Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing my friends about the sports podcast they run for Temple, called Down To Football? If you’re a football fan, this podcast is definitely for you.
The founders of the podcast are Colin Sommer, a freshman journalism major, Nick Palomba, a freshman media studies and production major, and Sean Mac Donald, a freshman media studies and production major.
1. So your podcast is called Down To Football?; why did you choose football to be the main topic of the podcast?
Sommer: Well, we were all passionate about it, so we constantly found ourselves sitting downstairs talking about football.
Palomba: …It helped that we all had different teams and it wasn’t just three Eagles fans talking about football — it was a Saints fan, a Carolina fan and an Eagles fan, so we all had a different perspective on the league.
2. Who came up with the idea to run a podcast?
Mac Donald: It was pretty collective.
Sommer: We were at the Klein Fest and WHIP offers a lot, so we could easily pitch something to them involving a podcast, it didn’t have to be a live show. We knew that we just wanted to start out small, something we could all do.
Palomba: I remember the meeting we had and we were all there and we had a plan for what we wanted the show to be, and that was probably more than a lot of people. When they first go for a podcast, a lot of people just go in and they’re like “I want to do this!” and it’s kinda just willy nilly, but we actually had a plan going in.
3. What was the process of creating the podcast?
Palomba: Well, we were literally put in the closet… the podcast studio was very new and was basically an old storage closet that they shoved a desk in with a computer and microphones. The process started with us emailing WHIP and being like, “hey we wanna do a podcast” and that’s how we got put in touch with our producer Sam Cohn. We had a meeting with him and we were just able to explain what we wanted to do and he liked it a lot. He was excited to get us started like immediately, I think after like a week of talking.
Sommer: We are the first sports podcast Temple has had.
4. Give me a brief description of what you guys discuss each episode.
Sommer: Before each episode, I would write a script out and we would have five segments. Basically the first segment was us recapping the top three games of the week — like the most interesting and essentially the most important games of the week. The second segment would be [us] talking about some of the standout performers, like individual players each week, in terms of just like actual football and also in terms of like fantasy football. Our third segment would be — it was actually called “must start, must bench, boom or bust.” So we would pick a player that we would think (this is specifically in terms of fantasy football) [would] have a generally good matchup for the next week. So a player who would do good, a player who would do bad next week and then the boom or bust: basically the player that has like a major upside but also a major downside; so basically like a like a low floor high ceiling kind of sense.
Palomba: The fourth segment constantly changed.
Sommer: No no no, that’s the fifth one. The fourth segment was the uh… we had a locked in pick… Basically we would look at the matchups each week and we would pick a team that we believed was locked in to basically win that game… And we also had an upset pick, basically a team that obviously wasn’t as good as the other team they were playing, but we thought that they could maybe be the upset of the week. So that was our fourth segment, our fifth segment constantly changed, so some weeks it would be… so I think the first one we did was “pretend or contender”…
Palomba: Yeah, so that was like, week four/ week five when teams really started separating themselves from the pack.
Mac Donald: … As like the season progressed, like once it got closer to playoffs, we would do like playoff predictions.
5. Has there ever been a time where you all have disagreed on topics and argued on air?
Palomba: Every podcast.
Sommer: … we would always have different picks, we would always make sure to have different picks for each segment, so that we could briefly discuss it. We would have debates and stuff like that and it essentially brought a bigger aspect to the show, it made it more entertaining. … if we all picked the same thing every week where we agreed on everything, there would never be anything to talk about. And somebody would always follow up and be like, “okay, I agree with that” but then somebody could also… if Nick said the Eagles were better than the Saints, then I would be like, “well okay Nick I really strongly believe that is not true”.
Palomba: Yeah. But also we didn’t just be like, “well I don’t agree with you”, we would also ask questions [like], “why do you think that?” or “what are the reasons behind that?”.
6. Is there something you wish you could change about the podcast?
Sommer: There’s nothing I would change about it, I like what we have going on. I would say since coming to Temple, it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.
Their podcast Down To Football? is available for listen on Spotify.