Kyle Brandt on his new Vice Sports show, NFL-ESPN deal and 10 years of ‘Good Morning Football’

By his own admission, Kyle Brandt has never gotten a gig he had to audition for.

And after hearing how his tryout at FS1 went nearly a decade ago, that might be for the better.

Fortunately, the NFL Network star didn’t have to audition for Vice Sports’ NFL Classics: After Further Review, which will air its first episode at 9 p.m. ET on Wednesday. And that actually makes sense when you consider that the entire concept — a ManningCast-style show focused on old games featuring former players and celebrity fans as guests— is right up his alley.

“Most of the things I’ve been involved with in my career, I’m involved in the pre-production and the development and the conception, and all of that of whatever the project may be,” Brandt recently told Awful Announcing. “This is one of those wonderful things that everyone just hopes for where your agent calls you and they’re like, ‘hey, you, you’re gonna do this show.’ And I’m like, ‘What? Oh, this sounds great. I love this.’

“It makes me feel like when you hear actors who get offers. I’m like, ‘That must be the life. You get offers? That’s just incredible. So, as with most things in my career, I didn’t have to audition for it because if I had to audition, I would never have gotten it. I’d never get anything I auditioned for. It came to me, kind of fully conceived, and the second I heard it, I was like, ‘wow, I think this might be the perfect show for me, and I’m thrilled to do this.’ It was like you take your jeans out of the laundry and there’s $50 in the pocket.”

Ahead of Wednesday night’s premiere, Brandt joined Awful Announcing for a wide-ranging conversation about the show, his career, the state of sports media, and the 10th season of Good Morning Football. Some quotes in the Q&A have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Awful Announcing: You’re somebody who’s always leaned into nostalgia. It seems like you’re always wearing vintage t-shirts, Starter jackets, and throwback jerseys. Why do you think you’ve always been drawn to the past?

Kyle Brandt: It’s a good question. I wonder that sometimes. There’s this quote in The Sopranos — which is ironic, this is the snake eating its tail —  about the lowest form of conversation starts with ‘remember when.’ And I disagree with that because I love talking about ‘remember when.’ I like listening to music, ‘remember when,’ I like the movies.

If you ever go on a YouTube video that is something — like it’s a song from the 80s or it’s a song from 2002, it feels like 50 percent of the comments, at least, are like, ‘man, this was when music was really music. It was better back then.’ People always say that.

And so I’m not ashamed of my nostalgia. I’m not ashamed that I am showing my sixth-grade son Bloodsport and Point Break. I love that stuff. And there’s so much nostalgia on Instagram and on Twitter, and the reason is because there’s so much of an audience for it. People love that shit.

That quote from The Office about, ‘I wish there was a way of knowing you were good in the good old days before you actually left them,’ that’s what nostalgia is. It’s the quote-unquote good old days… so, for me, I had a wonderful time in the 90s. I love that decade, and I like revisiting it anytime I can, and I love bringing people with me.

Awful Announcing: I find the idea of watching old games fascinating because a show like yours [Good Morning Football] spends so much time building up these games, and then it feels like we never think about them again. Even in a Super Bowl, you might truly only remember three or four plays from. Are you somebody who typically watches old games, and what was it like doing so for this project?

Kyle Brandt: I don’t watch old games. I watch old highlights, and I think that’s what we do. I think people, if you said to them, ‘the 2006 Bears-Cardinals, the Bears are who we thought they were game,’ they’d be like, ‘oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Hester had the punt return. Urlacher was really good.’ They just remember the greatest hits. But what they don’t remember is that Matt Leinart was unconscious in that game. It was probably the best game of his pro career. The Bears are the best defense in the league, and they could not stop Matt Leinart while future Hall of Famer Kurt Warner was on the bench just watching.

You don’t remember the details and the fun. You remember the big tracks, the radio hits, the pop hits, and, and so you don’t go back and watch the game. You go back and watch highlights or montages. You watch a Brett Favre montage. You don’t see Brett Favre throwing it incomplete on third and 12 in the third quarter because it’s not part of the old catalog that we look back on. But it’s really fun to do because we remember all the hits from an album, but it’s those non-radio tracks on the album that are like, ‘yes, this is what this album was about.’

And I learned so much. Like, there’s entire games that were in my wheelhouse that I just didn’t really remember. The ’95 [NFC] title game, Troy Aikman versus Brett Favre. It was at Texas Stadium. It was really competitive back and forth. Irvin and Emmitt had five touchdowns combined. Favre was incredible. I don’t remember that game. It’s just one of these lost things in my catalog. So it is so fun to go back and watch, not the highlights, man, the entire game. And then on top of that, you get to do it with the guys who played the game. And I just felt like I was hosting the show, but I was also kind of watching the show while I did it.

Awful Announcing: As somebody who’s typically in the analyst role, what was that like sliding into the host’s seat?

Kyle Brandt: I purposely didn’t watch the games a whole bunch before we shot, cause I wanted it to be organic, I wanted to be surprised by the interception or the fumble, just like the players were.

You know what’s cool about it? You watch these games and you know how they end, but when you’re watching Niners-Chiefs [in Super Bowl LIV], for example, you still kind of feel like the Niners are gonna win. And you like, you get nervous, and I was watching it with Chiefs fans and with Chris Jones, who played in the game. And Chris Jones was nervous. Like, he knows that they won. He knows that Garoppolo misses Emmanuel Sanders on the deep throw But when that sucker’s in the air, we’re all screaming because we think he’s gonna complete it.

Watching old games back, it doesn’t matter if you know how the story ends. You convince yourself that they’re gonna change it. And somehow for a 25-year-old, 30-year-old, 40-year-old game, you’re on the edge of your seat. It’s unbelievable.

Awful Announcing: In many ways, the show feels just as much like a podcast as it does a TV show. Sure, you’re re-watching a game, but you aren’t just redoing the play-by-play of it. You’re mainly using it as an opportunity to tell old stories and reminisce.

Kyle Brandt: Believe me, all of our episodes and all of our games had like a whole outline that our staff conceived, and that I wrote things for, and, ‘OK, when this play happens in the second quarter and Kelce makes this catch, we’re gonna go on a long thing about Kelce.’ But then somebody’s ramped up on another story that they’re talking about Andy Reid, and three plays go by, and you kind of missed your window to talk about Kelce.

It makes you empathize with play-by-play and color commentary guys that they have their stories and anecdotes that they want to get in, especially the color commentary guys, and sometimes the game just moves too fast, it goes in a different direction, and you have to be on your toes.

So it did feel like a podcast, and there really wasn’t a script. The easiest money I’ve ever made in my life is doing the Cowboys-Packers game with Michael Irvin and Emmitt Smith, ’cause I think I said 16 words the entire game. I’ve said 10 times as much talking to you right now than I did then, ’cause Irv and Emmitt just go, and they know every nuance of the game and every player on the field, Packers and Cowboys. So that one was just them. I was kind of just sitting there, like, looking at my phone while they talked about the game, and it was just that easy and fun.

Awful Announcing: I’m curious what you make of the entire conversation about the ESPN-NFL deal. For as much as people have talked about potential conflicts of interest, you’re somebody who has actually existed in that world [working for the NFL Network] for the last decade.

Kyle Brandt: I think I’ve done over 2,000 episodes of Good Morning Football, which is over 6,000 hours on the NFL Network, owned by the league. And I don’t think I can think of a single time in 6,000 hours when I was told, ‘don’t talk about that, don’t use that phrase.’ There’s never been a thing where — especially me, who’s pretty loose and pretty from the hip and off the rails — I’ve never been called into a meeting afterwards and they’ve said, ‘we have to address what you mentioned in the 6B segment about this and that.’

It’s never happened. And it’s equally surprising to know that, I mean, I’ve been to NFL headquarters, they have TVs everywhere. Our show is on all day. It’s on in the commissioner’s office. It’s on in everybody’s office. So, if it was the kind of dynamic where they’re like, ‘wow, Kyle, that comparison you just made about X, Y, and Z, not really a good look for the league, we need to cut,’ it’s never happened.

There’s never, not even so much as an email or a text. And we have talked about — I mean, we were birthed in summer of 2016 on Colin Kaepernick. It’s the first big thing that happened on our show. We’ve been through that. We’ve been through, Deshaun Watson. We’ve been through a million unsavory and unfortunate storylines. We’ve talked about officiating, we’ve talked about concussions. All of the ‘this supposed the boogeyman for the NFL,’ I have talked about passionately and unabashedly, and there’s never been a single time that I have gotten my hand slapped for it, ever.

Awful Announcing: You mentioned 2016. This is going to be the 10th season of Good Morning Football. As somebody who’s obviously sentimental, what does that mean to you?

Kyle Brandt: I kind of feel like an athlete when you ask them those questions. ‘Wow, you know, 15 seasons, like, what is that like?’ Usually they’re like, ‘I’m just trying to get to the 16th season, you know what I mean?’

I definitely have some nostalgia, just because this show should never have worked. It was an absurdly packaged thing with four hosts, three of whom never played in the NFL… and so they took a chance on me, and it should have flopped, and it shouldn’t have worked, and yet it did, and it survives through. Tax changes, media landscape changes. Now, looming employer changes, all of that. And I’m also proud of it because our slogan for the show is ‘football should be fun.’ And I turn on some shows where they’re not having fun, and it doesn’t even look like they like football. It looks like they’re always pissed off about it.

I like that there’s a place in an era of hot takers and screaming and WWE works and debates, where it’s just friends at a table talking about football, and they look like they really like it. So, maybe that seems naïve or old-fashioned, but I just love that there’s still a place for that, and I hope there always is.