Excerpts from The Believer: An Interview with Mina Kimes
“My goal isn’t to be the best, because I’m not and never will be. It’s just to be better than I was yesterday—which is a very sports-brain thing.”
Why Mina Kimes believes the NFL remains so culturally dominant:
- Every game matters
- It expanded its fan base through fantasy
- It’s inherently complicated and there’s always more to learn
- Its best players are extremely fun to root for
For most of my life, I was a die-hard sports fan who considered SportsCenter as much a part of a balanced breakfast as a bowl of Wheaties. But then I turned thirty, got divorced, moved to a new city, and pursued writing more seriously. I wondered, Was loving sports something I should shed, like so many other habits of my past life? I tried living a (relatively) sports-free life. A few years later, it was clear: Nah. I love the agony and the ecstasy of professional competition and the catharsis it brings. I especially love professional football. Happily, when I dove back into NFL coverage in 2020, I found a fresh new face: Mina Kimes, a woman my age, was on Around the Horn with familiar stalwarts like The Denver Gazette’s Woody Paige, chopping it up about the evolution of the college football ranking system, players kneeling during the national anthem, and the hypocrisy of the Athletics leaving Oakland.
Mina is one of the least likely figures in professional sports coverage. The daughter of a US military veteran and a Korean immigrant, she graduated from Yale and became an award-winning investigative journalist for Fortune and Bloomberg. But then a twist of fate led her to a new career path. In 2014, she published a personal essay on Tumblr about how rediscovering her love of football connected her with her dad. The post was republished on Slate, and soon ESPN The Magazine came calling. There she wrote about everything from eSports, to Korean baseball bat flipping, to features on Aaron Rodgers and Justin Herbert. Mina is a deeply analytical thinker who can distill a spreadsheet’s worth of data points into sound-bite-sized nuggets that any fantasy football player can digest. As she appeared on more radio and TV shows, the obvious could not be denied: This writer was herself a star. The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny started in 2018 and became one of the most popular podcasts offered by ESPN. (Lenny is her dog.) And in 2020, the network promoted her to NFL analyst, making her the first woman, and woman of color, to hold that title. Mina is a regular on the channel’s First Take morning show, and is a member of the core team featured on its daily football news show, NFL Live.
Given her unique and unlikely path to the pinnacle of sports commentary, it’s not surprising that Mina continued to break the mold. She wasn’t just subverting expectations of which gender or backgrounds are necessary for an elite football analyst; she was reshaping the role such an analyst could have in the culture beyond sports. Mina showed up everywhere. She was featured in GQ, The Washington Post, and Slate’s advice column, Dear Prudence. She broke down Nicolas Cage’s best acting moments on The Rewatchables podcast, gained hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers by deploying pitch-perfect memes, and appeared as celebrity chef David Chang’s phone-a-friend in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, boosting Chang to victory by correctly identifying Benjamin Harrison as the first US president to have electricity in the White House. She stretched expectations across the entire cultural spectrum: The wide horizon of her curiosity encouraged sports fans to embrace their own multitudes, while her technical prowess showed non–sports folks that the intricacies of the game can be a puzzle worth solving.
We met in her sprawling backyard in Los Angeles, which is filled with fruit trees she has been harvesting from, baking the fruit into layer cakes and cobblers. The culinary flair isn’t just for fun: Mina is preparing for a cooking competition show that will be filmed in the UK this fall. I can’t believe that the busiest woman in football is planning to add another obligation to her life, mid-season. But Mina Kimes lives for this.
I was thrilled to talk to someone whose football analysis I so admire, and whose dog I parasocially adore. But I also wanted to dig under the surface and hear how her background in investigative journalism influences the stories she chooses to tell; what it feels like to be broadening the sports landscape to include more people like her and like me; and how her obvious ambition is evolving now that she’s entered a world of her own.
— Sarah Enni
I. TUMBLR ORIGINS
THE BELIEVER: Let’s start with the Tumblr post that changed your life—the one where you describe how you, as an adult, were able to connect with your dad through your shared interest in the Seahawks. What was the impetus to write that?
MINA KIMES: In college I had a Blogspot. It was super-pretentious writing about music and literature, mostly, though I wrote a little bit about myself. But after college I went straight into business journalism and from there I became an investigative reporter, so I stopped doing much personal writing. Football was a lifelong interest and passion, but I really had the time to dedicate to it after college.
When I wrote that essay on Tumblr in 2014, I was on a plane back from a work trip. I’d finished all my transcribing and had a few hours, and I had all these thoughts. By that point, I was spending so much of my free time not just watching football but also reading about it and listening to podcasts and trying to learn more about the game. So it was occupying a lot of my brain space. And that would trickle into my conversations with my dad and give us something to talk about. I thought, I’ll just put this online and maybe my friends will like it. So I posted it on Tumblr, and then this editor at Slate, Josh Levin, reached out to me about cross-posting it there. And that’s how ESPN The Magazine’s editors found it.
For me, the social aspect of football was like a nice side effect—not only in terms of talking to my dad. It also allowed me to talk to strangers and make friends. I think that’s the reason a lot of us love the game so much—it brings us closer to other people. But that wasn’t what made me love it and re-devote all my time to it. It was the fact that I found it so exciting, intellectually. Having watched football all my life, I understood it on one level. But it was around that time that I started trying to understand it on even deeper levels. And as I spent more time doing that, I loved it even more. That’s how I still feel about it today.
BLVR: How did you start going deeper? You’re known for parsing advanced analytics now; was that your entry point?
MK: Some of it was understanding gameplay better. After college, when I really had the time to devote to it, there were so many more resources, like YouTube. When I was young, I couldn’t have said, I think that was this type of run-play option, but I’m not sure. Let me ask the internet. I’m somebody who has always liked using numbers to understand stuff better. Around that time—mid-2000s—I discovered Grantland writers Chris Brown and Bill Barnwell, who both took more of an analytical approach to writing about football. Reading them taught me a lot.
BLVR: In your personal essay you describe your dad as very analytical—you say he had a fifty-point plan to get you into college. Is that something you guys share?
MK: My dad and I share a lot, good and bad. Where he’s influenced how I approached the game is less about numbers, per se, and more about overpreparation—being very regimented about studying and my analytical process. Like, every day I wake up and the first thing I do is make a to-do list, organized by hour. When I first told my husband that, he was flabbergasted that anyone lives that way. That’s a habit I got from my dad, who was in the military. It’s just how I live my life. It’s the same approach I took to studying football in the beginning, and now it’s how I approach my job—sometimes to my detriment creatively, to be honest. But I think it’s also helped me in a lot of ways.
BLVR: I also took a break from paying attention to sports, and part of the reason was the tenor of sports coverage. For a lot of the time when we were growing up, it was very macho and kind of toxic and—
MK: Jacked up.
BLVR: What do you find annoying about sports coverage and what do you try to avoid?
MK: There are a lot of things. First of all, I think football fans are way smarter now than they used to be. They have access to a lot of information and therefore have a deeper understanding of everything from roster construction to camp management to play-calling, analytics, all that. And the coverage has come so far over the last few years in terms of meeting fans where they are. I’d like to think that the show I’m on, NFL Live, respects our viewers too much to trot out the same old, tired debates. Instead of yes-or-no questions, let’s start with why and how. Why is this offense good? How are they doing it? That’s how I like to talk about football. So football coverage is in a really good place, in some ways.
As far as what I don’t like—this is the case in other sports too—football is still reactionary to the last game. Like: This happened, so he sucks, or he’s the best quarterback ever, instead of taking a more holistic view. If I want to make a broader statement about a player or a team or an offense, I’m considering a larger dataset. Always. That approach keeps me honest instead of reactionary. But I also love talking about when I’m wrong, which I try to do from time to time. Like, what did I miss here? What did I not see coming? These things are not set—players improve, players get worse, players get hurt. There are a million different reasons why an opinion that is based on a good analytical process can be wrong a couple of weeks later. But as long as my process is good, I feel OK about being wrong.
I also think football coverage is way behind the teams themselves when it comes to analytics and modern game management. The way analysts talk about fourth-down decision-making or two-point strategies is typically behind where the teams are. People think of coaches as being meatheads. In my experience, they’re way more savvy about this—not all of them, but a lot of them—than people in the media.