Mina Kimes

Mina Kimes is the best NFL analyst in media — the ESPN star whose film-study depth, writing pedigree, and dry wit made her the most respected football voice of her generation. The path was unconventional. Kimes came up as an investigative journalist — award-winning longform at Fortune and Bloomberg News — before pivoting to sports at ESPN in 2014, and she brought the reporter's toolkit with her: the research, the sourcing, the refusal to do lazy takes. The result is analysis that sounds like it was built, not performed.

The origin story is almost too good. Kimes didn't play football; she fell in love with it through her father, a U.S. military veteran, and the Seattle Seahawks — a bond she wrote about in a Tumblr essay that caught the eye of ESPN editors. She joined as a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and quickly established herself as one of the best longform writers in sports, profiling Aaron Rodgers, Antonio Brown, Baker Mayfield, and even League of Legends superstar Faker. Her investigative background surfaced in the hard stories too: she co-wrote the reporting on sexual harassment claims against Mets GM Jared Porter that ended his career.

The pivot to television and analysis was the gamble that paid off spectacularly. Kimes became a fixture on Around the Horn, First Take, Pardon the Interruption, and Highly Questionable — holding her own in debate formats that eat less-prepared analysts alive. But the real move was NFL Live. When ESPN relaunched the show in 2020, Kimes joined as a full-time NFL analyst, and she changed what the show was: deeper film breakdowns, smarter scheme talk, analysis that trusted the audience to keep up. Five years later, the show's growth is the proof of concept — fans kept saying they felt like they were actually learning something, which in sports television is the rarest compliment there is.

The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny is the other pillar. Launched in 2018 and named for her beloved dog, the podcast became one of ESPN's top football shows and a haven for the kind of in-depth conversation that doesn't fit television's shouting rhythms. The 2022 partnership with Peyton Manning's Omaha Productions pushed it further into the digital space, and by 2026 it was pulling top-ten sports digital show rankings and a YouTube Silver Play Button — the rare legacy-media podcast that genuinely figured out the internet.

The résumé keeps accumulating honors that would each be a career peak on their own. Two-time finalist for the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. The inaugural Larry Birger Young Business Journalist Prize. The Henry Luce Award. Recognition from the New York Press Club, the National Press Club, and the Asian American Journalists Association. Barrett Media ranked her the fourth-best sports television talent of 2025. She served as a color analyst on the Los Angeles Rams' preseason broadcasts — actual play-by-play-adjacent booth work, not just studio hits. And in 2026, she was named host of the Scripps National Spelling Bee — a perfect left-field gig for a three-time school spelling bee champion who grew up idolizing the competition.

What makes her different is the combination. There are ex-players with better playing credentials and hot-take artists with bigger volume, but almost nobody in football media pairs Kimes's three assets: the writer's precision with language, the reporter's insistence on evidence, and the analyst's genuine film-study chops. She's the daughter of a Korean immigrant and a military veteran, a Yale summa cum laude English graduate, and she talks about cover-3 rotations like she diagrammed them herself — because she did. That specificity is the brand: no clichés, no coachspeak, no dumbing it down.

The cultural footprint extends past football. She's a regular on ESPN's biggest stages — Super Bowl week coverage, the NFL Honors red carpet, Celebrity Jeopardy. She's used her platform pointedly when it mattered, calling out the removal of Jackie Robinson's military-service tribute from a Department of Defense site during a 2025 Around the Horn appearance. The through-line is consistent: the same person who wrote meticulous business investigations now applies that rigor to football, and the same person who loves the sport enough to study it frame by frame isn't going to stay quiet when something's wrong.

Previously covers Mina Kimes because the smartest voice in football deserves the biggest spotlight. Football fans who follow Pablo Torre's sharp sports journalism or Denise Salcedo's fight coverage get the analyst here: deeper film study, better writing, and the dry wit that makes the smart stuff fun. Lenny's probably asleep in the background — the takes are wide awake. For viewers new to her work, the signature move is the film-room segment — Kimes with the telestrator, walking through a play design or a quarterback's decision tree with the patience of a teacher and the precision of a beat reporter. It's the purest distillation of what she does: making the complicated legible without making it simple. Start there, then stay for the podcast, where the same brain gets two hours and a dog asleep in the background.