John Brenkus, the co-creator and host of ESPN’s Sport Science, the six-time Emmy Award-winning series that spent nearly two decades making physics and biomechanics genuinely entertaining for sports fans, died on Saturday May 31, 2025, at the age of 54 after a battle with depression.
Brinx.TV, the media company Brenkus founded, announced his death the following day in a statement shared across social media and on his X account.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the news that John Brenkus has passed away,” the statement read. “John, co-founder of BASE Productions, founder of Brinx.TV and co-creator and host of the 6-time Emmy Award-winning Sport Science, had been battling depression. John lost his fight with this terrible illness on May 31st, 2025. His heartbroken family and friends request privacy at this time, and encourage anyone who is struggling with depression to seek help.”
His family’s decision to name depression explicitly, not to obscure the cause, not to retreat into the language of “passed away peacefully,” was consistent with how Brenkus had spent the final years of his public life.
He had talked about his depression. He had talked about how close it had brought him to the edge. He believed the conversation itself was important.
What Was Sport Science?
Sport Science debuted in 2007 on Fox Sports Net as something that had not previously existed in sports television, a show that took the specific physical feats athletes achieve on the field, the force of an NFL tackle, the rotation on a curveball, the mechanics of a long drive in golf, and examined them through the lens of physics, biomechanics and engineering.
Brenkus was not a scientist who found his way into sports. He was a storyteller who found a way to make science feel like sports.
The format evolved across nearly 1,800 segments and multiple network homes.
The show moved from Fox Sports Net to ESPN, which eventually acquired the Sport Science brand. At ESPN, it reached its widest audience, a cable channel built for sports fans who might otherwise have no particular interest in the coefficient of friction or the moment of inertia.
Brenkus made them interested. He did it by making the science serve the story rather than the other way around.
The show earned six Emmy Awards. ESPN’s tribute, delivered on SportsCenter after Brenkus died, described him as “an innovator, an entertainer and an educator.”
All three words are accurate and all three are necessary, none of them alone is sufficient to capture what made Sport Science work.
ESPN analyst Adam Schefter, who knew Brenkus from their years together at the network, wrote on social media after learning of his death:
“John was so good at what he did. Sincerest condolences to his family and friends. Rest in peace, John.”
Robert Griffin III offered, “Prayers up for John Brenkus and his family.” Marcellus Wiley, the former NFL player who had been Brenkus’s colleague and friend, wrote simply “RIP.”
Brenkus’ 2023 Revelation
In January 2023, Brenkus appeared on the Never Shut Up podcast hosted by Marcellus Wiley and talked about what had happened to him after the success of Sport Science.
The conversation was candid in a way that public figures rarely allow themselves to be about mental health, and it became one of the more widely discussed interviews of that year in the sports media world.
After selling Sport Science to ESPN, Brenkus had moved to Park City, Utah. The transition from a life organized around the show, the production schedule, the athletes, the segments, the purpose, to a quieter existence in a mountain town was more difficult than he had anticipated.
He felt isolated. The depression that arrived during that period was unlike anything he had experienced.
“I was flat-out suicidal,” he told Wiley. “So much so, I had a noose tied around my neck. I was ready to do it.”
What stopped him was his dog, Zeppelin. Zeppelin came to him and tugged on his jeans, a small physical interruption in a moment of crisis that gave him enough space to step back. He picked up the phone and called his mother.
He described the period that followed as a battle, a sustained and difficult fight to find his way back.
He saw multiple psychologists and psychiatrists, working through the mental health system that is supposed to help and finding, as many people do, that the first several people he saw did not provide what he needed. “There’s something wrong with me. I am mentally lost,” he said. “I then went through a battle, I mean, I’m telling you, a battle, to get out of it.”
Eventually, he found a doctor in Virginia who helped him identify the right treatment path. When he told Wiley about that moment in 2023, he said, “I have never been depressed since, a day in my life, from that moment forward.”
The conversation was understood by everyone who heard it as a story of survival and recovery. A man who had been close to the edge had gotten help and had come back.
He talked about it publicly because he believed that talking about it was one of the things that could help someone else who was in the place he had been.
The Gap Between That Interview And May 31, 2025
The fact that Brenkus spoke in 2023 about recovery and then died in 2025 of what his family described as losing his fight with depression reflects something that is important to understand about the nature of the illness he was describing.
Depression is not a problem that is solved and never returns. Recovery is real, what he described experiencing after finding the right help in Virginia was real. And the illness can also return, evolve and become more difficult.
His family’s statement does not specify the circumstances of his death beyond naming depression.
That privacy is appropriate and deserved. What the statement does do, naming the illness directly, describing it as something he fought rather than something he simply had, is consistent with the way Brenkus had chosen to talk about his own experience throughout the years when he was speaking publicly about it.
He was an advocate for people seeking help. His family, in announcing his death, continued that advocacy by asking those who are struggling to reach out.
What He Built Beyond The Show
John Brenkus spent his career building things. Sport Science was the most visible, the show that connected his name to a specific way of thinking about sports that did not exist before he created it.
The infrastructure around the show was equally his. He co-founded BASE Productions, the production company behind Sport Science, and built it into a significant enterprise before the ESPN sale.
After Sport Science, he founded Brinx.TV, a media company aimed at creating sports content that lived in the digital space where much of sports consumption was moving.
The company became his platform for continued production work after the ESPN sale, and it was through Brinx.TV that his death was announced, the company he had built serving as the vehicle for the news of his passing.
He was 54 years old. He had hosted more than 1,800 segments of a show that changed how a generation of sports fans thought about the science behind what athletes do.
He had spoken publicly and honestly about the hardest thing that had ever happened to him, and he had encouraged other people to seek help when they needed it.
His family is asking for privacy. They are also asking those who are struggling to reach out.
Both requests come from the same place, a family that lost someone they loved to an illness that is real, that is devastating and that can be treated.
If You Are Struggling
If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or suicidal thoughts, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day.
You can also text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. Help is available.
