Sports agent Rich Paul and former ESPN personality Max Kellerman team up with Bill Simmons for a new video podcast on Spotify and Netflix, promising a fresh perspective on sports and culture. The show marks a reconciliation between Paul and Simmons, who previously had public disagreements.
At this stage of the saturated athlete-podcaster landscape, the formula is familiar. But when Bill Simmons announced last month that The Ringer, his sports and culture media company, would launch a show hosted by superagent Rich Paul and former ESPN personality Max Kellerman , there was an unusual element of frisson.
Kellerman had been uncharacteristically silent since the network let him go in 2023, while his former and similarly vocal cohost Stephen A. Smith continued holding forth on what went wrong between them. Paul, one of the defining forces in the NBA since his client LeBron James entered the league in 2003, has largely operated behind the scenes. And in the popular basketball fan imagination, Paul and Simmons are thought to be enemies, owing to some back-and-forth public criticism spanning more than a decade. With Game Over, a talk show conducted in the au courant format of a video podcast, debuting on Monday on Spotify before it also appears on Netflix, Simmons and Paul have put aside their differences and promised, along with Kellerman, to offer something both more precise and holistic than the typical available fare. Kellerman and Paul’s relationship started as media personality and source, they say in an interview, while Kellerman was at ESPN. “Sometimes live on air as the topic came up,” Kellerman says of Paul, “he dropped a little jewel in there.” While there’s no shortage of podcasters today with a claim to firsthand experience of their subject matter, Paul hopes that his vantage as an agent who helped usher in the era of player empowerment would provide something unique. His main client, James, has led the charge of athletes not only having more of a say in where they suit up, but in controlling their image and messaging. “I understand the business, and I also understand the position I’m in,” Paul says, offering a calm but unshy recitation of his credentials. “You see players with platforms, you see other executives with platforms. And so I was really way out in front of it.” Shortly after Kellerman was laid off by ESPN, Paul called him with an idea for what would eventually become Game Over. “He’s like, ‘You ready to do the show?’” Kellerman remembers. But Kellerman stayed quiet for a couple of years as he awaited the end of his noncompete agreement, while Smith, his former cohost on ESPN’s First Take, hasn’t been bashful about saying he wanted Kellerman off the show. “I’m shot out of a cannon because I’ve been sitting for two years,” Kellerman says. Smiling, he referred to First Take as only “the other show,” and declined to say much about his time with Smith, promising to go into more detail on Game Over. Simmons had his own falling out with ESPN following his criticism of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, and he left the network in 2015 after working there for 14 years. It has not always been a given that the old guard of sports media personalities would translate to the modern podcasting era, but Simmons had long coveted Kellerman for his network of shows. “It’s so rare to find unique, thoughtful sports voices who can thrive as a solo act or with someone else,” he says of Kellerman in an email. “They completely misunderstood why he’s good, which is par for the course for ESPN by the way.” To the extent that every player is now also a podcaster, every fan is now also a sports media critic. “Max Kellerman Gets His Ultimate Revenge on Stephen A. Smith by Joining LeBron James and Rich Paul,” read the title of one YouTube reaction video after Simmons announced the new show. As for Paul and Simmons, the prevailing narrative of their animosity has stemmed from Simmons’s withering criticism of The Decision, James’s much-derided—but perhaps, as Paul would later argue, ultimately prescient—2010 television special announcing his departure from his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers. “I think he him,” Simmons said of Paul when he announced their surprise partnership. “I didn’t think he liked me.” They both say, though, that the past iciness between them actually concerned a matter of industry inside baseball, dating back to when Paul left Creative Artists Agency in 2012 to found Klutch Sports Group, an agency that later entered into a partnership with United Talent Agency. “The whole thing was pretty stupid,” Simmons says. “I didn’t like the way he left CAA and he didn’t like that I never asked for his side of the story. One of us should have just called the other. Shit happens. We worked it out in like 10 minutes over french fries.” Simmons learned over the same lunch meeting that Paul and Kellerman had what he defined as the hallmark of any of The Ringer’s successful shows. They “have great chemistry together,” he says. “It’s really that simple. People come for the hosts, they don’t come for the idea.” The sentiment has borne out in any number of media ventures in a fragmented, creator-driven landscape, where audience loyalties often revolve around parasocial relationships to those wielding podcasting microphones. “It’s a crowded space,” Paul acknowledged, noting his status as a media newcomer. “Obviously I’m not going to come out and look like Floyd Mayweather in his prime, but at the same time, the foundation is there and you lean on somebody like a Max to help you get better with your rhythm and with your conversation and with your takes.” They have been rehearsing in preparation for the show, and anticipate that they will have no shortage of material . Paul had already planned his first question: What happened at First Take? “So what am I going to say?” Kellerman responds, gearing up for yet another turn in the sports media arena. “I’m not going to talk about it? No, I’m going to answer the question.”
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