By: Eric Yin
SEATTLE – When most people think of football, they think of burly big men battling it out on the gridiron for supremacy. Then there is Mina Kimes. ESPN’s rising star and one of football’s unlikeliest success stories: the young petite Asian woman who has become the first major NFL studio analyst to never have played football, worked in a front office, or coached athletes.
Kimes path to sports stardom was anything but planned. As she self-admitted in a 2022 interview with Chris Hill, “when I was in college, I only really had two concrete aspirations. One was to be a writer in some capacity, and the other was to not spend a summer at home in Arizona.”
Graduating from Yale in 2007 as an English major, she got her first job as an investigative journalist at Fortune magazine. Working there for six years, Kimes made a name for herself by writing exposés on major businesses. The crown jewel of her business journalist career was her Henry R. Luce award-winning investigative piece on the unauthorized use of cement in repairing bone tissue. After leaving Fortune, she spent the majority of 2013 and 2014 working at Bloomberg writing profiles on high-level business executives such as Sears’ Eddie Lampert. This experience at Bloomberg would prove to be useful in the coming years.
Kimes got her big break into sports journalism in 2014, after a Tumblr post she wrote on her bond with the Seahawks and her father went viral. She was soon recruited by ESPN to write feature profiles on NFL players like Aaron Rodgers and Baker Mayfield instead of business executives. Just two years later, ESPN gave her the offer to start her own fantasy football show. Over the next few years Kimes would become more involved as an on-air talent, being a guest and guest-host for a variety of flagship ESPN shows: most notably First Takeand Pardon the Interruption. By 2019, the Rams had hired Kimes to be their color commentator for pre-season games, and she started her own NFL podcast called The Mina Kimes Show. Following the relaunch of NFL Live on NFL Network in 2020, Kimes became the first non-NFL player/executive analyst in the history of NFL Live.
Image taken from Instagram. Posted on Jan. 12, 2021, on Mina Kimes Instagram @mina_kimes
Part of her success has to do with her unique broadcast personality. In a world where sports journalists predominantly try to remain objective, Kimes is unabashedly a Seattle sports fan. Look no further than her arm which has the number 48 tattooed in roman numerals, representing the Seattle Seahawks’ first Superbowl championship. Even her background on television screams Seattle, as it is littered with green and blue sports memorabilia.
Image taken from YouTube video posted on the NFL Films channel on Nov 18, 2019, titled “100 Greatest Teams: Numbers 20-11 | NFL 100”
Mina Kimes is more than just an unlikely success story. The significance of a petite Asian woman becoming the first analyst that is not a retired NFL player or executive cannot be understated. This feat has simultaneously shattered multiple historical precedents. First, she overcame the gender barrier that has largely prevented women from becoming analysts. Secondly, she broke the racial barrier, becoming the first NFL analyst of Asian descent on a major TV broadcast. And lastly, she defied the long-time trend that analysts must be ex-players or executives. What Mina Kimes has accomplished in her career is nothing short of astonishing.
Her incredible success symbolizes a change in the sports journalism world. She is living proof that someone does not have to be an existing part of the NFL ecosystem to be a great analyst or TV personality. Kimes was an English major who started her career on Wall Street, that has since gone on to become one of the biggest sports journalists in the nation. By being so successful despite her lack of “qualifications”, she has opened the door for many others to follow in her footsteps, fundamentally changing the landscape of sports journalism.
At the end of the day, Kimes is a fan like the rest of us. She was not the winner of the genetic lottery pool or born into a storied sports family. Like every other NFL fan, she spent her weekdays working her job and weekends watching football. She learned about the game not through coaches, but simply by being a fan. The excitement and passion that she has as a die-hard fan make her a breath of fresh air on a buttoned-up NFL broadcast. As it is best put by Kimes in a 2020 Los Angeles Times interview, “If I didn’t work at ESPN, which I didn’t until 2014, I would still be watching a psychotic amount of football for someone that doesn’t do this for a living. I hope that never changes.”
Image taken from Twitter. Tweet initially posted Apr 29, 2022 by Mina Kimes. In a league known for producing rags-to-riches stories, Kimes’ is one of the most incredible. She is a business journalist that turned her fandom into a career in sports. She is an Asian-American woman that overcame both the gender and racial barriers on NFL broadcasts. She is a fan that became one of the NFL’s premiere analysts. And she