OUR RATING:
Sports. Some people love them, others could care less. But beyond testing the limitations of human physical performance, the world of sports offers an endless litany of compelling and unique stories. That’s where ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast comes into play. It takes the documentary series you might have actually enjoyed and strips away all those pesky visuals to give you pure, unfiltered storytelling about sports moments you either remember perfectly or don’t care about at all.
The podcast loves to dig into stories that are “forgotten” or “overlooked,” which, depending on your love of sports, is either code for “we found something vaguely interesting that happened in 1987 and we’re going to stretch it into multiple episodes.” or “this is the greatest story of all time”. To be fair, out of many sports podcasts I’ve listened to, 30 for 30 has a much higher hit-rate as far as genuinely compelling narratives go.
What struck me most about this podcast is its commitment to making you feel things about sports. They’ll take a story about a basketball game and suddenly you’re contemplating mortality, the American dream, and what it means to be human. It’s very touching, assuming you have the emotional bandwidth to get invested in a decades-old playoff series.
The episodes are wildly inconsistent in length, which is great if you enjoy never knowing whether you’re committing to 20 minutes or two hours. Some stories genuinely deserve the extended treatment. Others feel like they’re padding for time because someone realized they didn’t have enough material but had already committed to the episode.
They love their dramatic narration, too. Every story is treated like the most important moment in human history, even when it’s about a rivalry between two colleges you’ve never heard of. The hosts deliver everything with the gravitas of a World War II documentary, which can be either gripping or hilarious depending on the actual stakes of the story.
To be fair, when the podcast is good, it’s actually pretty good. The problem is you have to wade through a lot of “remember this moderately interesting thing?” episodes to find them.
30 for 30 also assumes you either already know the basics of the sport being discussed or you’re willing to figure it out through context clues. They’re not here to explain what a “pick and roll” is or why someone getting traded is dramatic. You’re supposed to just know, or at least pretend you do.
They have this habit of interviewing everyone even tangentially related to the story, which means you get insight from the actual people who were there. That’s cool and all, except sometimes those people aren’t particularly insightful or interesting, and you’re stuck listening to someone struggle to remember details from 30 years ago.
Look, if you’re a sports fan who likes narrative storytelling and has a lot of time to kill during your commute, you could do worse. The 30 for 30 podcast serves its purpose. It’s just that its purpose is incredibly specific, and if you’re not already in the target audience, it’s not exactly working overtime to win you over.
Where to listen to 30 for 30
Pod.link | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro
Discover the best episodes of 30 for 30