NEW ORLEANS — Laura Rutledge has so many different roles at ESPN during the football season that sometimes it seems like there must be two of her.
“You know what? I wish there were sometimes, because half the time I’m like Where am I? and What’s going on?” Rutledge told Front Office Sports from a hotel in downtown New Orleans during Super Bowl week.
Rutledge is the primary host of NFL Live on ESPN, and the anchor of the Saturday morning SEC Nation pregame show on SEC Network. She also worked over a dozen dates as a sideline reporter this past season between the network’s top college football crew, and the Monday Night Football second team on nights when ESPN had two games. To add to her professional responsibilities, Rutledge and her husband, Josh, are the parents to five-year-old daughter Reese and one-year-old son Jack.
“During all of that in the Fall, I didn’t ever allow myself to think about how crazy that was. I was just thinking, OK, what’s the next thing? Compartmentalize. Put my brain towards it,” Rutledge said. “And looking back I’m thinking, Wow, that was really crazy!”
Because she is in the day-to-day flow of the NFL, Rutledge said she finds it “easier” to keep up with everything going on in the league, and then will find “pockets of time” throughout the week to start getting a jump on SEC Nation and interview players for background on upcoming games for sideline reporting.
“It’s like my brain is scrambled eggs at all times,” Rutledge said.
As far as balancing the work with young kids, Rutledge admitted, “I’m still trying to figure that out. It’s a daily battle internally where I’m telling myself, ‘You’re not doing enough for them,’ and then ‘You’re not present enough at work.’ It’s always this constant push and pull with that.”
“What I’ve found with little kids especially is that even just sitting and playing with them for 30 minutes is valuable time to them—and it’s valuable time to me,” Rutledge continued.
“I think I get more out of it even than they do. I try to find time to sit my daughter down and say— ‘Look at me, let me tell you how proud of you I am. Let me tell you how amazing you are.’ —so that those are the things that are circling in her mind when I’m not there. My son is 19 months old so he doesn’t understand a lot of the time. He’s very attached to me, so that’s been really hard. Even coming here [to New Orleans], I’ve guilted myself about it—I couldn’t do an emotional goodbye with him, so I had to sneak out of the house.”
Rutledge has learned to set boundaries and try to shut off work when she is at home.
“There have been many times this year where I’ve turned down interviews or podcasts just because that’s past the time of when I need to be at home,” Rutledge said. “That’s when I need to be Mom.”
On Christmas Day of 2023, the family had a dire scare with Jack, who was about seven months old at the time.
“It was probably the most terrifying day of my life—and I feel very lucky to say that and to have walked away from it with a healthy child because there’s so many people who don’t get to have that happen,” Rutledge revealed.
Jack had had a minor surgery in early December. The family was at Rutledge’s grandmother’s house in Myrtle Beach, Sc. for Christmas and Jack suddenly became “inconsolable.” The family couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but then looked at the area where he had surgery and discovered what Rutledge described as a “massive hematoma” there. They rushed to the emergency room, where doctors were concerned about life-threatening internal bleeding.
“He was in so much pain—the poor little guy. It was just awful,” Rutledge said.
The son and mother were transported by helicopter to the children’s hospital in Charleston for emergency surgery, while the father had to embark on the two-hour drive. It was ultimately discovered that the boy’s own body had created a blood clot, which meant that the bleeding was not spreading to his internal organs as previously feared.
“I still think it was a miracle. I don’t know how else to describe it,” Rutledge said. “The doctors there who were experts on these things were amazed by it too. We’ve gone back to the hospital in Connecticut to see his doctors monthly in the aftermath, and we kind of thought we’d be doing that forever since we never knew what caused it. But recently, about two months ago, we went in and they were like, ‘You don’t have to come back. He’s good!’”
This week, Rutledge has returned to New Orleans, where on New Year’s Day, her scheduled role as a sideline reporter for the Sugar Bowl was rapidly transformed into a hard news reporter in the wake of the tragic terror attack that claimed the lives of 14 people on Bourbon Street early that morning.
The morning began with Rutledge checking on everybody in the ESPN crew to make sure that they were OK, and then during a 9 a.m. production meeting it dawned on her to check in with the Georgia football program. They gave her a statement to put on TV and news that the team was sheltered in place, and she reached out to SEC Nation coordinating producer Baron Miller and College GameDay coordinating producer Matt Garrett to figure out the logistics of communicating the news on TV.
After an initial spot, Rutledge continued to work the phones. “The interesting thing was our ESPN security team had a lot of FBI ties, and they were so generous with their information. That connected me to a lot of the law enforcement side of things, which was something I’m not necessarily that familiar with but I had to familiarize myself with it quickly so I could report it and provide the information,” Rutledge said.
After first broadcasting from the ESPN hotel, Rutledge and a TV crew hustled over to the Superdome where she would spend the day providing updates not just for ESPN and the Rose Bowl halftime show, but ABC News as well.
“I sat at that desk for probably eight hours,” Rutledge said.
“It harkened me back to my investigative journalism classes in college because it was a whole different type of reporting. The more I’ve thought about it since, the thing that was really important to me that day was thinking about it through the lens of family members of somebody who was a victim in the attack. How would they want to hear things communicated? I was trying as best I could to communicate just the tragic nature of it, and how hard it was, but also to say how the city was handling the safety portion of it. Because I think law enforcement deserved a ton of credit with how they handled everything.”
