We had a lot of ESPN-related coverage this year, because ESPN continues to be fertile ground for mockery. Here's everything we had to say about the monolithic sports network this year.
The Mostly Sexless Sex Scandal That Shook ESPN
A few hours after the 2009 Home Run Derby, Steve Phillips bought Brooke Hundley a drink. They were at the bar of St. Louis's Millenium Hotel, a block from Busch Stadium, where more than a dozen ESPN staffers had gathered after wrapping up another day's work during MLB's extended All-Star weekend. Hundley was a 22-year-old from Colorado making $10.96 an hour as an ESPN production assistant. Phillips was the former general manager of the Mets who'd spent the previous four years as a baseball analyst at ESPN. They'd met there in St. Louis, and Phillips had clearly taken a shine to Hundley. "Denver chick," he would call her. "Look at this little thing," he'd said to Chris Berman, one of his derby booth mates, as Hundley escorted Phillips from the stadium to a production truck. "She's going to be my bodyguard." Read...
The ESPYs Are A Colossal Waste Of Money
It's a nearly annual question in Bristol: Can we finally cancel the ESPYs? Read...
How ESPN Pulled A Bullshit Colin Kaepernick Story Out Of Thin Air
By pulling out of its partnership with Frontline, ESPN reminded us, yet again, where its newsroom stands. It's second fiddle to the company's business interests. So, let's show you what the flagship show of ESPN's newsroom does in lieu of participating in a documentary that the NFL is afraid of. It's a story that the NFL could only be thrilled with. Watch the video above and let's take you step-by-step through how ESPN contrives and then covers a story that doesn't even exist. Read...
Why ESPN's Chris Broussard Came Out As A Bigot
Outside the Lines is supposed to be the safe haven from all the bullshit. Bob Ley likes to call the show the Switzerland of ESPN. It's the thinking man's sports program—Bristol's answer to NewsHour. Sonorous reporters intoning Serious News. An air of calm, cool reflection about the issues of the day. Even on Monday, as SportsCenter kept fuckingTim Tebow's chicken at the expense of the Jason Collins news, Bob Ley seemed to understand that there was a truly significant story breaking all around them. Read...
What I Learned From A Year Of WatchingSportsCenter
Thirty-three years and more than 50,000 episodes on, SportsCenter is less a television show or a convenient way to catch up on the day in sports than a great mechanical contraption gone awry, its parts moving independently not just of one another but of any obvious directing intelligence. Read...
ESPN Loses Its Mind: What Howie Schwab Meant To Bristol
Information was sacred to Howie Schwab, the longtime researcher and producer who was laid off by ESPN on Wednesday. "Not knowledge," as the critic Lee Siegel once clarified. "Information." Siegel was writing about Stump the Schwab, the game show that made Schwab an unlikely half-celebrity, but it'll work here as an epitaph for Schwab's career at ESPN. His 26 years in Bristol were spent in service of information, dedicated to the idea of sports as discrete packets of unprocessed data, to be sorted and stored and perhaps later retrieved, or maybe jotted down on a card and hurried over to theSportsCenter desk, where an anchor always knew Schwab was coming by the jangling of coins in his pocket. Read...
Rick Reilly's Wife Does His Dirty Work On Twitter
Cynthia Reilly's Twitter presence is small. She's tweeted just 42 times and follows only nine people. She has three followers. But she's there for an important reason: to get people to call her husband, ESPN writer Rick Reilly. Read...
Rick Reilly's American Indian Father-In-Law Says Reilly Misquoted Him
Last month, ESPN's Rick Reilly came out in support of the Redskins' name. The backbone of his argument? Father-in-law Bob Burns, a Blackfeet elder, who supposedly said he doesn't care about the team name. Burns has written a response for Indian Country Today Media Network, and oh man. Read...
Ex-ESPNer: Did Network Cut 300-400 Jobs To Pay For SportsCenter Set?
A recently laid-off ESPN source gave us more details about the ESPN job cuts, the first significant staff reduction in four years. First off, it appears these layoffs will stretch over several weeks. There will be more technology and creative services layoffs today. Layoffs in production are coming in a few weeks; remote production layoffs will follow that; and then, some time in the summer, layoffs will hit the Charlotte office. This is how ESPN is going to get those to 300 to 400 job cuts: over several weeks, in excruciatingly slow fashion. Read...
ESPN X Games Memo Asks Staffers To Work For Free And Not Make Fun Of Brazilian People
ESPN's X Games are slouching toward Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil, the first of three new international host cities, where competition begins next week and where staffers are arriving to find that their mellows have already been thoroughly harshed. It seems that money is tight in this corner of the $40 billion empire—tight enough that production assistants are being asked, nicely and obliquely, to work for free. A tipster passes along a memo sent by ESPN operations manager Severn Sandt. It includes the following: Read...
ESPN Pulls Out Of Frontline Concussion Investigation
For a while now, ESPN's big alibi, the thing Bristol would trot out any time someone questioned the company's journalistic bona fides, was its joint investigation into NFL head injuries with PBS's Frontline. Now that's done with. Read...
Bottom Line: How Sports Leagues Crack The Whip On ESPN
"We're not in the business of antagonizing our partner," the ESPN executive told theNew York Times, defending the network's sudden withdrawal of support for a program that made the NFL look bad. This wasn't last week. This was nine years ago. Read...
ESPN Never Had A Golden Age: The Real Meaning Of Olbermann's Return
So Keith Olbermann is returning to ESPN, which a) has to be one of the more expensive press releases in history and b) shows that the company really has come to that age where you start getting deeply sentimental. It all makes sense. Read...
ESPN Mentioned Tim Tebow 137 Times In 120 Minutes
The Worldwide Leader has really outdone itself. Read...
Sources: ESPN Laying Off Hundreds
ESPN is laying off a portion of its staff today, a network spokesman confirms to us. How many? ESPN won't say. A tipster told us earlier today that it would be more than 400 staffers. A source at ESPN said that number is a little high, but it appears to be in the hundreds. Read...
ESPN President's Memo: Support The Troops; Also, We're Firing People
Below is a memo from ESPN president John Skipper, sent companywide just before the Memorial Day weekend and forwarded to us by a Bristol tipster. "This is the only communication we've received from upper management this week that mentions the layoffs," our tipster writes. Happy Memorial Day! Read...
ESPN Fired The Guy Who Made That Genius Olbermann/Tupac Video
Remember the Keith Olbermann-as-Tupac video? It was a bit of a thing a couple of weeks ago. We posted it; so did the The Big Lead and Complex and Awful Announcing. Apparently the guy behind it—Will Schleichert—worked for ESPN. He was a PA. Emphasis on the was. He was fired last week. Read...