It Was Never About Sticking to Sports

The lights in the gym were strategically dimmed to emphasize the spotlight-illuminated empty stage featuring a large video screen that read “ESPN Talent Gathering 2017.” I walked in hesitantly, still not quite sure if I even belonged in the same room as some of the most famous people in sports.

It was Dec. 13, 2017, and I had been working at ESPN for about four months as a senior writer on the college football and college basketball teams. I was a virtual unknown, both inside and outside of ESPN’s on-campus gym—certainly not as prominent as almost everyone else there that afternoon.

I took a tentative seat in the bleachers at the back of the gym, next to a former colleague from BuzzFeed News and Jemele Hill, who seemed purposefully distracted so as to avoid conversation. This was understandable because, even though Hill’s name would not come up over the next two hours, it was understood that her recent social media activity was part of why we’d all been summoned to campus headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut. It’d been only three months since then-President Trump had called for her firing on Twitter after she’d tweeted he was a “white supremacist” who “has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.”

Over the next two hours, under that spotlight, a parade of ESPN executives and personalities went through a series of presentations covering the future of the company. It all had the feel of a slickly produced high school pep rally, punctuated by the rollout of a new social media policy meant to guide us through the chaotic news cycle ushered in by the Trump presidency. That new policy mandated that we avoid outright partisanship and seek permission before commenting on political or social issues on the air or on social media.

“At the end of this meeting I want you to be confident about the future of ESPN,” ESPN president John Skipper told us. Skipper brimmed with enthusiasm on the stage—a month earlier, he’d reached a contract extension with the company to stay through 2021. “I want you to feel proud about working here, and I want you to feel that your best efforts are needed for that future and to feel that pride.”

A week later, Skipper stunned everyone by resigning from his position (under threat of extortion over a drug problem, he’d later say).

The promising future Skipper envisioned that day hasn’t come to fruition. In fact, many of the 450 people who were in the gym that late-fall afternoon are no longer employed there. In the almost six years since that meeting, ESPN has had four more rounds of layoffs, including one this year; parent company Disney took the unprecedented step last month of revealing the company’s finances, which showed a 20 percent drop in profit this fiscal year; and ESPN’s pay-TV channel reported losing nearly a million U.S. customers in the past year.

Back in 2018, ESPN’s critics seemed emboldened by the internal chaos. These days, ESPN has the feel of an aging boxing champion, still the titular ruler of its weight class but increasingly vulnerable. Competitors and fans now seem to be waiting for the day an energetic upstart snatches its belt. And sure, they’ve been doing that for a couple of decades now. But the end does seem nearer than ever before. The question I’ve been trying to sort through ever since I left the company in 2019 is whether the downslide is because of Skipper’s absence, the state of sports, the state of media, the state of politics, or some combination of all of them.

Let’s start with how the media giant has done with its stick-to-sports ethos. ESPN’s bleak forecast came to mind during a recent Aaron Rodgers appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, the irreverent eponymous program of the former NFL punter turned ESPN’s answer to Barstool Sports. Rodgers, the New York Jets quarterback currently recovering from an Achilles injury, is a regular guest. His conversations with McAfee and co-host A.J. Hawk (a former NFL linebacker) are wide-ranging and occasionally interesting. But in recent years, Rodgers has doubled down on his COVID-19 vaccine skepticism and has regularly used McAfee’s show as a vehicle to mainstream them.

On this particular show, Rodgers joked that his Halloween costume would be a spike protein, which is found on the surface of the virus that causes COVID—presumably a joke (?) about his unvaccinated status. Seconds later, the feed suddenly cut out, leading some to speculate that ESPN was attempting to silence Rodgers. McAfee debunked that rumor a day later, saying, “That’s fake news.” He later confirmed that the outage was merely a technical issue with one cable provider.

Aside from this glitch, Rodgers’ ongoing dalliance with the anti-vax talking points on ESPN seemingly hasn’t drawn much attention or censure from company brass so far. That’s likely because McAfee has been granted the kind of latitude and freedom that few ESPN personalities have ever had.

One reason is that McAfee is one of its best-paid personalities, reportedly signing a contract in May worth $85 million. He’s on the air for two hours a day, College Gameday every Saturday, and sometimes even ESPN’s morning show, Get Up. And McAfee is admittedly hard to turn away from, with him usually standing and pacing around his broadcast set, perpetually animated. He’s not especially provocative or hostile, making him one of the friendliest bros in sports media. His show feels like a televised keg party—and that deal also gave him complete creative freedom, including the right to invite personalities from competing networks who apparently can say whatever they want.

And we’re no prudes, but a few of us old ESPNers have even marveled at his ability to regularly cuss in the middle of the day on a Disney-owned channel. I’d have loved to have been able to drop a “fuck” in some of my written work there.

That was, for me at least, a no-go. I’ve often thought back to the tenor of that meeting in Bristol in 2017, which was ostensibly about the future of ESPN, but was really about getting employees with active social media accounts that risked offending viewers to cut it out. At the time, I thought many of ESPN’s leaders were merely cowards, afraid of drawing the ire of their many right-wing critics, from Clay Travis to President Trump. But they were responding to something that many of us hadn’t yet grasped: Despite the pep rally, ESPN’s future was guaranteed to be much less auspicious and much less ambitious than its glittery past.

Now I realize ESPN wasn’t so different from other media outlets in this punishing economy. They were scared shitless, and for once they couldn’t just throw money at their problems.

We all should now understand that there’s no such thing as sticking to sports, because there’s no possibility of stripping the cultural trappings of our games down to just the score and roster movement. Colin Kaepernick’s story was as much about him allegedly being blackballed from the NFL as it was his opinions about American policing. What ESPN was asking us to do was pretend that criticizing Trump’s Muslim ban on Twitter was politics while his appearance at the annual Army-Navy game to toss the coin was just part of college football’s pageantry. That hypocrisy—just like the more recent move to let white celebrities go off about vaccines—was mostly a cover for something else more dispiriting.

I talked with Skipper a couple of weeks ago as he sat in the radiant high-rise office of his new venture, Meadowlark Media, a new podcast network he co-founded with former ESPNer Dan Le Batard. He wore a sharp Carolina-blue sweater, the traditional color of his alma mater, the University of North Carolina. Skipper—ever the Southern gentleman—was as charming and congenial as I was told that he would be.

Over the course of our half-hour chat—and with many detours he insisted be off the record—Skipper remained bullish about the future of his old employer.

“It’s not like it’s a failing business,” Skipper said. “Sports is a good business, and ESPN is the sports company with the most rights, and I think they’re going to continue to make money into the future. It’s just not a high-growth business.”

And Skipper is right, ESPN still is the place to go for live sports events. It makes a lot of money relative to pretty much all other media companies—for now. He talked about the company as if it were a former partner he still remembers fondly. If Skipper has any resentment about having to step down, he didn’t show it. They did have some great times, after all.

Near the end of our conversation, Skipper also reminded me he had even played a role in the rise of Pat McAfee, before The Pat McAfee Show. “When I was at DAZN, we, and we here is Jamie Horowitz, put Pat McAfee on, before Barstool and before ESPN,” he said. “We were the first people to put Pat McAfee on national television.”

I wasn’t surprised about that. During his 20-year run at ESPN, Skipper proved to be one of the most creative and ambitious leaders in sports media. His list of innovations includes launching ESPN’s biweekly magazine in 1997, winning the broadcast rights to Monday Night Football in 2005, and spearheading the creation of Grantland and the Undefeated, among many other awe-inspiring achievements. He tried a lot of things that worked and some that didn’t, like greenlighting a Barstool talk show that lasted a single episode thanks to internal pushback.

But if you were a print journalist, Skipper’s run was an especially great time to work at ESPN. “He was a print guy, and he thought that he could find writers and turn them into broadcasters,” said Bryan Curtis, once a writer at Grantland, now at the Ringer.

And he could, at least sometimes. Among those former ink-stained wretches were major talents like Le Batard, Bill Simmons, and Jemele Hill. In those days, if you were a top sports columnist or gifted feature writer, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect a call-up to ESPN someday.

But when Skipper assumed the role of ESPN president in 2012, his ambition was soon shadowed by financial realities. As consumers started shedding their old cable deals in favor of streaming, Skipper and ESPN had to run a tighter ship.

After writing a couple of freelance stories for ESPN the Magazine, I was recruited to work there full time as a staff writer. I showed up at ESPN in the summer of 2017, after a round of layoffs earlier that year. It was awkward to come aboard during that time, especially when I’d run into former employees in press boxes. I was there to write about college football and college basketball through my previous lens as a feature writer at BuzzFeed News, where I’d covered the 2014 Ferguson uprising, the Mother Emanuel mass shooting in Charleston, and the brief NFL career of Michael Sam, the first publicly gay player to be drafted into the league. They essentially wanted me to report and write about how the world—politics, culture, race—was impacting college athletes.

It was a great job. The money was a lot better than anything I’d earned before in my journalism career. My colleagues were generous, committed, and oh-so-talented. So many more potential sources returned my calls and emails. I covered the Rose Bowl, man.

But there were also signs that it wouldn’t be great for long. My dream job was to eventually join the staff of ESPN the Magazine, but soon I learned that the publication was cutting back to monthly (it would eventually stop publishing altogether).

The day that I knew I wouldn’t be long for the company in its post-Skipper era came when I was on vacation in Cancún in June 2018. I was just planning to relax at our rooftop pool when I got a phone call from my editor. Since he knew I was out for the week, I figured that it must have been an emergency. When I picked up, he apologized profusely and then asked if I’d seen the news about Roseanne Barr’s new show being canceled because of a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, a Black woman who was a senior adviser to Barack Obama throughout his presidency.

I hadn’t paid much attention to Barr or her show, and cared even less now that it was gone. But I soon realized why my editor was calling—he wanted to make it clear that I shouldn’t say anything about it, so as not to draw the wrath of Disney executives. I went back to my vacation with the dawning realization that the last year on my ESPN deal would likely be my last year at ESPN.

It’s not that I wanted to tweet about Roseanne Barr and her racist tweets. It’s that I now knew part of the bargain would require constant reminders to understand my place in the company. I’d worked in journalism for more than 15 years by then; I knew how to keep most of my opinions out of print. But I didn’t want to be constantly monitored like an overactive schoolboy. (After I left the company, more than once I heard from former co-workers that my tweets seemed a lot more entertaining. I mean, duh.)

I could also see the trend lines in the company: more of the TV-ready personalities like Mike Greenberg and Stephen A. Smith and much less of the journalists who needed some more polish to shine. The new ESPN, under new president Jimmy Pitaro, kept cutting back on personnel and dropping huge amounts of money on stars like Troy Aikman (five years, $90 million), McAfee (five years, $85 million), and Kirk Herbstreit ($6 million a year).

Curtis saw it too. “I noticed it when they started taking a tiny number of personalities and putting them all over the network. That was the plan,” he said. “Now ESPN has fewer stars and more megastars.”

McAfee is one of those megastars, and he’s mostly delivered for ESPN. He’s kept his show in the news, with a regular assist from Rodgers. He’s racking up big audience numbers on YouTube. And he’s now the preeminent loudmouth at the center of College Gameday, one of ESPN’s most venerable and celebrated productions. And—as we’ve already covered—he can pretty much say whatever he wants. No one seems to get too upset when McAfee and his guests don’t stick to sports.

He is part of ESPN’s future, if there is to be one. But even McAfee, expensive as he is, won’t determine it.

After I interviewed Skipper, he went on air later that day with former ESPNer Pablo Torre and expounded on what might save his former company from the bleak future facing so many other media companies.

Skipper said Disney desperately needed to sign another rights deal with the NBA, given that their current one—which averages about $2.6 billion a year, and is shared with TNT—was set to expire at the end of the 2024–25 season.

“These are existential rights for ESPN,” he said on Pablo Torre Finds Out, a podcast produced by Meadowlark Media. “They have to have the NBA.”

I pondered the irony of the NBA being another lifeline for ESPN when a few years ago it was popular among certain writers and bloggers to muse about how the league’s occasionally progressive political stands—remember, Black Lives Matter is controversial!—were anathema to (mostly white male) sports fans. Maybe “wokeness” wasn’t affecting their bottom lines after all. Not that anyone other than rabid partisans like Travis or professional contrarians like Jason Whitlock would say that now.

Regardless, early in his tenure as ESPN president, Skipper discovered that those broadcast rights deals were pivotal to keeping the channel on cable lineups, which, a decade ago, reached as many as 100 million people. Without those deals—$2.6 billion for 12 years of the NFL, $470 million for the College Football Playoff, $550 million for Major League Baseball—ESPN wouldn’t have much programming to offer that the public will pay for. (Not even The Pat McAfee Show, whose TV ratings have so far been disappointing.)

“My central charge coming into the job as president was ‘I believe we should try to buy as many rights as possible for as long as possible, because whatever happens, including the decline of pay TV, sports rights are going to be more valuable,’ ” Skipper told me. “It’s going to be the way that we hold our audience and continue to have a profitable company.”

His reasoning is solid, but it also reminded me of the challenges facing every single employer that I’d worked for in the past—none of which have had the option of buying their way into viewership quite like this.

I started my career at local newspapers, which hemorrhaged revenue as advertising moved online. Then I moved to online media, which has tried venture capital funding, online advertising, and partnerships with social media companies like Facebook to sustain itself, often with little success. Neither industry has figured out a guaranteed counterpunch, and their futures remain very much in doubt.

I would have never believed that ESPN, a moneymaking behemoth for over four decades now, would find itself in a similar situation as the Shreveport Times, casting about for eyeballs that might make the ads pay enough. In other words—to answer my original question—it probably isn’t really losing Skipper (though he had a singular vision for the company), nor was it changes to sports or even changes to politics. It’s the same story about media, and attention, and eyeballs that is plaguing us everywhere.

If anyone would have an understanding of how this dilemma washed up on ESPN’s glinting sands, I figured it would be Bob Ley, who until his retirement in 2019 was the longest-tenured on-air employee at ESPN. He had plenty to say about the problem.

“It’s not that you have to make money. You have to make a shitload of money,” said Ley, who is the founder of Seton Hall University’s Center for Sports Media.

And make no mistake: These days, ESPN still makes a shitload of money. Just not as much as it used to, and there’s no path to reclaiming the lost income. Last month, Disney made the decision to release ESPN’s financials for the first time, revealing that the network had profits of $2.9 billion in fiscal year 2022. I think they wanted to look good, and they did: That’s even more than Disney’s entire entertainment division, which had profits of only $2.1 billion over the same time period.

But more relevantly, that’s also down significantly from the salad days of 2012–2018, when, over six years, ESPN made $22 billion in profits, which evened out to closer to $3.6 billion a year, including $4.4 billion in a single year, according to reporting by James Andrew Miller, co-author of Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, in 2011.

It’s unlikely to get any better as consumers continue to drop their cable bundles in favor of streaming services, which haven’t yet proven to be as profitable. That shift in viewing habits has shrunk ESPN’s footprint to 71 million homes from a peak of 100 million. For now, the only way for cord-cutters to watch ESPN is through cable.

To curb some of those losses, Disney CEO Bob Iger has announced his intention to find another partner for ESPN, whether through equity investment with one of its league partners or a marketing and distribution deal with a preexisting streaming company like Apple or Amazon. ESPN is also placing its bet on a new streaming service of its own design to be released in 2025.

But it’s unclear right now if a streaming product would make up enough of the impending losses of those cable carriage fees, which make up nearly two-thirds of ESPN’s revenue.

“The math doesn’t work,” Ley said. “That’s why I tell the students I speak to: You get the best seat for one of the great stories in American media. And the kicker is, I know a lot of the players that have been close to it, and even now are still active in it … nobody knows how this ends.”

It all sounded so familiar to me, a recovering newspaper and online media reporter. I just never would’ve believed that ESPN’s future was as uncertain as your local newspaper’s turned out to be when I was sitting in that gym.

And now, almost six years removed from that star-studded meeting in Bristol, I can see that none of the panic that day was ever really about propriety. Now McAfee can cuss during the day, Rodgers can posture publicly on the network for a debate about vaccines with Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Stephen A. Smith can push the presidential candidacy of his “friend,” Republican former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, on social media. If ESPN was truly trying to strip the politics out of its programming, it failed. But that was never truly the point.

No, that meeting in 2017 was about coming to the realization that, now and for the immediate future, ESPN is running out of time and money like the rest of us. It was an existential cry for help—it just hadn’t figured out where that cry should be directed yet.