This isn’t really about Aaron Rodgers

by David Benjamin

“Dan, there’s not a source.”
— Adam Schefter on “The Dan Patrick Show,” 6 May

MADISON, Wis. — Two weeks after impact, a lingering cloud of doubt hovers over the alleged scoop by ESPN’s Adam Schefter — reported on the National Football League’s Draft Day — that Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is spoiling for a divorce from his team.

Schefter has pretty much admitted that he popped his shocker just before the NFL’s biggest annual media event so he could maximize exposure for his personal brand. Indeed, Schefter has built himself into a one-man industry. His profile dwarfs that of ESPN, his nominal employer. Besides being ESPN-TV’s main NFL gumshoe, he’s further exposed on ESPN Radio, in a series of bylined podcasts, on NFL Insider, LinkedIn, Stitcher, Spotify, something called Yardbarker and a host of sites all over the Web. He also collects five-figure speaking fees through an outfit called Sports Management World Wide. He is, in the words of every play-by-play announcer who ever saw the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, “Huge!”

Interviewed on Draft Day on “The Dan Patrick Show,” Schefter claimed that Rodgers is hopelessly estranged from a heartless Packer’s general manager and would rather forgo his three-year, $37.5 million contract and sit out the 2021 season rather than ever set cleats again on the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field.

Zounds! What a bombshell!

Schefter’s strafing run instantly upstaged all other developments during Draft weekend and for the ensuing two weeks — and for the months that will pass before the Packers either smooth Aaron’s ruffled feathers, trade him away from Green Bay or call his bluff and start playing ball without him. Schefter forced the Draft-drunk talking heads on ESPN and the NFL Network and every sports page in America to devote countless hours and endless inches of rumor-mongering, guesswork, gossip and Tarot-reading to the implications of the his perfectly-timed prophecy.

Schefter also triggered a torrent of vituperation from sportscasters, sportswriters, radio sportstalkers and their frenzied “callers,” excoriating the Packer execs who had callously failed to coddle and cosset their snowflake QB.

Meanwhile, back at “The Dan Patrick Show,” a week after the Draft, Schefter was busy elaborating on the factual depths to which he dug to unearth his “exclusive.” After explaining, rather laboriously, that his Draft Day surprise was “an accumulation” of “talk,” Schefter blurted out that he’d composed and exposed the biggest NFL news story of the year without tapping an actual source.

He said he hadn’t talked to anyone in particular. Above all, he had not talked to Aaron, nor to anyone in the Packers organization. He had, however, talked to everyone. He confessed to Patrick, ““This was an accumulation. All during the offseason, of just listening to people talk. And observing.”

Schefter said, “It’s like, it was going on all offseason. You just keep hearing and there’s more and more talk.”

The capper was this: “I’m just telling you throughout the course of the off-season, there was rarely a week that went by without where I didn’t hear something about Aaron Rodgers.”

Schefter, remarkably, seems unaware that, throughout the course of the last twelve seasons in the National Football League, not two days have transpired when the sportscasting community did not “hear something about Aaron Rodgers.”

Or Tom Brady, Drew Brees and Russell Wilson. Superstar quarterbacks are a perpetually babbling brook of sports jabber, celebrity gossip and feverish rumor. Guys like Schefter are the minnows who feed off the flow and poop in the water.

A few sportswriters have quibbled over Schefter’s impetuosity, questioning his grandstand timing on Draft Day. Few of his peers have objected, however, to Schefter’s inability to cite either a primary or secondary source, or to the absence of a response from any affected party (say, the Packers), or to a follow-up interview or two.

Or any interview at all.

The harshest critic was the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand, who wrote, “On Schefter and Rodgers, a reporter can’t win when trying to explain a scoop using anonymous sources because there is too much you can’t answer.”

Okay, who the hell is this Marchand character to question Adam Schefter?

Or me, for that matter!

But let me try.

By watching All the President’s Men, Absence of Malice, Spotlight, The Post and other newspaper movies, we’ve all learned that a single-source story cannot survive scrutiny from the editor-in-chief in a real news organization. We’ve learned that the reporter’s imperative is to get a quote from an eyewitness who doesn’t mind seeing his name in the papers. We know, from the movies, that any statement by an anonymous source must be backed up by other sources — as many as possible — who can corroborate, word for word, the nameless source’s story.

Otherwise, no story.

Once, while writing a book about “whistleblowers,” I poked into charges of overt racism in the Boston Red Sox organization. I tracked down one of the Black players, Tommy Harper, who had been affected by the historic bigotry of the Sox front office. For twenty minutes, I stood with Harper in his doorway, imploring him to tell his story in full, naming names, for the record. Weary of his struggle and wary of retaliation by the Red Sox, Harper declined. He said he’d just as soon leave behind that dark chapter in his career.

I needed his willing testimony, quoted by name. Without that, no supporting witness — even if I found one — would convince an editor to print the story. I needed the facts from the horse’s mouth.

The horse’s mouth, for Schefter, was Aaron Rodgers, who apparently never spoke to Schefter. Nor do we even know whether Schefter knocked on Rodger’s door and tried to get him to talk. Speaking of horses, Rodgers attended the Kentucky Derby the day after Schefter’s scoop, where mobs of reporters got the Tommy Harper brushoff. In two weeks since the Derby, Rodgers has still said nothing about his future with the Packers.

It might be true that Rodgers is fatally disgruntled with the Packers. Chances are that Schefter’s “accumulation” is more or less accurate. But this likelihood is beside the point that Schefter either neglected — or failed — to do the legwork and buttonhole-snagging required of a professional reporter in any news beat other than sports.

By any normal editorial standard, Schefter’s report was slovenly, gossipy and self-serving. Yet, he got away with it. ESPN could have followed up (ethically) by noting that Schefter’s bombshell contained neither evidence nor attribution. ESPN could have — should have — sanctioned Schefter for flouting the canons that protect serious news organizations from the rising chorus of “fake news” detractors.

Instead, as they say, crickets. Despite the reality that some of the best, most honest and eloquent reporters in the history of the news have peered out of the press box onto the ballfield, sportswriting too often operates outside the rigorous rules that constrain — and often frustrate — those journalists who cover areas like public affairs, foreign policy, education, finance, fashion, cooking, the obits, the weather and the crossword puzzle. Schefter — at least in this example — epitomizes, lamentably, what Jim Murray, the great LA Times sportswriter, once confessed about his own beat:

“We work in the toy department.”