Ivan Maisel

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Ivan Maisel is a national college football writer from Mobile, Alabama. He is Jewish, and he attended Murphy High School and Stanford University. He began his career in 1981 at The Atlanta Constitution, where he covered Clemson’s surprising run to the national championship. He then worked for Sports Illustrated as a fact-checker, started covering national college football for the Dallas Morning News in 1987, and later wrote for Newsday in 1994 before returning to Sports Illustrated in 1997 as a senior writer. In 2002, ESPN.com hired him as its first college football writer. He appeared on ESPN TV, radio and podcasts and co-hosted the ESPN college football podcast for many years.

Maisel served as Editor-at-Large of ESPN College Football 150, the project commemorating the sport’s 150th anniversary. He wrote and hosted Down & Distance, produced The American Game and The Greatest, and helped produce Saturdays in the South for the SEC Network.

He has earned many honors for his work, including nine Football Writers Association of America Best Story awards (most recently for a 2022 remembrance of coach Mike Leach), the 2016 FWAA Bert McGrane Award (the FWAA Hall of Fame), and recognition by the Associated Press Sports Editors as one of the 10 best sports columnists in 2019. He also received the 2020 Jake Wade Award from CoSIDA and the Edwin Pope Vanguard Media Award from the Orange Bowl in 2019. ESPN announced in 2020 that it would not renew his contract, and he left in January 2021. He then joined On3 Media, with On3 launching on August 1, 2021; he left On3 in June 2023.

In 2025, Maisel published a biography of former Notre Dame head coach Frank Leahy, titled American Coach.

Maisel was born into a Jewish family in Mobile to Freida Gutlow Maisel and real estate developer Herman Maisel. He has a brother, Elliot, and a sister, Kathy. His son Max died in 2015 after going missing in Rochester, New York; a body found later in Lake Ontario was identified as Max. Maisel later spoke about the case and its impact and wrote about it in his 2021 memoir, I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye. He also wrote about the death of Washington State quarterback Tyler Hilinski in 2018 and has continued to share his experiences as a father and writer.