Trey Wingo doesn’t miss hosting NFL Live five days a week.
The former ESPN host appeared on God Bless Football with Stugotz this week and didn’t sugarcoat what it was like trying to fill a daily NFL show during, say, late January or mid-June. Wingo hosted NFL Live for 15 years before his ESPN tenure ended in 2020, and he had some thoughts on all those hours of airtime.
“I didn’t think it was stupid at the time,” Wingo said. “I’ve come to the realization that when I don’t do this five days a week, eight hours at a time, most of what we used to do was pretty f*cking stupid. Let’s just be honest about it. Let’s just be honest about it, right? There’s not enough real information to talk about this stuff 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There’s not.”
Wingo spent 23 years at ESPN and was the face of NFL Live from its early days as NFL 2Night in 1998 through 2018, when he moved to co-host Golic and Wingo on ESPN Radio. That’s two decades of figuring out what to talk about on a Tuesday in March when the most newsworthy item is a backup linebacker signing a two-year deal.
So networks started manufacturing events out of things that shouldn’t be events.
That means things like the NFL schedule release have evolved from simple announcements into full-blown media productions. Networks now build multi-hour shows around finding out when the Cowboys play the Eagles. ESPN dedicates prime evening hours to it. NFL Network rolls out special programming. Teams have started releasing their own schedule videos with cinematic production value.
The league has turned a calendar into content, and Wingo gave that whole spectacle a thumbs down.
“That’s why you come up with stuff like the schedule release or funny little bits like ‘Wing Go or Wing No,’ because there really isn’t enough to talk about,” Wingo explained. “That’s the issue. That’s like half the stuff I watch now, and I’m like, ‘Why are you talking about that?’ Oh, ’cause you have to. Cause you have to fill the time.”
“Wing Go or Wing No” was exactly what it sounds like: a recurring NFL Live segment where Wingo would rattle off quick yes-or-no takes on various topics. Should the Bengals draft a receiver? Wing Go. Is this team a playoff contender? Wing No. The whole bit took maybe three or four minutes. That was the point. It was designed to fill time in a show that needed to produce an hour of content every single weekday, whether there was an hour’s worth of actual NFL news or not.
It’s the kind of segment that sounds silly when you describe it out loud, which is exactly what Wingo was getting at. When you step back from the daily grind of producing content, you realize how much of it exists purely to eat up clock.
“Outside of watching live events and reacting to it, or talking about what’s gonna happen next, it’s all just fodder,” he said. “It’s all just filler… So I enjoyed it while I did it. If they asked me to do it now, I’d say, ‘Put a power drill into my head.’ … All you’re doing is you’re setting up the times. We know how they’re playing, it’s just a matter of when you play it.”
Wingo also brought up another example: midseason awards. NFL Live has done them for years, handing out completely made-up hardware to players halfway through the season.
“The first defensive midseason award winner was Richard Sherman,” Wingo said. “And I had him on my show, and I said, ‘How do you feel about winning a completely made-up, nothing award?’ The point was that we knew. It was tongue planted firmly in cheek.”
That self awareness seems to be what Wingo thinks has shifted at ESPN over the years. He contrasted the network’s old approach with what he sees now.
“We used to have a saying on ESPN when we were in cahoots with CNNSI and battling for viewers. We’re like, ‘We don’t take ourselves seriously. We take sports seriously,'” Wingo added. “And now I feel like it’s the exact opposite. We may talk about sports, but ‘Look at what I have to say.’ It’s just a very different dynamic now.”
Since leaving ESPN, Wingo has carved out a different path. He’s hosted podcasts like Half-Forgotten History and Chasin’ It with Chase Daniel. He’s done golf coverage for Peacock. He works on his own schedule now, picking projects that interest him rather than showing up every weekday to manufacture content around a sport that doesn’t always generate the sexiest of headlines.
His departure from ESPN followed the end of Golic and Wingo in 2020. The network couldn’t find another on-air role that fit, and Wingo’s contract wasn’t renewed. He’s been open about not wanting to do the early-morning radio grind anymore, and about how ESPN essentially pushed him into that role after breaking up the Mike and Mike show.
What Wingo described isn’t an ESPN problem or an NFL Live problem. It’s a daily sports programming problem. Every network faces it. There simply aren’t enough games, transactions, and meaningful news events to justify the hours of football content produced every single day. So networks create programming around the schedule release. They do midseason awards. They come up with recurring segments that fill time.
Wingo just happens to be one of the few people who spent years doing it and is now willing to call it what it was.
“I couldn’t do it right now for all the money in the world,” he said. “I just couldn’t do it.”
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.