Three Sports Media Landing Spots For Jason Kelce

On Monday, Jason Kelce announced what we all figured was coming-- his retirement. The longtime Philadelphia Eagles center called it a career today and was unable to hold back his tears. It was a nice moment and end to a great career for Kelce, who will go down in sports history as one of Philly's most beloved athletes.

Now, however, the attention turns to what Kelce might do next. He has grown beyond merely being a well-liked future Hall of Fame football player over the last six months as his proximity to the Travis Kelce-Taylor Swift romance propelled his overall fame into the stratosphere; there are now many people who know him by his New Heights podcast with Travis instead of his football career. As a result he proved to a lot of new people what many already knew-- that he's an easy going personality who would be great on television. And given how popular the playing field-to-television pipeline is nowadays, it's only natural to expect Kelce to end up working in some capacity for one of the NFL rights-holding networks. Will it actually happen? We'd put our money on yes. But it isn't set in stone.

Regardless, let's think about it. Kelce does not seem suited to be a color commentator, which is where the biggest money is. He'd probably be good at it but it's an extremely competitive field right now and the whole "trying to find the next Tony Romo" thing fell out of fashion at the same time Romo himself did. Instead it seems far more likely that this Kelce brother would follow the path of JJ Watt, who spent a little bit of time actually retired before doing studio analysis for CBS on Sundays.

With that in mind, where could Kelce end up?

ESPN

ESPN has a ton of former players on their roster and even has an elevated partnership with a former NFL player-run production company in the form of Omaha Studios and Peyton Manning. So there are a couple different paths for Kelce to take if he decides the Worldwide Leader should be his next home. Does he want to become a Jeff Saturday-type who shows up for spot appearances on the morning shows? They could easily make that work. Does he want to try to make content similar to Peyton's Places? ESPN would be happy to do it.

It feels like if Kelce is looking for a low-key commitment, ESPN is the place to do it. They can pay him well enough for his team but don't need him to be part of any of their central programming. The biggest role they'd have for him is a spot on the Sunday Countdown desk and that isn't really a cornerstone for viewership so even that wouldn't be a massive responsibility. Kelce landing here would tell us a lot about what he wants from his second career.

CBS

CBS obviously doesn't have the aggressive level of 24-hour sports coverage that ESPN or even Fox Sports has, but they sure do have a need for talent right now. As Andrew Marchand noted for The Athletic ahead of the Super Bowl, four of the six members from CBS' The NFL Today desk need new contracts. Jim Brown re-upped already, but as it stands only he and JJ Watt are currently slated to return. It's likely they'll go after Nate Burleson given his rising fame in the non-sporting world, but the Phil Simms/Boomer Esiason/Bill Cowher trio could all be gone. In which case CBS would need to re-stock their retired NFL player talent. Enter Kelce.

Aiding their case if Kelce is shopping his talents around is that Watt's integration last season was pretty much seamless (minus the Super Bowl hair thing). The network has a recently-used blueprint to onboard him for television. It's a bit more of a commitment to do The NFL Today week-in and week-out than if Kelce joined other networks but since CBS is now at the back end of the Super Bowl broadcast rotation there isn't nearly as much pressure to deliver every week as there presumably was last season. A nice shallow pool for Kelce to dip his toes into if he wants to give something resembling full-time television a try.

NBC

NBC has a lot of similar traits with CBS that could appeal to Kelce. He'd only work one day a week as part of Football Night In America, which could be more appealing to him from a branding perspective since it's definitely the most famous primetime pregame show and the only one where people are tuning in to catch what they missed from earlier. They don't have any spots opening up but they did seamlessly integrate a newly-retired NFL player into the crew (Devin McCourty) and gave him a lot of room to show off his talent. Both sides would benefit from a partnership-- Kelce gets a big stage and NBC gets a draw for younger audiences.

As the most "intense" option NBC might not be on the table for Kelce if he's trying to take it easy for a while. Transitioning from the playing field to the 7 p.m. timeslot isn't easy to do over the course of six months. But if Kelce wants to capitalize on his momentum as a budding media star there would be no better spot to be.