Scott Van Pelt says he’s not moving to 5 p.m. slot

Scott Van Pelt has been the subject of enough speculation about the 5 p.m. timeslot on ESPN that he took a few minutes on his podcast Wednesday morning to address it head-on, both for the people who’d been wondering and specifically for Jimmy Traina, who had asked him about it when Van Pelt appeared on the SI Media Podcast earlier this year.

The answer is no. He’s not moving.

“We’re not gonna change where we are, for the time being,” Van Pelt said.

When Around the Horn ended after 23 years last May, it left a 5 p.m. hole in ESPN’s lineup that the network filled with generic SportsCenter episodes while it figured out what came next. The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand reported in October that Van Pelt was a strong candidate for the permanent replacement, with Peter Schrager and Brian Windhorst also in consideration.

Burke Magnus told Marchand that ESPN would like Van Pelt to do both — a daily show at 5 p.m. while continuing to anchor late-night SportsCenter after major events — and that he’d have to continue doing Monday Night Countdown and post-game SportsCenter after Monday Night Football games regardless of what happened at 5. The plan, as Magnus described it, was to have a little bit of both worlds.

The problem was that Van Pelt couldn’t get a clear picture of what the 5 p.m. show would actually be. He didn’t have a rundown. He didn’t have a run of show. He didn’t know who’d be part of it. And he wasn’t willing to show up at the upfronts and make a big announcement about a new show when the honest answer to the question of what it was would have been some version of we’ll do some stuff with some sports and figure it out as we go. That wasn’t going to work for him.

“And that wasn’t gonna make any damn sense,” he explained.

The closest he got to a real concept was the Ryen Russillo reunion, which had looked like a genuine possibility over the summer. The two had conversations that, by Van Pelt’s own description, went down enough runway that he started to genuinely wonder whether it would happen. The SVP and Russillo radio show had ended in 2015, Russillo left ESPN in 2017, built a successful podcast at The Ringer, and eventually moved his show to Barstool, but the appeal of doing it again at a different point in their careers, in a format that required them to be nimble and sharp with only 20-something minutes of actual content per day, was real for both of them.

Russillo had too many options. Too many commitments, too many irons in the fire, and ultimately, the logistics never came together in a way that worked for both of them. Burke Magnus had confirmed as much in speaking with The Athletic that he’d pushed for it — “That was a bit of a selfish concept by me,” he said, “because I was such a huge fan of those two when they were together years ago” — but wanting it to happen and making it happen are different things.

It wasn’t meant to be, and without Russillo, Van Pelt was back to not really having a concept to build on that differed from his late-night SportsCenter.

What made the decision easier was that the late-night version of what he does still works, and still works well. His SportsCenter has drawn 10 Emmy nominations. It follows the biggest events on ESPN’s schedule in a window that generates more eyeballs than a 5 p.m. slot ever could, because it follows the games rather than preceding them.

Van Pelt has heard directly from players, coaches, and the leagues themselves about how much that post-game broadcast means. Van Pelt’s SportsCenter regularly books timely interviews with players and coaches who have made major news in the hours leading up to it. These interviews with major names in the wake of high-stakes games are just something that wouldn’t exist at 5 p.m, and likely was another reason he didn’t want to move away from this timeslot for a concept he couldn’t fully visualize.

“I love doing the shows that I do after the big events because there’s nothing else like it,” he’s said before. “Nothing.”

That feeling hadn’t changed.