Back in 2012, ESPN had several prominent free agents: Jim Rome, Michelle Beadle, Erin Andrews, and Scott Van Pelt.

Only Van Pelt stayed. As for the rest…

Rome does have a program on Showtime and has made appearances on CBS’ big national telecasts. However, truth be told, Rome’s daily TV show still barely registers on CBS Sports Network.

Andrews went to Fox. While she still gets the high-profile sideline assignments, including the Super Bowl, her duties as host on Fox’s college football pregame shows are a work in progress at best.

Then there’s Beadle. Well, let’s just say things didn’t quite work out as planned with NBC.

With SI’s Richard Deitsch reporting that Beadle is set to return to ESPN, it seemed to be a good time to break out the Q/A I did with Van Pelt during a recent trip to Bristol. The One Who Stayed is very happy with his decision.

You had a decision to make. you were on the market and you stayed.

Van Pelt: Uh‑huh, I did.

A few of your former colleagues left, and they have had mixed results.

Van Pelt: I wish everyone all the best.

I know you do.  When we were here last time (April, 2012), you were up in the air. Now it’s been more than a year. How do you feel about the way things have worked out?

 Van Pelt: It was great to be able to take inventory of my life professionally and ask myself, what do I do, what do I want to do, and it was flattering that other people were interested in offering up something different to do.  You know, the best thing that happened was that they were willing to help me create a little bit more of a life.  Picking it up there, just the idea ‑‑ the best thing that happened was I was able to talk with a group of people here and say, you know, I’d love to do some college football.  I’m not trying to take Chris Fowler’s chair because he’s awesome.  I’m not trying to take Rece Davis’ chair, also awesome.  But if there’s a spot at the table that I could just pull up a chair and do something that’s of any value, then great.  So we carved out a thing with Gameday, and it’s great.

You do a daily radio show, SportsCenter, and Gameday during the fall. And there’s the golf majors during the spring and summer. That’s a pretty full schedule.

Van Pelt:   Any one of those would be a job.  Here’s the best thing, the most important thing for me to make clear here.  Every entity here has done a great job of making it like a symbiotic thing.  Everyone is on the same page.  Everyone works to say, okay, well, what day can we lose him on radio, Tuesday or Wednesday, cool.  The Gameday guys say, look, we need you to be there on‑site, or hey, we can do the piece but get out of there, go home, so we don’t need you to be here.  You know what I mean?  Everyone is reasonable.  It’s an unreasonable thing to take on, but I asked to do it.  You know what I’m saying?

You asked to do all this?

Van Pelt: I did.  Look, I love the radio piece.  SportsCenter,  and Gameday I think is the best show that ESPN does.

Talk about the radio show.          

Van Pelt: Of course, and the thing that was most important to me staying here. Let me put it this way:  To continue to try to grow the show with (Ryen Russillo) was as important as any single thing.  You know?  All the things that you get to do at ESPN, the totality of that, nothing else could match, and where other places just said, oh, you can do a radio show, that’s fine.  But I couldn’t do a radio show with Ryan anywhere else.

I guess the best way to put it is the thing I was least willing to sacrifice here, moving forward, because of its importance to me was radio. (The show) is in its infancy.  Mike & Mike is 14 years.  They’ve been doing it for a long time.  Colin (Cowherd) is twice as long as we have.  It takes a long time to build that.

What do you like about the radio show?

Van Pelt: It’s just hard as hell to do well.  It’s really difficult to do well.  And as a TV guy, you walk into it with an arrogance that ‑‑ well, I’m on TV, I’ll be fine on radio.  And four minutes into your first eight‑minute segment, you realize that you’ve got three hours left to fill.  I’ve often said, and I’m kidding, like I could do SportsCenter mildly buzzed and I could navigate the terrain because I know the mechanics, and there’s only so much heavy lifting I have to do.

And you’ve done it buzzed a few times.

Van Pelt:  I’ve done it blind drunk several years, several years, just really, really hammered on a nightly basis. (Editor’s note: Just kidding, folks)

Radio, every segment of every hour is a challenge to fill in an interesting way.  What I like the most about it is how challenging it is to do it well.  I have such respect for the people that are great at it, and I’m talking across the board, guys who I would never do shows like, but their ability to ‑‑ and I’m talking in different genres.  The genius of a Limbaugh or a Stern or even here you could say a Cowherd who some people say is polarizing, the genius of people like that is they get people that like them that look to them to nod their head and they get people who are angry at them to listen to be mad.  That’s a genius ‑‑ I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t just knowingly wink and poke the bear.  I couldn’t do that.  But I respect the ability for people that understand the medium to do it.

When you have to go on SportsCenter at night and you still wear that hat, you can’t just go and be an insane radio person.  You just can’t.  Because there’s a line you straddle, and I find myself on SportsCenter having to remind myself, keep your opinion out of this, right, because this isn’t the forum for it, and then on radio I find myself having to remind myself, no, you’re allowed to go ahead and let it rip.  And it’s tough to straddle the lines and be good at it.

But I think the radio helps the TV because I find myself letting it bleed more in, because I think people are willing ‑‑ I think the one thing people I think know about me is that I’m authentically a fan.  I love sports, and allowing that passion to bleed into the presentation, I don’t think people hold that against you.  In fact, I think Boomer has shown us that it’s okay.  It’s okay to be ‑‑ in fact, it’s not just okay, it’s good to be agnostic.  It’s good to be fair.

So you stayed because of the totality of the whole package?

Van Pelt: Correct, yep.

Aside from the money, ESPN was the only place that would allow you to stay at ESPN, if you know what I mean.

Van Pelt:  I got to talk to really talented, smart, good people at other places, and I said that and I mean that you wish all of them success.  I just think that the challenge for them is herculean. Look I worked for the Golf Channel, right, and I used to joke that when I’d show up to cover a major championship before the Golf Channel had any rights that it was trying to fight a tank with a Popsicle stick.  I’d walk around carrying our own sticks for our shooter, we didn’t have a golf cart, but I knew those golfers, I had relationships with those guys, so I went in there and I fought, and we lost, but I managed some punches for a guy holding a tripod; you know what I mean?  I’ve been on the other side of it, and it’s a hard fight to win.

You have the arsenal of properties that you get a chance to be a part of here, it’s a very difficult hill to climb.  And I mean, you know, you take inventory, and I was proud of whatever little niches that I had carved out.  They were all important to me.

I’m sure wherever you landed, you would be the face of the network, Wouldn’t that have been enticing?

Van Pelt:  I’m not ego‑driven.  Hey, we’re going to put you on billboards and you’re going to have a show.  Awesome.  Then you know what you have to go do?  A show.  And you have to fill that hour and you have to ‑‑ and it needs to be ‑‑ I wasn’t afraid of failing as much as I was confident in succeeding here.  Does that make any sense?  Again, the idea of an ad campaign and billboards, like that’s the icing, man.

The cake is the doing the work every day, and the challenge of that at this point in time, I didn’t think that that was as enticing to me as being able to continue to do things I truly enjoyed doing with people that I enjoy at a place that I valued them and in the end they valued me.  Maybe they valued me more than they were going to have to, what are you are you going to do?  As I told them, I didn’t tell you that my house cost this much, somebody just knocked on the door and said this is what we’ll give you for your house.  Well, then that’s what my house costs.  I didn’t tell you that, they did.

As a highly visible Maryland alum, how do you feel about being part of the Big Ten?

Van Pelt: I think Maryland should be flattered because they were coveted by (the Big Ten). Maryland should be happy that it’s a windfall financially.  But you give up ‑‑ you sacrifice a lot of traditions.

The other thing I did say is that I wasn’t going to have a funeral for something that I thought died in 2004, which is the old ACC.  What I grew up with no longer existed anyway, and the ACC told Maryland that its rivals were going to be Pittsburgh and Virginia, and Maryland and Pittsburgh have no rivalry at all.

I can’t weep for that, but I’ll obviously be nostalgic for what I remember.  I remember it.  But then I go to Cole Fieldhouse and it’s closed.  I grew up going to RFK and it’s not a stadium.  I grew up going to Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, and it doesn’t exist.  If you think about what you grew up with, you can’t even go to the places you grew up to see the teams that you used to watch.  What is the one thing they say about life?  The only thing for sure is it goes on.

Speaking of life, you have a baby now at home. How does that change your perception of things?

Van Pelt:  You’re incredibly selfish in this business, I think.  You work holidays, you work weekends, you sacrifice in many, many ways to do what you do.  And the benefit of being an older dad is that a lot of that work is behind me.  I still will work hard, and I’m still thankful that I get to do this, but my guess is, my hope is that I’ll be able to be present for stuff later in life.  If I’d have done all this when I was 30, who knows what I would have missed?

It’s every cliché there is.  I went in last night after doing SportsCenter, and my daughter was asleep, and ‑‑

This is like 2:00 in the morning?

Van Pelt:  Yeah, it was about 2:30.  She’s asleep, and I just reached in the crib and I held her hand, and I sat there and I stared at her, and I walked in and I laughed when I laid down because it’s like ‑‑ like I said, it’s every cliché there is.

But my favorite part of yesterday was that, you know.  Was that two minutes of silence watching her lie there.  It sounds like a sappy Hallmark commercial, but that was what I did.