The Job Should Not Pay What It Pays

Adam Schefter makes nine million dollars a year to answer his phone. NFL Insiders make too much.

That is not a knock on his work ethic. The man genuinely works seven days a week and sleeps with his phone next to the shower. But nine million dollars a year is what ESPN decided the ability to repeat what an agent or a front office just told you is worth. For reference, that is more than most starting quarterbacks made a decade ago. It is more than most beat writers who actually cover teams, travel, build real relationships with players, and write substantive football content will make in their entire careers combined.

And Schefter is not even the only one. Ian Rapoport, Dianna Russini, Tom Pelissero, Jeff Darlington, Jeremy Fowler. The insider tier is a full industry now. All of them chasing the same phone calls. All of them competing to be four minutes faster than the next one. All of them getting paid like they are producing something that could not exist without them.

The teams can tweet. The agents can send the same text to twelve reporters simultaneously. The players post farewell videos before trades are official. The information exists. It is moving. The insiders are just charging a toll to stand in the middle of it.

Speed Beats Accuracy Every Time, and Nobody Pays a Price for It

The David Montgomery trade last year is as clean an example as you will find. Rapoport beat Schefter by seconds to report that Houston sent a fifth-round pick to Detroit for Montgomery. Schefter filed the same. They were both wrong. The actual deal was a fourth-rounder, a seventh-rounder, and offensive lineman Juice Scruggs. Three assets. Not one. Both reporters corrected it minutes later. Both kept their jobs, their salaries, and their credibility with the audience that keeps treating them like referees.

That is the game. Both reporters said something false. Both said it because their brand lives and dies on being first. The source either gave them bad information or gave them partial information and they ran with it anyway because waiting to confirm means someone else breaks it first. Nobody ever finds out which one. Nobody asks. The next story starts immediately and everyone moves on.

The escape hatch is always the same. My source told me this. My source was wrong. I reported what I was told. It is the only profession in media where the person who gave you the wrong information faces no consequences, the person who broadcast the wrong information faces no consequences, and the audience that got misled just reloads the feed to see what is next.

Russini Is Not the Problem. She’s Just the Most Visible Right Now.

The reason Dianna Russini is the name people are saying this week is because she has had a run of misses that are hard to explain away. Steve Sarkisian had to hold a press conference after an overtime win and call her report “absolutely ridiculous” and “completely unprofessional.” His agents at CAA released a formal denial, which his agent said had never happened once in Sarkisian’s career. Aaron Rodgers called one of her Jets reports “100% false” on record and confirmed he does not speak to her. The receipts are real.

But the pile-on framing that she is uniquely bad at this job, or that she does not belong in it, misses the actual problem. The job as designed produces exactly what she is doing. Move fast. Use what sources give you. When it is wrong, blame the source. Protect the source. Repeat. Russini is not running a different play than everyone else in her tier. She is just getting called for it more right now because her misses have been louder.

The Sarkisian situation specifically shows how the whole machine operates. Her report moved everywhere within minutes. Every outlet picked it up. Texas had to manage its locker room around a story that came from one anonymous phone call that the subject of the story called completely false. The person who made the call answered to nobody. Russini went on Le Batard and said she stood by her reporting. The story died. She moved on. Nobody found out who the source was or what they were actually trying to do.

That is not a Russini failure. That is the system producing its intended result.

The Audience Is the Last to Figure This Out

The way fans treat insider reports and the way the actual information moves are two completely different things. Fans see Schefter tweet something and treat it as close to confirmed. The tweet gets screenshotted, shared, posted in every team group chat. By the time a correction comes, if one comes at all, most people never see it. The original version is the version that sticks.

The insiders know this. The networks know this. The sources know this. The only people operating like the information is reliable are the fans.

The Maxx Crosby situation is what happens when you watch it break in real time with your eyes open. Multiple reporters. Multiple versions of the same story. Conflicting accounts of what Crosby wanted, what the Raiders would accept, what the Ravens found in the physical. All of them citing sources. None of them able to all be right. The dust is still settling. Whoever was wrong will say their source was wrong. The source will never be named. Nobody will be held to anything.

Russini is going to keep getting criticized, and some weeks she will deserve every bit of it. But Schefter will keep defending front offices that feed him information, Rapoport will keep racing to file before confirming, and ESPN will keep paying nine million dollars a year for a job that produces noise more reliably than it produces news.

The question is not whether the insiders will get it wrong again. That one is settled. The question is when fans start treating these reports the way they treat the weather forecast: interesting, occasionally useful, and never something you bet on until you can see it yourself.