Michael Wilbon: Fans should ‘view skeptically’ ESPN’s NFL coverage, but shouldn’t stop trusting individual reporters

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Michael Wilbon isn’t ready to say ESPN’s NFL reporting can’t be trusted now that the league owns a piece of the network. But he’s also not pretending the question is out of bounds, either.

Appearing on the Awful Announcing Podcastwith host Brandon Contes, Wilbon was asked whether ESPN’s NFL coverage still merits trust now that the league holds a 10 percent equity stake in the network.


“My answer to that philosophically is trust,” he said. “I wouldn’t go as far as can’t trust. View skeptically? OK.”

Wilbon grounded his trust in ESPN’s individual reporters in decades spent covering the league himself, name-checking Adam Schefter specifically and pointing to a wider array of NFL reporters he knew personally well before any of them worked for ESPN — some of whom, he noted, aren’t even on television regularly anymore but still do the reporting that matters.”

“I know how good Adam Schefter is,” Wilbon continued. “Do I trust Adam Schefter? You damn right I do.”

That trust doesn’t come as easy from Dan Patrick, who argued in August 2025 that ESPN’s NFL coverage had already prioritized access over accountability well before the league acquired equity, and that the transaction merely codified an arrangement that had existed in practice for years. Don Van Natta Jr. took the accusation personally, invoking his own recent investigative work on turmoil inside the NFL Players Association as evidence the network still produces consequential journalism on the league.

Patrick didn’t backtrack, nor did he necessarily double down; his response could best be described as measured. He began by addressing Van Natta’s criticism that he was unaware of ESPN’s reporting on the NFLPA leadership saga by admitting that he doesn’t regularly visit ESPN.com before questioning why the network didn’t do more to promote his work.

David Samsondeclined to entertain that nuance at all. On his own podcast, the former Miami Marlins executive dismissed the notion of ESPN meaningfully policing the NFL, while zeroing on Bob Iger’s public assurance that the deal wouldn’t compromise ESPN’s journalism and branding it corporate damage control engineered to preempt exactly this scrutiny.

Chris Bermantold CNBC’s Alex Sherman he didn’t believe a 10 percent stake gives the NFL any real power to dictate ESPN’s editorial coverage, while conceding he’d be genuinely disillusioned with his own network were that ever proven true.

While that’s just a microcosm of the reactions playing out across sports media, Wilbon is willing to trust the reporters currently doing the work, but not to promise that trust extends to whoever eventually replaces them.

“I think the answer right now is yes, you can trust it, because you can trust those people. You can trust Don Van Natta, that he is going to do a great job of covering the NFL. I think the question is what happens as we get further into this relationship and those reporters start to get replaced,” he said. “Who are they replaced with? And what training are we talking about? I’m a trustee at Medill, my alma mater, and I know the preparation is as thorough as it was when I was there, maybe more thorough, harder to get through. The same things are requisite. But I don’t know how customary that is anymore, how widespread it is, how different it is to perceive that you’re going to be a part of media as part of presenting news, which there’s actually a distinction to.”

Wilbon made sure to note that the equity stake isn’t the sport’s only conflict of interest hiding in plain sight. Gambling partnerships spanning ESPN, Fox, CBS, and NBC unsettled him considerably more, given a league whose own history treats betting as a automatic disqualifier.

“Do you want to trust an entity that partners with gambling houses?” he asked. “No gambling allowed in baseball clubhouses. What do you think got Pete Rose in trouble? What do you think got the 1919 White Sox banned?”

It bears repeating that it was revealed just this past week that Schefter, the same reporter Wilbon named as beyond reproach, had been an early-stage investor in Underdog, the fantasy-turned-prediction-market venture that recently sold for a reported $1.3 billion.

None of that makes Wilbon’s larger argument wrong. It just means the line he’s drawing runs closer to home than he may have realized. But, again, the question was never whether ESPN’s current NFL reporters deserve trust. Wilbon already answered that. It’s whether that trust holds up once the relationship between the league and the network gets even more entangled than it already is.

The post Michael Wilbon: Fans should ‘view skeptically’ ESPN’s NFL coverage, but shouldn’t stop trusting individual reporters appeared first on Awful Announcing.

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