A frequent conversation in sports media is the balance between discussing advanced statistics or in-depth technical terminology and yet still being able to speak to a broad audience. Yahoo Sports writer and podcaster Nate Tice is an important figure there, with his media work focused on bringing some of those in-depth insights to a wider crowd.
He recently told Awful Announcing finding the right mix of educating and entertaining those tuned in is key for him.
“That’s something I work on every day,” he said. “I always try to get better at it, and that’s what’s fun. I think sometimes people just want to be a little bit smarter than their buddy at the bar, that’s it. And so even if I say 15 nerdy things, if one hits your brain, I feel like I did a good job.”
He said he thinks there is a wide audience that does want to pick up more details about the NFL.
“Millions of people are watching football, right? There’s a lot of people that want to know more. And sometimes they don’t even know it, but they learn something and go, ‘Oh, I didn’t think about that.’”
Tice has a lot of different audiences, including from those who read or listen to his written and podcast (Football 301 with Charles McDonald and Matt Harmon, Yahoo Fantasy Forecast with Harmon) work at Yahoo, those who follow him on social media platforms, and those who see his guest appearances elsewhere. He said educating those who want to learn is the key focus for him across platforms.
“I love to teach, that’s my number-one priority. That’s why I was a coach. My dad’s a coach, I have 10 cousins that are teachers and coaches. That’s really fun for me personally when I see that light bulb go on, when I see someone reply to me on Twitter or comment on something and go, like, ‘Oh, you pointed out that thing, I never noticed that thing!’ That’s so cool to me because football is so complex. Let’s make it digestible. And I think that’s just a fun balance to try to find.”
Speaking of Tice’s dad, yes, his father is indeed former NFL head coach (and sometimes newsbreaker) Mike Tice. And the younger Tice had a playing and coaching career of his own, including playing at Wisconsin and coaching and scouting with the Raiders and Falcons and in the AAF.
But, unlike many athletes turned media figures, Tice didn’t want media work associated with himself or his father early on. That led to some of his early media work coming through anonymous blog posts (including on one site where he worked with this author). Tice told AA that given the nepotism conversations out there, he’s always happy when people only learn of his family connections later.
“I think the greatest compliment I get is when someone goes, ‘Oh, I had no idea that was your dad.’ And that happens more often than not. People I’ve been friends with, online friends with, go ‘Hey Nate, I don’t want to tell you this, but I knew you for like a year and a half until I figured out who your dad was,’ and I’m like ‘Thank you.’
“I understand the stigma of nepotism and being a coach’s kid. And when you have a unique last name like Tice, yeah, that’s gonna stand out a little bit. So I never wanted that crutch, and I also just didn’t want that stigma, I wanted Nate to be the guy getting attention, good or bad.”
He said he had also some concerns his posting or writing might negatively impact him or his dad, as there certainly have been stories about social media activity from relatives of players or coaches.
“Early on, I really was shy to even tweet under my real name because my dad was with a team or I was with a team. And at the time, I think times have changed about how you can be on Twitter and on social media, but I just didn’t want us to get in trouble, you know, ‘There’s Coach Tice’s kid popping off, he’s never gonna get hired because he’s talking on Twitter too much.’”
But Tice was always interested in the online world, and the advanced statistics world. And he said some of that came from his father’s encouragement.
“I’ve always have been very online,” he said. “Just speaking that language, staying up to date, I’ve always been a tech nerd. And I’ve really got to credit my dad, because even when I was young, he pushed me towards that. He’s like, ‘Read PFF.’ Like, my dad was telling me to do that. He was like, ‘I don’t understand it, but you will. I want you to crystalize it for me.’
“I had to explain what DVOA was to my dad 15 years ago. That helped me. I didn’t realize those were reps. And my dad, even as a kid, was like ‘Oh, you’re a ball boy, you’re not just going to sit in the stands like other coaches’ kids, I want you at work.’ But I didn’t realize that he was teaching me.’”
Tice said he and his father no longer coaching actively led to him ditching that veil of anonymity.
“Once he retired and I was not with a team, that’s why I started tweeting [under my name.] And I’m glad I did, because here I am now at the Super Bowl.”
It’s been a notable path there for Tice, who’s gone from posting clips and thoughts on social media to working for The Athletic and Yahoo to joining Yahoo full-time and also NFL Network as a contributor. He said the NFL Network work has been particularly beneficial for him in finding ways to reach that wider audience that isn’t already into the statistics.
“I started doing some TV stuff with NFL Network this year, and that has actually been a great learning experience. Doing Good Morning Football, the producers there will talk to me about ‘This isn’t 301, but we want you to show a little smarter side, show more of the stats and maybe show more deep dives, but you’ve got to make it digestible.’ So really it’s just a work in progress.”
Tice said having both his written and podcast work under the same roof at Yahoo is extremely helpful, too, as it allows him to reference deeper written dives for those curious about something he brings up briefly on a podcast.
“It’s been great having everything under one roof,” he said. “Really, what’s nice is, I hate using this term, but I’m going to use it, the synergy of it all. It’s a lot easier when I’m talking about a mock draft on the podcast and it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you can read that on Yahoo.’”
Experience has been key to Tice’s growth in deciding what to put in a written article and what to bring up on a podcast.
“It’s choosing what will hit, basically. It improves with reps at it, like anything. Sometimes stuff is better for the written side when we’re trying to explain it. Being a podcast it’s like, yeah, you want to be informational, but you’ve also got to be somewhat entertaining. And you can’t overload somebody with numbers. That’s something I’ve learned, and that’s again reps.”
Tice said his early podcasting with Robert Mays on The Athletic Football Show suffered a bit from trying to explain everything in depth all the time, which he thinks he’s shifted away from on the podcast side.
“Year one with Robert, it’s ‘I have 40 stats and I’m going to give you all 40 stats on the podcast.’ And then it’s learning how to chop that down. And then writing, it’s like, well, I can include all of these as long as it’s legible, include that and maybe show a little bit more of the work.”
Ahead of Super Bowl LIX, which saw Tice and other Yahoo figures broadcasting from Radio Row, he said an example of this showed up when discussing Kansas City Chiefs’ coordinator Steve Spagnuolo’s defensive scheme shifts.
“I was referring to something that Spagnuolo does on defense now. All I was trying to point out is that it’s a little different than he did last year. And then that’s usually what it is: it didn’t matter what number, what exactly sticks in people’s brains is ‘Oh, okay, that’s why it looks a little bit different.’ And that’s why I’m trying to learn just what sticks in people’s brains.
“But it’s a work in progress and I try to get a little bit better every day at it. …In the past I used to think, ‘Oh, quantity,’ if I say 40 things, but now it’s like, ‘Okay, this sounds good, this is something that people can remember, a difference of this year to next year.’”
Tice said his written articles are often a better fit for a deeper dive.
“The podcast is you’re showing the answer, and then when you’re writing, you’re showing how you got to the answer a little bit more. So I think that’s the difference. And it’s nice when I’m writing, I can use clips, because I can embed my tweets. So sometimes it’s nice to be like, ‘Okay, here’s the visual of something I talked about,’ or ‘Here’s the visual of what I’m trying to explain.’ That component of being more visual helps out a lot too.”
Those written articles can then benefit from Tice’s embedded video clips, too. He said those can serve as examples to help drive a point home.
“With football, there’s more in the minutiae that I think people realize,” he said. “It’s to crystallize a message. It’s like ‘Hey, Milton Williams is really good this year, here’s a play of him winning this one rep.’ And it’s that one example that people remember.
“Using those clips, sometimes if someone is following me on Twitter and listens to the show, which is nice, thank you to everyone that does that, they kind of go, ‘Oh, this is what you were talking about.’ And sometimes when I’m on the podcast I go, ‘Hey, I tweet out the play if you want to see a visual.’ So again, I guess that’s the synergy of brand.”
Tice said he thinks there’s also an art to explaining football concepts to a wider audience, and one that comes from more than just experience with those concepts.
“I did a show with Pablo Torre this summer, and it was one of my favorite things I’ve done. Pablo’s the best, so that was really fun. But there was the irony of him, the Harvard nerd, having football people go ‘Get smarter, you dummy,’ about learning this stuff. I think there is a balance.
“Maybe some, I don’t want to say all of them, but some former players and former coaches, this is a language they’ve been speaking for decades. And it’s hard. I’m a guy that consumes a lot of content, I’m very online, and so that I think that just even helped me kind of go like, ‘Well, this video game reference works,’ rather than calling it the concept name. And I think it’s hard for some of those guys because that’s how they refer to it their entire lives, and now it’s like ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be talking about what the language is there.’ But it’s ‘Yes, I can, and then maybe reverse-engineer it.’”
From Tice’s perspective, people can find different levels of how much detail they want to provide. But he feels the difficulty of doing that well is sometimes what leads to ex-player analysts going too broad with platitudes.
“I think everyone finds that balance of how deep they want to go. But some of the guys only know deep, and then that’s why I think sometimes they revert to platitudes and go ‘Who wants it more’ and everything, because that’s the only way they think that they can maybe get a little more broad. So I think they are finding a balance too. But again, it’s something I’m trying to figure out too.”
Tice said another factor that’s helped him has been that his heavily-online history and nerdy interests let him connect with some of the audience for advanced stats more than your average ex-player might.
“I speak their language,” he said with a laugh. “It’s like ‘Hi, nerds, I’m one of you!’ It’s the holding up the three [fingers] in Inglourious Basterds, I hold up three correctly to the nerds. But it does help, because I’m not just very online, I’m big into pop culture. A lot of us watch movies, and I like to sometimes use those kind of analogies that compare it to something. That’s what sticks in people’s brains.”
He said it’s helpful to work at an organization like Yahoo that not only invests in taking their talent on the road (beyond sending three of their NFL shows to Radio Row at the Super Bowl, they also sent Tice and others to Indianapolis for last week’s NFL Scouting Combine), but also embraces hiring younger, fresh voices.
“Everybody at Yahoo, you can tell they’re going for something as far as who they’re bringing on, whether it’s the Cespedes BBQ boys in baseball, KOC coming on in basketball. It’s kind of fun being part of that group of new voices; I’m 35 now, so I was going to say young voices, but 35, I don’t know if that counts. But it’s been as good as I could have hoped.”
And the mix of football shows Yahoo offers is also positive in Tice’s mind, providing opportunities for crossovers and letting them reach a wide range of audiences.
“It’s a little bit of everything. Ours is the nerdy show, obviously, Football 301. You’ve got the reporter show, Inside Coverage. We obviously have fantasy with Yahoo, so we have fantasy stuff which I do with Matt Harmon. But Football 301, it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re a national show, but we’re the ones that are the deep dive stuff, we’re the ones with the extensive breakdowns.’ …Ours is for people that want to know the why, the how of everything.”
It’s been a long time around football for Tice, between his family and his own playing, coaching, and media career. But he said he still finds the game appealing to discuss, especially with the levels of strategy and different minigames (which relate to another one of his interests, and one he shares with this writer, board games).
“Baseball is my first love and it still is probably my favorite sport. But there’s something about football and how it’s more than one game happening. There’s 22 guys on the field, there’s offensive line versus defensive line, it’s the receivers versus the corners, it’s the quarterback versus the defensive coordinator.
“All those matchups are like little mini-games going on, I know I’m hitting your brain right now with a board game reference, but it’s three different mechanics happening at once as opposed to just ‘Oh, this is just the game.’ Baseball is a one-on-one sport disguised as a team sport. Football is truly a team sport.”
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“I think it’s really cool when something like a left guard making a cutoff block is what made that play work. And that’s what I think is that’s where the dopamine I get is going like, ‘Okay, why did that play work? Oh, it was just a really well-blocked play. Oh wow, that defensive tackle did something unusual there, and that’s what stands out.’
“I think it’s really cool to point that out to people and go like, ‘Yeah, you know this guy’s good. Why is he good? This is why he’s good. This is the rare thing that this guy does.’ I think that’s what keeps me coming back.”
Tice said explaining those elements gives him some of the same feelings as coaching does.
“I like to teach, and this is a great way for me to teach. And when I’m not with a team, I might as well keep coaching. I think I really like that and it’s an itch I like to scratch. I think that’s what keeps me going.”
And he said his board game hobby, with its combination of explanation, strategy, and competition, scratches some of the same itches for him.
“I like board games for the same reason. I like teaching a board game and seeing the light bulb turn on for somebody. And then also, it’s my competitive side and working out a little problem and everything.
“That’s also why I like this. There’s competition in the media too. I want to be really good and professional at my job, and I think this is fun.”
Overall, Tice is thrilled he’s found a role that lets him stay involved with football in a way he enjoys.
“I found a path that worked. I mean, I was a ball boy, a backup quarterback, a coach and scout, and I was like, nothing ever felt kind of perfect as far as role in the football world. And then now I’m like, ‘Oh, this!’, teaching people, on Twitter, or on a podcast. So I think maybe that’s it, I found the path, which has been a long time trying to find it. But I did, kind of accidentally.”