Stephen A. Smith says he ‘inherited’ sports debate format

Stephen A. Smith has a ready answer for anyone who thinks he’s responsible for what sports television has become.

In a new profile in the Financial Times, Smith was asked how he responds to critics who argue his format has been bad for the discourse in sports. “I didn’t create it. I inherited it,” he said. “When I walked on the air, I wasn’t doing anything different than anybody else did. Evidently, the audience gravitated to me.”

Smith didn’t invent the shout-and-argue format at ESPN — that predates him by years —, but he has spent two decades perfecting it to the point where he is now the highest-paid personality at the network, earning $20 million a year on the five-year, $100 million deal he signed last spring. First Take is the top sports debate program on television. The competition that was supposed to challenge it — FS1’s morning block, built around Skip Bayless for years — no longer exists in any meaningful form. The show Smith hosts has never been more dominant, and the man who hosts it has never been more famous or more paid.

So yes, he inherited the format, but what happens when you don’t just inherit a format but become its defining practitioner for so long that the format and the person are indistinguishable? Nick Wright made that argument last week amid Smith’s ongoing feud with Jaylen Brown, saying Smith creates unnecessary conflict with athletes and makes the rest of sports media look bad in the process. Smith’s response was to suggest Wright was only inserting himself because of his ties to LeBron James’ camp at Klutch Sports. Wright called that characterization “utter and complete fantasy” and demanded an apology, a retraction, or a clarification.

For all intents and purposes, that’s a reasonable encapsulation of where Smith operates in 2026. He is powerful enough that critics who come after him tend to get folded into his content, their criticism reframed as a hidden agenda or a personal beef. He has enough platforms — First Take, a daily SiriusXM sports show, a weekly political program, a YouTube channel, regular cable news appearances — that the Financial Times profile is not really a sports media story at all. But Smith is sports media, and has been its defining voice long enough that the genre and the person are functionally inseparable. Whatever the discourse is, he is the one who sets the temperature. Whether he created it or inherited it is, at this point, beside the point. He owns it.