Jarrett Payton, the Chicago broadcaster learning to talk past his father’s name

Jarrett Payton

Photo: DoubleBlue / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 26, 1980 Arlington Heights
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	All-NFL Europe League team 2005
Individual awards	Orange Bowl MVP · World Bowl XIII champion with the Amsterdam Admirals

Jarrett Payton has never entered a Chicago room ahead of his surname. It reached the Hall of Fame stage, an NFL coaching office and every newsroom that has employed him before he did. What changed at the end of the summer is the length of the shift. As David Haugh’s new partner on the morning show at The Score, Chicago’s sports-talk station, he has four and a half hours to fill every weekday, and a name, however heavy, does not talk for that long on its own.

The name belonged to Walter Payton, the Chicago Bears running back the city still calls Sweetness. Jarrett grew up in the northwest suburbs, in Arlington Heights and later South Barrington, with his mother Connie and his sister Brittney. Still a boy, he stood at the lectern in Canton and presented his father for enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, a speech that made him a public figure long before his own career began.

That was 1993, and Jarrett, born on December 26, 1980, was twelve. At St. Viator High School he chose soccer first and was named all-state before switching to football, where as a senior he played quarterback, tailback and receiver and piled up 2,842 all-purpose yards. His last months of high school were the months his father went public with a rare liver disease. Walter Payton spoke about it in February 1999, partly on the airwaves of The Score, and died on November 1 of that year, when his son was a freshman at the University of Miami. The college years that followed asked for patience: a redshirt season, a stint at fullback, a slow climb back to tailback. As a senior he ran for 985 yards and seven touchdowns, and his final game in a Hurricanes jersey was the one people remember. In the Orange Bowl on January 1, 2004, he carried 22 times for 131 yards in a 16-14 win over Florida State and was named the game’s most valuable player.

No team drafted him. The Tennessee Titans signed him in 2004 and put him on the practice squad, under a head coach, Jeff Fisher, who had been his father’s teammate in Chicago. He wore 33 in Nashville because the franchise had retired 34 for Earl Campbell. The following spring he was sent to NFL Europe, and for a few months with the Amsterdam Admirals he was the back he had been in Miami: 5.6 yards a carry, second in the league, a share of the touchdown lead with seven, a place on the All-NFL Europe team and a World Bowl XIII title. Back in Tennessee, he made his NFL debut against the Indianapolis Colts in October 2005 and finished the season with 33 carries for 105 yards and two touchdowns. The Titans let him go before 2006.

Canada gave him his longest run. With the Montreal Alouettes in 2007 he gained 852 yards, fifth in the Canadian Football League, scored eight rushing touchdowns and had a 160-yard afternoon against the Calgary Stampeders. Montreal released him the next summer, and a 2009 stint with the Toronto Argonauts ended at his own request after ten touches. He closed out his playing days in 2010 with the Chicago Slaughter of the Indoor Football League, back in the city where every introduction began with his father.

Read plainly, the record is that of a determined journeyman with one great January night, and the hardest thing about it is that nobody was ever going to read it plainly. The Titans job came through a man who had shared a locker room with Walter. The most-watched thing he has produced as a journalist is a four-second phone clip. Leaving Arrowhead Stadium on September 24, 2023, after the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Bears 41-10, he caught Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce walking out side by side and posted it to X over a security guard’s objection; it passed 15 million views. When The Score hired him this summer, Jeff Agrest of the Chicago Sun-Times called him personable and charismatic and then asked the question the job turns on: whether he has enough opinions to fill the airtime. Agrest read the hire as proof that the station’s talent pipeline had dried up.

That television career was longer and steadier than the viral clip suggests. Payton co-hosted SportsFeed on CLTV before WGN-TV hired him as a sports anchor and reporter in May 2015. Over the next decade he anchored sports on the station’s 4 and 9 p.m. weekday newscasts and co-anchored GN Sports, its nightly half-hour show. Off the set, he launched the Jarrett Payton Foundation in 2011, which runs a youth football camp, the Jarrett Payton Leadership Academy, and an anti-bullying program called PROJECT: NO BULL. Every year he takes part in handing out the NFL’s Walter Payton Man of the Year award during Super Bowl week. And in August 2024 he served as the Hall of Fame presenter for Steve McMichael, his father’s teammate, whose enshrinement was held at his home in Homer Glen because ALS kept him from travelling to Canton. In the speech McMichael’s sister read for him, he called Payton his pseudo-son.

The turn came quickly. On July 30, 2026, Payton announced that he was leaving the station. “After 10 meaningful years at WGN, I’ve made the decision to step away from the station,” he wrote, adding that he wanted to spend more time with his family. Less than a month later The Score fired Mike Mulligan, its morning co-host since 2008, together with midday host Marshall Harris, and on August 24 named Payton as Mulligan’s replacement. The Haugh & Payton Show went on the air on August 31, from 5:30 to 10 a.m. on weekdays. Mitch Rosen, the station’s vice president, said Payton’s experience, perspective and deep connection to Chicago and its fan bases would be a tremendous addition. The hours suit his stated reason for leaving television: the shift ends mid-morning.

The family he cited is the one he built in 2009. He married Trisha George on March 4 of that year, a date the couple chose because it echoes 34, his father’s number, and held the reception at Soldier Field a few days later. They have two children, Jaden and Madison.

A Bears season and a co-host Agrest described as hard to draw out will fill the mornings through the winter, and the station that once carried his father’s hardest announcement now carries his voice for longer than any camera ever did. Whether Chicago starts hearing Jarrett Payton on his own terms is the one question his surname cannot answer for him.

Tags: sports, athletes, American football, Chicago Bears, sports broadcasters, Jarrett Payton, Walter Payton