Breaking In with Kevin Fishbain: A Sports Media Podcast

In episode 41, Kevin chats with Chris "Bear" Fallica, wagering expert at Fox Sports and host of the podcast "Bear Bets." Fallica appears on Fox's "Big Noon Kickoff" college football pregame show, and helps set up Monday's College Football Playoff national championship, and next month's Super Bowl, from a betting perspective. Known for his time on ESPN&a...

In episode 40, Kevin chats with Jeff Joniak, the play-by-play voice of the Chicago Bears on ESPN 1000. Joniak is in his 25th season behind the microphone for the Bears and approaching his first home playoff game on the call in seven years. He began his broadcasting career at Iowa State, and then in Chicago where he worked for "Sports Phone." You'll hear how Joniak would spend nights...

In episode 39, Kevin chats with Dan Rubenstein, co-host of "The Solid Verbal," the largest independent college football podcast. Rubenstein and Ty Hildenbrandt have hosted the podcast since 2008, and Rubenstein will tell that origin story, how they found each other at Sports Illustrated and how they got their podcast off the ground. He also discusses how driving scripts around Hollywood...

In episode 38, Kevin chats with Michael Silver, senior NFL writer at The Athletic. Silver has been covering the league since he was on the 49ers' beat in the early 90's. He wrote more than 70 cover stories for Sports Illustrated and also worked for NFL Network and Yahoo Sports. An author of five books, Silver's latest, "The Why Is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry and Re...

In episode 37, Kevin chats with Sheil Kapadia, podcast host at The Ringer. Kapadia hosts the Philly Special podcast and The Ringer NFL Show. Prior to his time at The Ringer, Kapadia covered the Philadelphia Eagles at The Athletic. He also was ESPN's Seahawks beat writer for a few seasons. Kapadia got his start working his way through different outlets in Philadelphia, finding ways to set hims...

In episode 36, Kevin chats with Stacey Dales, senior national reporter for NFL Network. Dales has been with NFL Network since 2009, and prior to that, she was an analyst and reporter for ESPN and ABC. She also was an NCAA women's basketball analyst for CBS Westwood Radio. Before her broadcasting career, Dales was a two-time first-team All-American basketball player at Oklahoma. She got her st...

In episode 35, Kevin chats with Jake Zivin, the play-by-play broadcaster for Apple TV's coverage of the MLS. Saturday afternoon, Zivin will be on the call for the MLS Cup on Apple TV alongside Taylor Twellman. How Zivin got to that seat began as a kid with sports broadcasting aspirations, and included an internship with the MLS 20 years ago where he worked in the truck working the score bug....

In episode 34, Kevin chats with Kevin Clark, host of "This is Football" from ESPN and Omaha Productions, and former NFL writer at The Ringer and the Wall Street Journal. The first "Kevin" to appear as a guest, Clark recalls the first podcast he listened to — and how it influenced his own podcast — and his early days writing, from being an agate clerk at the Chicago Tribune to a...

In episode 33, Kevin chats with Mark Lazerus, senior NHL writer at The Athletic and Chicago Blackhawks beat writer. "Laz," who's in his 14th season covering the Blackhawks, has been named one of the top three columnists in the country twice in the past three years by the Associated Press Sports Editors. Before Lazerus was chronicling the Hawks' Stanley Cup wins, or more recentl...

In episode 32, Kevin chats with Judy Battista, NFL Network senior national columnist. Battista is on "The Insiders" on NFL Network Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday at 7 p.m. ET. She's been writing for NFL.com and discussing the league on NFL Network since 2013, and had previously been at the New York Times. Before Battista became an authority on the NFL, she was covering local news in...

In episode 31, Kevin chats with Sarah Kustok, Brooklyn Nets analyst on the YES Network. A two-time winner of the New York Emmy Award, Kustok was the first-ever solo female analyst for an NBA team. She also does NFL sidelines on Fox and is part of CBS Sports' "We Need To Talk." Before becoming a pioneer in the game analyst space, Kustok was a player herself, a star basketball player...

In episode 30, Kevin chats with Marcus Thompson, senior columnist at The Athletic in the Bay Area. Thompson is the author of "Golden: The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry" and was a 2025 nominee for the Dan Jenkins Medal in Excellence in Sportswriting. Thompson recently covered the Track and Field championships and the WNBA Finals before being there for the beginning of the Warriors season...

In episode 29, Kevin chats with Ken Rosenthal, senior baseball writer at The Athletic and Emmy-winning broadcaster for Fox Sports’ MLB coverage, including this week’s World Series. Rosenthal has been one of the most prominent news breakers in the sport. His name is synonymous with baseball, which he has covered since the late 80’s. He’ll talk about the editor at an internship who doubted him, his...

In episode 28, Kevin chats with Jeff Pearlman, New York Times best-selling author of 11 books. His latest book, "Only God can Judge Me: The many lives of Tupac Shakur,” comes out Oct. 21. He has written biographies of Brett Favre, Walter Payton and Bo Jackson, chronicled the 1986 Mets, the Showtime Lakers, Kobe and Shaq, and the USFL. Pearlman also hosts the podcast "Two Writers Slinging...

In episode 27, Kevin chats with Tom Fornelli, college football writer for CBS Sports and co-host of the Cover 3 podcast. Fornelli has been at CBS for 15 years, and he is a fixture in their college football coverage. How did he get to CBS? It wasn't the typical writer's route, but one that speaks to the times. Fornelli blogged in his free time while working as a manager at an Osco Drug in...

In episode 26, Kevin chats with Mina Kimes, NFL analyst at ESPN and host of "The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny." Kimes can be seen on NFL Live and a variety of ESPN shows offering her NFL expertise, but her start in journalism was in the business world, not sports. A blog post she wrote about how she and her dad bonded over the Seattle Seahawks caught the eye of an ESPN editor a decade...

In episode 25, Kevin chats with Ian Rapoport, senior insider at NFL Network, where he has become one of the most prominent newsbreakers in the sport. Rapoport began covering the NFL when he was on the Patriots beat with the Boston Herald in 2009 and he made his move to becoming a national reporter in 2012. Well before that, he was a college student looking for a job in sports writing, sending out...

In episode 24, Kevin chats with Dianna Russini, The Athletic's senior NFL insider and host of "Scoop City." Prior to joining The Athletic, Russini spent eight years at ESPN. An accomplished prep athlete, Russini's story begins there, and how she loved to compete. Russini's media career, however, began in news. Inspired by the reporting she watched on Sept. 11, Russini, the...

In episode 23, Kevin sets the stage for the first "Monday Night Football" game of the season between the Bears and Vikings with Joe Buck, the voice of MNF on ESPN and ABC. Buck has been calling NFL games since 1994. He was in the St. Louis Cardinals booth from 1991-2007, and has called 24 World Series and six Super Bowls. Buck has eight Sports Emmys for his play-by-play. He talks about w...

In episode 22, Kevin kicks off the NFL season with the voice of Sunday Night Football, Mike Tirico, who will call Cowboys-Eagles on Thursday night to begin the season, and then Ravens-Bills on Sunday night. With the NBA returning to NBC, Tirico will be on the call this October, then the Super Bowl in February followed by the Winter Olympics in Italy. Tirico, who was inducted into the National Spor...

In episode 21, Kevin chats with Bruce Feldman, national college football insider for The Athletic. In addition to his written work at The Athletic, Feldman co-hosts the podcast "The Audible" and is a sideline reporter for Fox's college football coverage. Before his decades spent as an authority on college football, Feldman had two main talents — golf and drawing. He went to college...

In episode 20, Kevin chats with Adam Hoge and Adam Jahns, hosts of the aptly-named "Hoge and Jahns" podcast about the Chicago Bears. They've covered the Bears alongside Kevin for over a decade. It's a special triple-origin-story episode, as Hoge and Jahns each go through their journeys in sports media, and then go into how their podcast began as it reaches its 10th anniversary....

In episode 19, Kevin chats with Bryan Curtis, an editor-at-large at The Ringer and co-host of the media podcast, "The Press Box," one of the podcasts that helped inspire this one. Curtis got his start as an intern at the New Republic before heading to Slate. He then got an opportunity to write the media column for Play, a magazine inside the New York Times. Curtis discusses how he got co...

In episode 18, Kevin chats with Jori Epstein, who has covered the NFL at Yahoo since 2022. Prior to that, she worked for USA Today with a focus on the Dallas Cowboys. She won the Terez A. Paylor Emerging Writer Award in 2022 as voted on by the Pro Football Writers of America, recognized as a rising star in the industry. Epstein's origin story begins at the University of Texas. Learn about the...

In episode 17, Kevin chats with Adam Rittenberg, who has covered college football at ESPN full-time since 2008, but has been affiliated with ESPN dot com dating back to an internship in 2001. Rittenberg's journalism career even dates back to his youth, when he worked for a children's news service as an 11-year-old. Rittenberg details what ESPN.com was like in the early days, how he got h...