. But yeah, I imagine he'll do just fine. Yeah, I think, I think, you know, when we talk about him, like, slowing down, I don't think that means slowing down for what the rest of this made slowing down. No. I think you have to imagine that he was working more hours. He was working for more hours than most of us are awake.

Yes. Yes. And again, I am eager as somebody like you who's interested in this whole world to find out more about his decision to leave. Like, why are we leaving right now? Yeah.

You know, what's the moment? What's the conversation that convinces you that this is it? Mm-hmm. Not five years from now, 10 years from now, this is the moment that you're going to walk away from one of the biggest jobs, maybe the biggest job in sports writing. We'll find out about this. If it turned out that it was a salary argument, a salary dispute, no indication to believe that it is. But if he's like,

I want, you know, whatever, make it up a billion dollars to keep doing this. And he was like, no. Or if he was like, I want, you know, I want my own. Like, you and I are friends, but I don't have a billion dollars. I do need to sign Stephen A. I want my own, I want my own show just like Pat McAfee. Okay. That would have been an interesting demand. Yeah, no, I mean, if it was just an astronomer, it's a huge ask, do you think ESPN will look bad for not meeting it? I think they would meet it, honestly.

I think any, I think any notable, remember you and I thought that one of these insiders was going to go to a gambling company. Yeah. For a long time. And I guarantee there were some semi-astronomical figures thrown around with gambling companies. Uh-huh. And I think at the end of the day, if it's Schefter, Woj, pass, and I think ESPN meets it within all reason. Now, if Woj said, I want to host a Pat McAvey-style show and I specifically do not want to wear sleeves,

maybe that would have been a longer conversation with Cittaro. Anyway, that's our first pass on Adrian Wojnerowski's retirement. Sean Fennessey's on the pod tomorrow, David, to talk about the election. Maybe some further Woj legacy items that we're going to rank best. campaign movies. Shoemaker and I return Monday with more Luke one takes about the beat. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.