Field Yates worked on the scouting and coaching staff for both the Patriots and Chiefs before landing at ESPN in 2012. MELISSA RAWLINS/ESPN IMAGES
Field Yates’s first experience as part of the broad NFL landscape came as a coaching and scouting intern with the Patriots during summers while a student at Wesleyan.
“I think the players probably thought I was this little runt running around the facility, but the experience was priceless,” he said. “That was my Rosetta Stone for football knowledge.”
So it’s fitting that a certain Bill Belichick-era ethos has shaded the Weston native’s time at ESPN, where he has worked since 2012: Versatility makes you more valuable to the team.
Yates has been a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-pretty-much-all when it comes to the network’s NFL coverage, particularly in recent years. He has been ESPN’s main fantasy football analyst since Matthew Berry left in July 2022. He hosts podcasts and television programming alike, including NFL Live last summer when Laura Rutledge was on maternity leave.
Yates still breaks transaction news, sometimes involving the Patriots, where he remains plugged in. And that scouting background — which also includes two seasons working for Scott Pioli with the Kansas City Chiefs — has helped him emerge as one of the network’s preeminent NFL Draft experts.
Yates’s malleability and expertise has led to a specific focus among those roles at ESPN. Two focuses, actually, on the opposite ends of the NFL calendar.
Most of his time is dedicated to two of the network’s — and fans’ — highest areas of interest: Fantasy football, of course, and the NFL Draft, where he will be a part of ESPN’s television coverage for the first time come April 25-27.
Yates will be part of the ABC broadcast, which leans more storytelling than ESPN’s, on Thursday and Friday for the first three rounds. He also will be part of the single broadcast on ESPN/ABC for Rounds 4-7 on Saturday.
“I do think a good chunk of my responsibility will also be to fill whatever gaps necessary on the football side, talking about prospects and picks,” said Yates. “I’ll hopefully be ready for those.”
The ABC broadcast during the first two days includes host Rece Davis, analysts Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard and, making his official ESPN debutNick Saban. Pete Thamel will contribute the news and Rutledge will interview families in the green room.
“The cast of people that we have lined up is kind of a college football braintrust, if you will, and the ABC broadcast obviously is a little bit different,” said Yates. “It does lean a little bit more into the storytelling side of what the draft is all about, with plenty of football talk as well. But I think it will be a cool opportunity for me to sort of dive in on some of the prospects that I’ve spent the past year studying, but also dive into the humans that they are.”
He’s eager to work with Saban, joking he’s not sure whether to refer to the legendary former Alabama coach as the “Belichick of college football” or Belichick as “the Saban of the NFL.”
“The energy and the preparedness that Coach Saban brought to our Zoom in advance of the draft forecasted a guy who is going to be dialed in and ready and really, really good at this,” said Yates. “The thing with having him as part of the broadcast is that, even somebody who has done his best to prepare for every single prospect over the past year, there is going to be a part of me that’s going to have a hard time resisting turning to Nick on every prospect and saying, ‘Uh, what do you think?’ Because no one is a better authority on these guys than he is.”
Yates’s own bona fides are indisputable, even as his path to ESPN was an unexpected one.
“I wish I could tell you that I had some brilliant epiphany and knew that I was going to go work in the media and hopefully one day be at ESPN,” he said. “But the truth was that it was a lot less scientific than that.
“I just wasn’t sure if I was going to end up in the world of scouting and coaching forever,” he said of his time with the Chiefs. “It’s incredibly exhilarating and gratifying in a lot of ways, but I had some hard questions about whether it would eventually afford me some balance that I thought might be important to me.”
Upon leaving the Chiefs, he came home to Massachusetts, got his real estate license, and almost on a whim started a football blog. Late in the 2011 season, he reached out to several media members, seeing if they needed any help or had writing opportunities.
ESPN’s Mike Reiss responded, and reconnected with Yates after the Patriots’ loss to the Giants in Super Bowl XLVI. He said he might be able to use some help at the 2012 draft.
“This was the year the Patriots took both Chandler Jones and Dont’a Hightower in the first round,” Yates recalls. “And Mike said, ‘The Patriots might be busy on night one. Any chance you’d like to come down and help transcribe some stuff, maybe get some experience?’
“That was my big break. I went down there and had a good experience and that turned into, ‘Are you available by chance for rookie minicamp?’ Yeah, of course, I’m available, what am I going to say to that? And it kind of built from there, I just sort of kept adding little pieces to my portfolio and saying yes to things and trying to be as versatile and helpful as possible.”
Yates acknowledges even though his versatility helped him find his way at ESPN, he is excited to somewhat streamline his responsibilities.
“I sort of envision right now that the pie is being reduced from like a lot of slices to maybe two big chunks,” he said. “My career is trending more and more toward sort of the half year of fantasy football and the half year of the NFL draft, with everything else that I can provide on top of that kind of additive.
“The NFL Draft is going to be around forever, and it’s going to probably become more popular than ever every single year. And I’ve been in a fantasy football league since I was 14, and know how those leagues connect people. I could talk about fantasy football 365 days a year. So I feel extremely lucky to have both of these things football fans are so passionate about on my plate.”
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2024-04-14 16:12:00
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