When Rich Eisen anchored SportsCenter for the first time in 22 years last August, ESPN brought back the show's old-school graphics and music The broadcast drew 708,000 viewers, 67% above SportsCenter's average in that 11 p.m. ET slot, ESPN told Front Office Sports at the time.

The reaction online showed how much fans had missed the program. Eisen told Fortune in a recent interview that he came across a video of a young woman recording herself as the familiar open played. She was crying.

“It was a simpler time,” Eisen said. “People kind of wish it was like that again.”

That moment validated an idea Eisen had brought to ESPN when he returned: a nostalgia video podcast. This Was SportsCenter: Stories from the Set reunites the veteran anchor with former colleagues and comes with full access to ESPN's video archive. The first season debuted in June on Disney+ and the ESPN app, featuring conversations with Dan Patrick, Chris Berman, Mike Greenberg, Linda Cohn, Chris Fowler, and Craig Kilborn.

A second season of six new interviews is slated for 2027, Eisen said, adding that he has already lined up “some pretty interesting commitments.”

“It's kind of like a career scrapbook for everyone,” he added.

It is a fitting project for someone who helped define that era.

From SportsCenter Star to CEO

Eisen, 57, worked at ESPN from 1996 to 2003, anchoring SportsCenter through the show's cultural peak. He and co-anchor Stuart Scott formed a popular anchor team in the late 1990s and even landed roles together in the 2000 Disney comedy The Kid. In its 2015 obituary for Scott, ESPN noted that the pair's late-night SportsCenter became next-day water-cooler talk, thanks to their chemistry and the show's repeated airings.

Because ESPN re-aired his late-night broadcast several times the next morning, his SportsCenter show reached more than 100 million homes, he told Fortune in 2024. Kids watched him before school, and many of them now have teenagers of their own. Eisen said he “literally put” that generation “on a school bus with Stuart Scott in the mornings.”

In 2003, Eisen left ESPN to become NFL Network's first on-air hire. More than two decades later, he is still there, hosting NFL GameDay Morning and anchoring the network's draft and Super Bowl coverage. In 2014, while still at NFL Network, he launched The Rich Eisen Show, a three-hour daily mix of sports and pop culture that aired on DirecTV's Audience Network.

Then, in December 2019, DirecTV's Audience Network was shutting down, and the show was about to lose its home. As Fortune previously reported, Eisen received the news two days before Christmas — along with the chance to take the show over himself. Overnight, the host became the owner. At the time, he said, it was “quite daunting.”

As the business found new homes, eventually on Peacock and then Roku, it grew. Eisen hired a CFO and more staff, and he put the company's revenue toward building his own control room.

Through it all, he said, he has stuck to one principle: “Creating an a–hole-free environment, because this life is too short and this business is too small.”

This December marks seven years since Eisen took over the show, meaning he has now owned it longer than he spent as its contracted host under DirecTV. Last year, the show landed its biggest home yet: Eisen reunited with ESPN in a licensing deal that brought it to Disney+, ESPN's streaming platforms, and ESPN Radio, where it debuted that September. It also airs on SiriusXM and is released as a podcast, while his team cuts full interviews for YouTube and clips for Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. The arrangement inverts the traditional talent model: rather than signing Eisen as an anchor, ESPN licenses a program he owns and produces independently.

“What we do every day is we meet the fans and the listeners or the viewers where they want to be met,” Eisen said. He did not share audience figures, but said viewership and listenership have “exponentially exploded” since the move.

“There is no platform quite like ESPN's,” Eisen said. “There just isn't.”

A Family Business

Eisen's production company also makes Women's Sports Now, a weekly show created by his wife, Suzy Shuster. She executive produces it and co-hosts alongside Renee Montgomery, Sarah Tiana, and Colleen Wolfe. The show launched on the Roku Channel in 2025 and moved to ESPN this spring. Part of the inspiration was the couple's daughter, Taylor, a basketball player.

“The point of this is women talking about women's sports,” Eisen said, adding that a third season is expected next year. Meanwhile, The Rich Eisen Show marked its 12th anniversary earlier this month. Taken together, the deals make his production company an outside supplier of programming to the same network that employed him as an anchor more than two decades ago.

He is weighing more podcasts and possibly a celebrity-driven show — ideas he said are all on the table because “anything's possible.” For now, he said, it is “pretty amazing in this contracting world that this show keeps expanding.”

This story was originally reported by Fortune.