Nick Wright rips NFL insiders reporting ‘banal’ transactions instead of real news

The state of NFL insiderdom is a pretty easy target these days.

The biggest so-called “insiders” make their bones as information brokers, trading favors with agents, team publicists, and anyone else “in the know” so they can be first to get the big scoop whenever it comes around. The result? A flood of transactional news about backup linebackers and practice squad elevations.

One prominent sports media figure has had enough of that. Nick Wright, host of FS1’s First Things First, took the insider class to task Sunday morning in a flurry of social media posts.

“I think I speak on behalf of all NFL fans when I say, we’d trade 100 banal transaction tweets (with agents credited, of course!) for 1 good, solid update on things such as…” Wright wrote before listing off numerous NFL storylines.

A few minutes later, Wright followed up on his initial post.

“What’s happened with the NFL Insider game is so fascinating. The competition amongst most of them became solely focused on being first on banal transactions, which involves horse trading with teams/agents… and due to those ‘relationships’ we actually get less real news!” Wright posted.

No doubt, Wright has a point. By nature, insiders are required to sacrifice some level of editorial independence in order to be fed scoops. And when insiders are spending every waking hour “reporting” insignificant transactions, when that news is going to be public knowledge in a short time anyway, they’re not dedicating time to reporting information that won’t be revealed to the public without a bit of digging.

In a third post, Wright highlighted a few insiders that he believes are actually providing new, insightful information for fans. The FS1 host highlighted Dianna Russini, a senior NFL insider for The Athletic, Mike Florio, who often reads between the lines of publicly available information and reports without favor on his Pro Football Talk, Fox’s Jay Glazer, who shares nuggets each week on Fox NFL Sunday, and Jonathan Jones, who does the same each Sunday morning for The NFL Today on CBS.

Despite a handful of insiders who continue to offer valuable insight, Wright calls out the insiders that have the biggest platforms for acting as a mouthpiece for agents, teams, and the league more often than not.

“But the biggest ‘Insiders’ are all publishing a lot of agency/team PR & it feels like they’re making sure they stay on the right text chains by avoiding breaking actual news! It’s very frustrating!” Wright concluded.

Unfortunately, so long as consumers continue to value who reports the big scoops first, these “banal” transactions are going to continue to take on outsized importance for these insiders.