The Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism
Sponsored by The McGarr Symposium on Sports and Society
Seth Wickersham Speaks on Campus
Seth Wickersham is a senior writer at ESPN whose primary focus is long form enterprise and investigative work on the National Football League. His stories have appeared across ESPN platforms.
In more than two decades at ESPN, he has profiled the likes of Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Bill Belichick, John Elway, Sean McVay, Andrew Luck, Odell Beckham, Jr., Bill Walsh, Jim Harbaugh, Alex Honnold, Gregg Popovich and Y.A. Tittle, among others, and he has written deep dives into strained relationships within the Cleveland Browns, Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. Along with senior writer Don Van Natta, Wickersham has written critically acclaimed investigations on the NFL’s handling of the Spygate and Deflategate cheating controversies, the Rams and Raiders franchise relocations, the behind-closed-doors meetings on the inequality protests, the efforts by Jerry Jones to block Roger Goodell’s contract extension, the complicated tenure of NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith, the efforts of Donald Trump to interfere with Senator Arlen Specter’s Spygate inquiry, and of Dan Snyder’s attempts to avoid being removed as owner of the Washington Commanders. A 2022 story about Snyder by Wickersham, Van Natta, and Tisha Thompson is widely credited with triggering the push for him to sell the franchise.
In 2018, Wickersham was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting, and has been part of a staff that has three times won the NMA for General Excellence. His stories have been anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing, the Best American Sports Writing, Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists, and in Words Matter: Writing to Make a Difference. He has won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Pro Football Writers Association. In 2015, he won a Folio Award for Best Single Story – Sports, and received a second-place National Headliner Award in Magazine Feature Writing.
In the fall of 2021, Wickersham’s book It’s Better to Be Feared: The New England Patriots Dynasty and the Pursuit of Greatness was released. It was a New York Times bestseller and was named Nonfiction Book of the Year by Sports Illustrated and Sports Book of the Year by the National Sports Media Association.
In the fall of 2025, Wickersham’s second book, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback, was released. It was a New York Times bestseller.
A collection of his ESPN work, Be on That Hill, will be published in the fall of 2026 by Hyperion Avenue.
He is credited as playing himself in the 2014 movie Draft Day, though he regrets to inform that the scene was cut before it was shot.
Wickersham was born in Denver and raised in Boulder and in Anchorage, Alaska. He attended the Missouri School of Journalism, where he and ESPN writer Wright Thompson covered Super Bowl XXXIV for the Columbia Missourian. He was hired at ESPN The Magazine shortly after graduation in 2000. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children.
Bio courtesy of ESPN Press Room
The Deford Lecture
The McGarr Symposium on Sports and Society has hosted the Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism annually since 2010. Created to honor the iconic sportswriter and carry his unique vantage point on sports, the Deford Lecture has hosted journalists, scholars and leading thinkers to discuss pressing cultural issues with the UT-Austin community.
Frank Deford (1938-2017) was amongst the most versatile of American writers. On radio, he was heard as a commentator every Wednesday on Morning Edition on National Public Radio. On television, he worked as a Senior Correspondent for the HBO show, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. In print, he was Senior Contributing Writer at Sports Illustrated–– an association that dates back to 1962. As a journalist, Deford was elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters and named U.S. Sportswriter of the Year six times, as voted by his peers. Sportswriter of The Year. The American Journalism Review has likewise cited him as the nation’s finest sportswriter, and twice he was voted Magazine Writer of The Year by the Washington Journalism Review. Posthumously, Deford received the inaugural Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting for his lifetime achievement.
Since the Center for Sports Communication & Media has been managing the Deford Lecture, speakers have included Bob Costas (2018), Andrea Joyce (2019), Mina Kimes (2020), Howard Bryant (2022) and Christine Brennan (2023). The Lecture was postponed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Frank Deford, Sportswriting Icon
The author of eighteen books, Frank Deford (1938-2017) was a towering sportswriter, working in virtually every medium during his illustrious. He was senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated, where his byline first appeared in 1962. A weekly commentator for NPR’s “Morning Edition,” he was also a regular correspondent on the HBO show “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” He was editor-in-chief for the groundbreaking - and short lived - sports daily newspaper, The National.
As a journalist, Deford won the National Magazine Award for profiles, and was elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters. Voted by his peers as U.S. Sportswriter of the Year six times, he was also cited by The American Journalism Review as the nation’s finest sportswriter and was twice voted Magazine Writer of the Year by the Washington Journalism Review.
The Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism began at the University of Texas in 2010, with his campus address that year. Over the years, it has featured some of the most compelling voices, interested in the intersection of sports and American culture. Deford was presented with a Christopher Award and awards for distinguished service to journalism from the University of Missouri and Northeastern University. Deford and Red Smith are the only authors with more than one piece in The Best American Sportswriting of the Century, edited by David Halberstam. For his radio and TV work, Deford has won both an Emmy and a George Foster Peabody Award.
Frank Deford Content Archives
Frank Deford maintained a sizable and influential presence in print, radio and video over his storied career. Here are some of the archival resources for his work.