Mina Kimes Eats All-22 Tape for Breakfast

Mina Kimes spends most of her waking hours thinking about football. That’s her job, of course: She’s just wrapping up her first year as an analyst on ESPN’s NFL Live show, and she dispenses her razor-sharp, internet-inflected takes on a wide swath of television, radio, and podcast programming, both inside and outside the Worldwide Leader in Sports. But as she tells it, she’d probably be waking up thinking about football even if she were still an investigative business reporter, which she was until ESPN hired her to write for its magazine in 2014. A personal interest in nerdy Xs and Os analysis—while reporting profiles and features for the magazine, she’d appear on her buddy Bill Barnwell’s in-the-weeds football podcast—quickly became the whole job.

When not crushing NFL tape for the playoffs this month, Kimes somehow found time to break a huge baseball story: working on a tip she received years ago, she worked with ESPN writer Jeff Passan to report that recently hired New York Mets general manager Jared Porter had sent a series of unsolicited, explicit texts and photographs to a female reporter in 2016. The story resulted in Porter’s firing.

With the NFL playoffs coming to a head, and with Kimes on just about every platform for the biggest sports channel on the planet, GQ called her up to talk about her career path, the Porter story, and her favorite playoff storylines.

GQ: You're coming to the end of your first full season doing football television. How has it been?

Mina Kimes: Well, it's been an unusual season, and not just for people in and around the league. I've really just enjoyed getting to focus full-time on football. Prior to this I was a bit of more of a generalist. I was doing a football podcast, but the shows I do at ESPN, like Around the Horn and Highly Questionable, are broader. So to work full-time on a football show and get to spend all of my waking hours studying and thinking about football—which I was mostly doing anyways—it’s been really fun. And it’s not like I have anything else to do right now, right?

What is different about shifting from that generalist’s approach to clocking in every day on football? What has changed about watching the game for you?

We really want our show to be both entertaining and educational. We do a lot of tape, a lot of Xs and Os. We'll dig into details in the game that you're not going to see on some of the more general shows. I've just been able to devote more hours of my day to thinking about that, which is a luxury. It's just really fun: I was friends with the people on my show already because we were just texting about football nerd shit. And then we started doing a show together, and now those conversations are just on television.

Is football just more interesting than it's ever been? It seems like the schemes and the granularity with which we can discuss it feels like it's gotten so advanced, especially with someone who's in your position explaining, Well, this is how it works.

I think it's really creative right now. And a lot of that has to do not only with the play design, or how NFL coaches are more likely than ever to borrow ideas from college, but also the types of quarterbacks that are excelling—though it feels weird to say that in a final four that still has Tom Brady. Quarterback play right now is better than it's ever been. And that's partially because NFL teams have become more open-minded to the types of quarterbacks that they're willing to draft and develop, which is to say more athletic quarterbacks, dual-threat quarterbacks. It's a golden age for mobile quarterbacks right now.

Is that the broader story of the 2020 football seasons for you?

I feel like any answer other than “coronavirus” is wrong.

Non-COVID division.

Well, right now, with this final four, you've got the old guys on one side and then [Patrick] Mahomes and [Josh] Allen on the other end. It really feels like the best possible final four. It's been an interesting dichotomy, because in the playoffs, there were all these older quarterbacks in their late thirties. But the truth is, outside of Rodgers and Brady, no other older quarterback was playing at a super high level, candidly. You had [Ben] Roethlisberger, [Drew] Brees, [Philip] Rivers, and their teams were carrying them more. There's such a dramatic gap between those guys and this new breed of younger, mobile, fun quarterbacks who are taking over the league: [Lamar] Jackson, Allen, Mahomes, [Deshaun] Watson. It feels like there's finally this younger generation of truly elite quarterbacks. It frankly took a while, between the ones who are now in their late thirties and this generation.

You profiled Aaron Rodgers a few years ago. That was a fun story—he's a weird, interesting guy. What sort of vantage point does that give you on the season he's had, and who that dude is as a person or as a football player?

Well, I think he's a maniacal competitor, but that's such a boring and obvious thing to say about any elite quarterback. Just once I'd love to profile a quarterback who's not a maniacal competitor, but is really good anyways. How great would that be like, Oh yeah, he doesn’t really care. He's like really not trying that hard, but he's just incredible.

I think it's been fascinating to watch this season from Rodgers because of how much he's bought into the offense. Part of the reason Green Bay's offense is so deadly this year is the design of it, and the fact that Rodgers has quarterbacked it within the structure of what Matt LaFleur is doing. For example, against the Rams in the divisional round, it was a lot of running the football, a lot of quick passes, and Rodgers didn't really uncork a deep shot off a play action until near the end of the game, on the touchdown pass to [Allen] Lazard. But he's fine with that. He trusts the system now. Sometimes with older quarterbacks, that doesn't happen.

With three games left in the season, what questions remain that you want to see answered?

With the Chiefs, it’s the dynasty question. They have all the pieces in place, but this is very much their window—this is the best shot a team has at becoming the next Patriots. But they'd have to do it this year. [Josh] Allen’s already answered questions—we’re talking about a young guy who’s made a historically unprecedented leap from year two to three. I don't think that he has anything remaining to prove.

I want you to like dig deep into the nerd bag: Who is the most interesting player left in the playoffs?

I'm trying to give you, like, a hipster answer, since you asked for one. How about Aaron Stinnie? He is a starting guard for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He was a practice squad player very recently, but they lost their starting right guard, Alex Cappa. With Tom Brady, the difference when he's under pressure—he goes from Tom Brady to being Tom...Thibodeau. It's not a great time to lose your starting guard if you’re Tampa, which has had an excellent offensive line all year. They're facing a Green Bay pass rush that's peaking at the right time. I imagine [defensive coordinator Mike] Pettine's going to dial up a lot of twists and stunts to try to get one of his better rushers inside, bothering Brady, pushing the pocket. I'm telling you: That's going to decide the game.

I want to ask about the baseball story you just put out. Can you tell me a little bit about how you wound up reporting and breaking the story about Jared Porter, the now-fired Mets GM?

This is a story that I was tipped off to in 2017, back when I was a reporter. And the source wasn't ready to tell the story. So I just checked in periodically until she was. Then I enlisted the help of Jeff Passan, who is a friend and a phenomenal reporter, to finish the reporting and writing. It's something that I've lived with for a few years now. Not in the way that source has, but it's something that I frankly wasn't sure if it would ever see the light of day.

You’re sitting on the story about a woman harassed out of pursuing a job in sports media, as your career over that same period was cranking up. That must have been an intense experience.

It just makes me reflect on how fortunate I've been. One of the most important factors in that story—and people seem to understand this, fortunately—was that the source was not only disempowered and marginalized because of her gender, but also because she was not from this country and not a native English speaker. While in some ways I lack privilege, in other ways I have a ton of it. I have a lot of resources and power. And when I've been in uncomfortable situations, just as every woman, practically, in this industry has been, I've been a lot luckier and had more help.

Highly Questionable is one of the shows that you appear on, and [creator and former host] Dan Le Batard is no longer with ESPN in part because, as I understand, he felt he was unable to exercise his most full-throated political beliefs. I don't get the sense that you have any issue expressing the things that you feel.

No, but I also—I'm trying to think of a way to say this that's not self-aggrandizing. If I feel something deeply about a subject that goes beyond Xs and Os or things that are happening on the field and I feel like I have something to add to the conversation, I will say it. But beyond that, I do feel pretty acutely that just being my presence in a lot of the programming I do is a statement in and of itself. Or at least a shift or a change that perhaps can affect viewers, readers, listeners in ways that I never anticipated and I've only begun to understand.

You're a big Twitter presence, and you seem a lot more willing to engage with, let's say, people operating in bad faith than I'd expect from someone with such a big following. What drives you to want to engage with the trolls of the world?

Usually a lack of impulse control, if you really want the answer. But I try to be thoughtful about the decisions I make, because the reality is you're seeing is, like, one one-hundredth of it. And for me the thought process, if I'm ever deciding to “amplify a voice” or a point that's being made either in bad faith or is problematic, I ask myself, Can I make a funny joke? That's the first one. And two, Can I make a point?

Sometimes people say "Don't feed the trolls, don't magnify this, don't give this person a platform." But I actually think it's useful for people to understand that this is out there. People always ask me if it upsets me, and for sure it does a little bit, but mostly in a cosmic sense, not a personal one. They're not all bots. These are real human beings somewhere typing something really hurtful and angry. I think it's useful for us to not sweep it under the rug.

The Porter story was your first byline in a while. Do you miss writing?

Sometimes, but for a few years at ESPN, I was writing and doing analysis, and that was hard to do. Back then I didn't have the time that I have now to do film study or grab stats or talk to people and develop ideas. I do miss reporting and writing a bit, but I don't miss juggling too many things.

How did you shift from feature writing to that harder analysis mode?

Early in my career, I was an investigative journalist, and not too far into working at ESPN, maybe even a year or less, I started doing regular appearances on my friend Bill Barnwell[’s podcast], which is a pretty hardcore football show that was my first exploration into analysis. From there I started doing some radio, which is a pretty common path for people at ESPN on the take journey, if you will. And I did fantasy football radio, which is hilarious in retrospect, because I'm not great at fantasy football.

One thing led to another, and I became a panelist on Around the Horn, which is mostly reporters. So I was still a reporter as I was doing all of these things, but gradually got to the point where I was writing less and talking more, quite frankly. I started podcasting and then this year I transitioned primarily to television.

Football fandom seems like it’s evolved so much. There are still very stupid fans, but the level of discourse that's happening has become pretty advanced. It seems as if that you're a part of that shift, and I wonder what it feels like from that side.

My transition was more from a reporter to an analyst. A lot of the things I learned about football along the way were a product not of fandom but of reporting stories about football players, and wanting to be educated when I spoke with them. Even if the final product, whether it was just a profile or whatever, was more focused on off-the-field matters. I've always found it very important when I was a reporter to understand the Xs and Os, and use that information to better understand the subjects that I was writing about.

So to me the process of studying, learning, synthesizing information, it reminded me a little bit of when I was a business reporter. The subject matter is different, but the tools are very much the same. Here's the data I'm working with, here are the people I need to talk to, the questions I need to ask. And I went from asking those questions about financial things, to asking them about football.

How does your sense of your own career now compare to what you thought it would be five, or 10, or however many years ago?

Zero. There wasn't even like a little kernel inside of me that thought I would be doing this five years ago. Forget 10 years ago. I guess I thought I would be writing about sports, but no, I never aspired to be on television, much less to be—this is going to sound really corny, but the subject of my own story or the person who's being interviewed.

Sometimes I would go on TV to talk about my stories—there was a very unfortunate C-SPAN appearance that I really hope is not on the internet anymore. But in any case, I harbored no ambitions. I didn't turn on sports television and think I want to be that person, probably in part because there was no one that looked like me. This has been as much of a surprise to me as it probably is to some old dude turning on his TV somewhere.

Has learning that you can do it and can be good at it, is that switched on deeper, weirder ambitions in that zone? Is there stuff you want to try now that you might not have given yourself permission to before?

Well, no. I'm pretty rudderless as a human, but I get offered things and someone, usually my agent, gives me a kick in the pants to say yes to them. When the Rams asked me to work their preseason games, that was not something I ever thought I would do or had the ability to do, but said, "Yes." That's something I've gotten better at: saying yes to things. That's really hard for young women like myself to do. Maybe some young people in general—I don't want to generalize. But, in any case, I don't have a master plan.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Originally Appeared on GQ