The Hot-Take Format Wins on Ratings. That’s What Should Worry You.

Kirk Herbstreit said on The Inner Circle Podcast in December 2025, as Barrett Media reported, that he watches some of the NFL shows on various networks and “it drives me crazy where our industry has gone.” The reason: “it’s a lot of clickbait. It’s a lot of like really loud comments that will maybe go viral.” He pointed at the “let’s argue to argue” approach of Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith, and said of chasing virality, “Man, I will quit before I ever do that.”

Herbstreit was making a point about College GameDay, which he said keeps its focus on the football and not on its own personalities. If that ever changed, he said, “I would be so fast gone out of studio television.” That is a notable thing for a company man to say in public.

Here is the part nobody wants to sit with: the format works, and the ratings say so.

Update, October 2026: The ratings case has only gotten stronger. ESPN’s own January 2026 release says First Take averaged 517,000 viewers in 2025, its most-watched year ever, up 6 percent from 2024. That is the network’s claim about its own show, but it is the same direction as every number below.

First Take by the Numbers

First Take averaged 614,000 viewers in November 2023, its most-watched month ever and its 16th straight month of growth, according to Barrett Media. Across September through November 2023, per Front Office Sports figures reported by Awful Announcing, it averaged 554,000 viewers to 120,000 for FS1’s Undisputed.

That does not prove the analysis got sharper. It proves the style draws an audience, and it is easy to see why a show would conclude that certainty beats nuance. Nobody tunes in to hear “it’s complicated.”

The Copycat Lost Badly

Fox Sports 1 tried to beat that formula with its own version. Undisputed ran the same hot-take premise against First Take and lost the ratings fight. Bayless left the show on August 2, 2024, and FS1 later confirmed it had been canceled.

ESPN, meanwhile, had not waited for a verdict. In September 2023, Stephen A. Smith announced that Pat McAfee would join First Take on Tuesdays. ESPN’s answer to a show that was already winning was to add another big personality, not to question the format. The lesson the industry took from the ratings was not “maybe fans want more context.”

What the Format Trains

Treat sports commentary as a courtroom where somebody has to lose every argument on command, and the likely result is an audience trained to read every roster move, bad quarter and coaching decision as a binary: bust or Hall of Famer, blow it up or run it back, because the format has no mechanism for “let’s wait and see.” That is an argument, not a finding. But fans who marinate in it for years seem likelier to become fluent in the performance of having an opinion than sharper consumers of the sport, which is a different skill, and a worse one.

None of this means Stephen A. Smith is bad at his job. By the ratings, he is extremely good at it, and that is the problem. The job was never “explain basketball.” The job is to generate a reaction, and almost nobody does it better. The issue is what happens when a fan ecosystem starts mistaking reaction for analysis, because reaction is the version of sports commentary that gets the audience.

VDG Sports, where Vince Douglas Gregory writes about the business and culture of sports, will keep serving hot takes with the receipts attached.

Vince Douglas Gregory

Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.