Jason Kelce explains why he keeps popping up in random corners of ESPN and beyond

There’s a version of Jason Kelce’s ESPN career where he’s grinding film every week, breaking down offensive line technique like a young Troy Aikman in training. That’s not the version anyone’s actually gotten. Instead, Kelce has spent the year showing up underneath golf greens, at center ice for hockey broadcasts, and hitting a ceremonial tee shot at the Masters Par 3, and on the Ross Tucker Football Podcast, he finally explained why.

Speaking with the NFL on CBS analyst, Kelce was asked to account for the increasingly scattered slate of assignments he’s taken on beyond his regular Monday Night Countdown appearances.

“This year, the things I did with ESPN outside of that would be TGL and then the Masters, right? TGL, that facility, I’d heard how incredible it is down there and wanted to see that,” he explained. “The Masters, yeah, of course I want to do the Masters. The number one place in the golf world to go down to Augusta, Georgia. There’s nothing I think that really tops that experience. I had been as a spectator before. That was my first time to go and participate and see the Par 3.”

Unfortunately for Kelce, golf fans revolted almost immediately when he showed up at the Par 3 Contest in April, caddying and taking part in ESPN’s broadcast. The reaction on social media was close to unanimous, with fans arguing the Masters, an event with a decades-long reputation for guarding its own atmosphere, was the one place ESPN shouldn’t have sent its most casual personality.

None of that blowback seems to have changed Kelce’s approach, and his explanation suggests the appearances were never really about optimizing for audience reaction in the first place.

“I’ve always wanted to do NASCAR,” he said. “So, I basically have a YouTube channel where a lot of this stuff, bobsledding, NASCAR, we tried to dunk for the first time —  you get to document it, so you’re making money on it, and at the same time you get to try and do something really cool that you’ve never had the opportunity to do. Especially while I played, I didn’t have the opportunity to try these things. So, now being retired, [with] a little bit more time, you can go and try things that you have always been interested in trying or seeing or doing. So, we have the Monday night stuff and the ESPN stuff, then the YouTube stuff, which is kind of like really just an excuse to do bucket list items that you’ve always wanted to do. It’s been fun. We’re definitely capitalizing on the ability to go and do random things. Maybe too much. We got to talk as a team, but it’s been fun.”

That “YouTube stuff” turned out to be a bigger deal than the offhand description lets on. Around the same stretch Kelce was explaining his ESPN bucket list, the New York Times reported that he and his brother Travis were finalizing a reported $100 million deal with Amazon through the company’s new Creator Services division, built around a solo YouTube show alongside merchandise, a book, and their Garage Beer brand, an arrangement modeled directly on how successful New Heights had already become.

Kelce had previously hosted a solo late-night show for ESPN, They Call It Late Night with Jason Kelce, which ran for five episodes out of Union Transfer in Philadelphia during the final weeks of the 2024 season. Awful Announcing reported in January that the decision to skip a second season came from Kelce himself, who wanted to explore other opportunities during the offseason rather than commit to another run, with ESPN remaining supportive of the show and planning to keep working with him on other projects.

With the Amazon deal now in place, Kelce has a considerably bigger platform to build the kind of solo content he clearly wants to keep making, alongside a three-year, $24 million contract with ESPN that was never really designed to be that vehicle in the first place.

Kelce doesn’t sound bothered by any of it, whether it’s golf fans souring on his Augusta cameo or ESPN’s format limitations pushing his bigger swings elsewhere. He’s not chasing the traditional trajectory toward becoming ESPN’s next authoritative football mind. He’s chasing whatever he never got the chance to try while he was playing, on whatever platform will let him do it, television ratings and social media outrage notwithstanding.

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