Interview with Ryan Nanni
The quick-witted Nanni is podcast Shutdown Fullcast's not-so-secret weapon going for nearly a decade
Ryan Nanni seems like the younger brother of the group.
I recall the first time listening to self-proclaimed “world’s only college football podcast” The Shutdown Fullcast and thinking that this raspy-throated gentleman with Spencer (Hall) and Jason (Kirk) reminds me of one my good friends from graduate school.
There was a group of us during this time in Savannah, GA who became chummy. We hung out between classes, drank and watched movies, both dumb and pretentious. Our friend, named Ryan coincidentally, was (still is) of a similar ilk to the Ryan of this piece: the aforementioned younger sibling, funny, whip smart and unpredictable in moments of one upmanship.
Nanni, once a practicing attorney, was among the group of writers/personalities who helped reshape a stale sports journalism field by unapologetically taking the piss out of it. It was an alternative form in the online age where Nanni and his colleagues could be looser, sillier and, dare I say, wittier.
While he may disagree with that last descriptor, you’d be hard pressed to find a group of individuals talking as inspired about their love of college football (and other stuff) as the one on The Shutdown Fullcast.
Four co-hosts (plus a producer) in total, all preternaturally observant and well-read, taking the podcast form to newer and, year by year, stranger heights.
You have Spencer Hall (called by Bomani Jones “the greatest college football writer in America”), Jason Kirk (the Inspectah Deck of the crew), Holly Anderson (as lethal a comic sensibility as anyone in podcasting), Michael Surber (show producer, composer and Gilmore Girls enthusiast) and our guy Ryan Nanni, described by Hall as “a one-line assassin.”
He’s also that guy who desperately wanted to wear the Outback Bloomin’ Onion costume and finally got the chance at the 2018 Outback Bowl.
This, however, diminishes Nanni’s contribution to the enterprise.
If you’ve listened to enough episodes, a recurring theme is that show greeter, Hall, has a tendency to derail topics thus rendering Nanni the hall monitor of sorts, keeping everything on track. It’s an oversimplification, but it helps explain one of the show’s many charms.
Before Surber, Nanni was usually the one tasked with The Fullcast’s post-production responsibilities. And if you follow any of them on Twitter, they’ll tell you that editing an episode is not for the faint of heart.
One of the recurring bits on the show is its audio qualities (or maybe lack thereof). Personally, I’ve never found it to be any better or worse than any other podcast, but they do lean into it with gusto. Kirk tends to be the x-factor, usually recording his end of each episode outside or in his car.
All this to say, Nanni had his hands full.
At this point, I should say that Nanni, Kirk and Surber each record in separate homes (and a time zone) from Hall and Anderson. Nowadays, none of this really matters, but it adds to the mystique in attempting to explain any technical issues that arise.
However, it’s a particularly sobering moment that jumps off the page for me from a 2016 episode.
During the summer, the gang did previews for each Power 5 college football team.
The general rule of thumb was to make each one sillier than the last. (A personal fave was when they finally got to Notre Dame’s season preview at the end of the episode and the recording just stops. It’s the podcast version of the Sopranos ending.)
In this particular episode, though, once they get to Baylor’s preview, Nanni instead monologues about the sexual assault scandal that had recently hit the school’s athletic department.
The final three minutes of this episode render the previous forty-two almost futile.
“My main takeaway is I hope we don’t just look at Baylor and say, ‘What a dark spot on college football’s soul. Burn it out so the rest of us can go about our business.’ It’s a sobering moment that should make us question all of our other schools that we claim to love and make sure they are not making the same mistakes that eventually blow up this horrifically and with this much human cost.”
End episode.
And it’s the way Nanni, almost hopeless-sounding in his affect, crystallizes the essence of sports fandom and the blinders with which it insists we ignore humanity that makes it such a seminal moment in the show’s history.
It’s usually the performers who wear silliness as a badge of honor that tend to have the most empathy when empathy is necessary. Nanni and his cohorts are among those performers.
That being said, I did witness him walk onstage for The Fullcast’s first live show in Atlanta wearing a cardboard box contraption over his entire person.
Dude can be silly.
And we’re all grateful for his continued presence in the medium. Here’s the email correspondence I had with him back in February.
What was the first sports-related experience you recall?
This is going to sound like a bit but it isn't: the earliest sports memory I have as a spectator is Leon Lett's fumble in Super Bowl XXVII. I have to imagine this was one of the first Super Bowls I was allowed to stay up to watch, since I didn't really have any feelings about the Cowboys or the Bills as a kid and the game was already way out of hand. Don Beebe just busted his ass down the field to make that play, and, even as a young child, the whole thing was so incredibly funny and weird. I do remember feeling relieved on Lett's behalf that he hadn't lost Dallas the game on that play.
How'd you end up at Florida? Were you already a fan of its athletics before enrolling?
So I was actually born in Gainesville, though a few years later my family moved to Tampa. But we had some friends we kept up with growing up, one of whom ended up dating and marrying a woman who was a trainer for the Florida volleyball team. We probably went to one or two matches a year when I was young, though I never went to the Swamp for a game.
That established my allegiance in-state, but I wasn't especially big on college football at that time, and I didn't think I'd end up at Florida. Ultimately, that choice came down to two factors. First, the scholarship money was just entirely too good at UF to turn down, and I had enough of a vague understanding of what I wanted to do education-wise to know that I'd probably go to professional or grad school, so it felt smarter to save some money for that rather than get an expensive Bachelors degree. Second, I wasn't as eager as I thought I'd be to go far away from home; I think the second-closest city I was considering was D.C.
Was there ever a moment during law school that you felt you wouldn't end up practicing?
No, not at all. I did think I'd transition to something more attorney-adjacent, like working for the government, and I had areas of the law I was more interested in than others, but I didn't think "eh, I'll give this a go and if that doesn't work out I'll be an idiot online instead."
In the aforementioned EDSBS article, Spencer mentions that you kept him from quitting. What's his continued presence in the industry mean to you personally?
The answer to that has changed over the course of my time working with or near him. For my first few years doing this, he was a mentor and one of the people I wanted to impress. I didn't have any real clue what I was doing or if my work was any good, and "just write something that Spencer or Holly or Luke Zimmerman think is funny" became the easiest and most reliable compass point.
Eventually I started working more on other projects that didn't intersect with Spencer directly even though we were still coworkers, and the thing that stuck with me from that point forward was the idea that nothing - a project, a format, a website - should be so sacred that you don't move on from it if it starts to feel stale to you as the creator of it. Embracing that perspective really allowed me to be a much better editorial thinker.
At this point it's funny to me to think about Spencer quitting (and I didn't know I kept that from happening) because if he wasn't writing or doing podcasts or whatever he'd still be thinking and saying all the same things. If you have dinner with Spencer, he's going to want to talk to you about a cool college football game from 15 years ago he just rewatched or what he thinks Holey Molely should do next or why he's convinced he could befriend a lion.
How much did Twitter (of old) help you find your comedic voice?
I'm not sure it helped me find it so much as it channeled it into a contained area. My brain has always spit out strange observations or weird rewrites of song lyrics or what have you. Twitter just meant my wife and friends didn't have to be the only ones dealing with them.
That said, for a while Twitter really felt like a hindrance to me as a writer. I mentally separated Tweets, which were short and unimportant and disposable, and Posts, which had to be much more considered and logically structured and, hopefully, memorable. And sitting down to write the latter felt very hard, just from an ideation standpoint, while I could just Tweet all the stupid day.
At some point I came across a morsel of writing advice I'm pretty sure was from Daniel M. Lavery, which I will clumsily paraphrase as "any Tweet can become a Post." And that flipped some kind of switch for me, where I was able to use the single-serving outputs my brain spits out as starting points for longer written concepts or podcast episodes or video ideas or whatever.
Do you have a tweet that you look back on and think, "yeah, that was good"? For that matter, do you have a favorite short/longform essay that you wrote?
While I think it's best for one's health to never have that good of a memory of what you've tweeted, this will make me chuckle a little when I remember it.
I don't know that I have a written thing I'm personally fond of, in part because I haven't primarily considered myself a writer in some time. But I do think this might be my favorite example of the "any tweet can be a post" ethos.
What's a favorite Fullcast episode or moment for you?
Any of the live shows would fit here but the first one, in Atlanta, probably takes the cake. This is a show I'm pretty sure we (or at least I) would do even if people didn't listen to it, and its most consistent value for me has been the chance to goof off with smart people who make me laugh. But that live show was such a cool opportunity to meet people who also like this weird thing that we make, and shake their hand, and thank them for their support. When you work online, it can be very hard to feel like actual people know or like what you do, no matter what your traffic numbers tell you. So it was very humbling and meaningful to bridge that gap in real life.
How important for you was the addition of Holly to the show when you guys were several years in?
This is not a slight but I don't remember it? Holly has been part of the Fullcast universe for so long before me that it kind of feels like she was always part of the podcast and just (possibly wisely) decided to skip several years of episodes because she had other things to do.
Jason is rightfully considered the most ruthlessly and impressively efficient source of humor on the show. He needs so few words to just crack the rest of us open and his talent for economy in spoken prose is something (as you've noticed reading my answers) I can merely aspire to fruitlessly. Spencer has the weirdest reservoir of a brain on almost any subject, and he has a comfort with descriptive language on the fly that, again, I can't match.
But Holly has the skill on the show I most try to emulate: She can set tempo in either direction. When it's time to "yes, and" off something nonsensical I have posed, she can not just extend a line of discussion but reshape it in better and more interesting ways. When it's better to stop something and give it closer examination, she can become a great impromptu interviewer (or inquisitor, if i've said something particularly ill-advised). Holly's a great cohost because she can play along with you or push back against you or move everyone on to something new once a bit's run its course and not make it feel unnatural or forced. It's kind of like watching a conductor lead a piece they're also composing in real time.
Obligatory COVID question: There's enough that's gone on in the last three years to make anyone jaded (if they weren't already). What have you taken from the pandemic, either personally or professionally?
A fun thing about seeing a bunch of your friends get laid off and then eventually joining them in that fate is you really get to reevaluate what work means to you and how much of your identity comes from it. For most of my adult life, the answer to that second question turns out to have been "way too much," and I let the job take up too much mental space and relative importance. The dissolution of all of those things, while deeply unpleasant and often hard to explain, has helped me reset significantly.
In early 2021, I was talking with another sportswriter who was struggling with a form of the same crisis, and I told him that I had a small epiphany when I realized my relationship with my dad has never rested on his professional accomplishments, even now as an adult. My framework for him is about the kind of person he is in our family and our community and his work, even though he's good at it, maybe comes in third place at best. Understanding that helped me rethink my own priorities. I am proud of the things that I have helped build, but ultimately it's much more important to me to be a good father and partner, a supportive neighbor and friend, and a kind stranger to those who need it than to be a particularly funny podcaster or accomplished writer.