Kyle Brandt spent nearly a decade at NFL Network building one of the most celebrated morning shows in sports television alongside Peter Schrager. Thanks to the NFL Network-ESPN merger, they shared a screen again within less than a year.
On SI Media with Jimmy Traina, Brandt revealed that his Day 3 appearance on ESPN’s draft coverage wasn’t a given. He was already in Pittsburgh covering the draft for Good Morning Football on Thursday and Friday, but he proactively solicited ESPN for any additional role they could offer.
“I proactively reached out to anyone who would listen at ESPN, and I said, ‘I’ll do anything you got,'” Brandt said. “If I can be the 12th man on the desk talking about a Day 3 pick for 10 seconds, I’d be thrilled to do it. I want to make relationships, I want to meet people, I’m here to work on any day under any circumstance.”
ESPN obliged
As we covered during the draft, Brandt joined Rece Davis, Mel Kiper Jr., Louis Riddick, and Field Yates at the desk during the seventh round, where he memorably admitted he once tried to poach Yates for NFL Network over a secret lunch. The more consequential moment, though, was getting Sean McVay on ESPN alongside Schrager. The Rams’ selection of Ty Simpson two days earlier had become the most scrutinized pick of the draft after McVay’s conspicuously muted press conference went viral Thursday night, with reporters covering the team saying they’d never seen anything like it from him, and McVay felt compelled to address his demeanor the following day. On Day 3, he told Brandt and Schrager that part of his thinking was not wanting to send the wrong signal to Matthew Stafford.
Neither Brandt nor Schrager had prepared a single question to elicit that candor.
“There was zero pre-production put into it. We never once had any questions given to us by any network,” Brandt said of the interview. “Peter and I didn’t even do the thing where we’re like, ‘OK, so you’re going to ask him about Ty Simpson, I’ll ask him about Stafford.’ We had no plan. We just totally winged it.”
It was also the first time Brandt and Schrager had been on television together since Schrager’s final episode of Good Morning Football last March, when Brandt delivered an emotional on-air tribute calling Schrager his “best bud.” The two were original co-hosts when GMFB launched in 2016 before Schrager departed for ESPN last year, citing creative burnout and the show’s contentious cross-country relocation. The merger rendered the separation moot, and the McVay interview was the first substantive proof that their chemistry remained intact.
“We ran that pick and roll for 10 years together, and it was so fun to get back in there and do it again,” Brandt said. “Not based on the fact that we’re some crazy talent, just because we have so many reps together.”
He described the reunion as “like Andy and Red on the beach hugging it out.”
That reunion was itself a byproduct of the merger, which officially made NFL Network employees ESPN employees on April 1. Brandt described navigating that transition as being like the Brady Bunch kids being absorbed into a new household, except ESPN’s house has 18 bedrooms. He’s approaching it the way any conscientious houseguest would, polite, shoes off at the door, using a coaster, careful not to overstep while he learns where everything is.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.