What happened to ESPN?
Everyone has their own explanation. Conservatives says the channel got too political. Cable executives say the company has gotten caught up in the cord-cutting revolution. Internet evangelists say that Bristol never figured out the internet. Finance people say that the company overpaid for content in the form of long-term league contracts, which were improperly valued and left no room for maneuver.
All of these explanations are correct.
We could argue over how to rank them in order of importance. My own ranking would be: (1) Overpaying for broadcast rights; (2) Cord-cutting; (3) Politics; (4) Internet. But no serious appraisal of ESPN can deny that all four are at play.
But I want to take a minute to nibble around one of the smaller problems at ESPN that was, in its own way, emblematic of what happened to the whole.
SportsCenter was one of the iconic TV programs of my youth. A news show! About sports! As a kid, imagine being told that you could get a whole hour’s worth of those three minutes of sports highlights your local news broadcast gave you. It was heaven.
And what made SportsCenter great wasn’t just the highlights, but the not-entirely professional delivery. There’s a reason that the early generations of SportsCenter anchors were iconic. There were the brilliant, dada-esque
commercials. The on-air buffoonery. The slow-play highlight packages.
What made SportsCenter so great was that the show covered the sports you were interested in, without fear or favor.
But as ESPN started acquiring the rights to broadcast more and more sports, they changed the basic mission of the show and SportsCenter morphed from a news program about sports into an infomercial for sports that ESPN owned. It became an hour-long commercial.
When NASCAR, or the NHL, or the NBA, or tennis was absent from the ESPN airwaves, suddenly SportsCenter would treat them as though they barely existed. When ESPN bought the rights to a European soccer league, suddenly soccer showed up at least once in every Top 10 highlight package.
SportsCenter went from being a consumer-oriented show to being part of a vertically integrated corporate pipeline. And viewers could tell the difference.
Which is fine, so far as it goes. But the change meant that ESPN wasn’t really ESPN as we had known it.
As a consequence, ESPN broadened its reach—the ESPN of 2005 was bigger, by any metric, than the ESPN of 1995. But what the executives didn’t realize is that as the brand expanded, it was also being hollowed out. So when the cord-cutting and the bad-deals pushed the company into tough times, ESPN had no core audience to fall back on.
