SMW Top 20 of the 2010s: #5-#2

This was a particularly grim decade in sports media, marked by the untimely passing of several respected industry professionals.

ESPN’s Stuart Scott had long deserved better from his critics by the time he fell ill in 2007. It was not until his final years that he received the broad respect and recognition that his work justified. Scott worked throughout his seven-year battle with cancer, covering the NBA Finals and anchoring the first SportsCenter in its new studio in the last months of his life. He made his final public appearance at the 2014 ESPYs, where he gave the defining speech of his career — one that will no doubt be replayed for as long as Jim Valvano’s in 1993.

Turner Sports’ Craig Sager fought back repeatedly from cancer, going through three bone marrow transplants in a three-year span. The final months of his life were some of the most productive of his career, conducting the first postgame interview after Villanova’s buzzer-beating national championship, appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and working his first NBA Finals game. He too gave a memorable speech at the ESPYs.

While Scott and Sager’s cancer battles were the most public, there were unfortunately several more in this decade. NBC’s Dave Strader, Showtime’s Nick Charles, Fox Sports’ Bill Webb and Steve Byrnes, Turner’s Jim Huber, and sportswriter Bryan Burwell, to say nothing of those who are still fighting.

One would be remiss not to mention ESPN’s John Saunders, Jim Durham, and most recently, reporter Ed Aschoff; sportswriters Drew Sharp and Le Anne Schreiber; and legends like Dick Enberg, Frank Deford and Keith Jackson. While any ten-year span will necessarily include a number of losses, the 2010s took a particular toll on this industry.

One of the most discussed media stories this decade, both in and outside of the sports niche, was the NFL’s two-year ratings drop in 2016 and 2017. It is not at all unusual for a sports league — or any television property — to have a couple of down years. Those were not even the NFL’s first down years of the decade; ratings and viewership fell in 2011 and 2012. So why all the concern?

One factor was the magnitude of the drop. The league’s regular season average fell 18 percent from 2015 (10.5) to 2017 (8.6), a steeper drop than the six percent dip from 2010 (10.6) to 2012 (10.0). The 8.6 average rating was the lowest for the regular season since at least 2001, while the average audience of 14.88 million was the smallest since 2008 (14.63M).

Yet that does not come close to explaining the unusually high levels of interest in the NFL’s ratings decline. During the 2016 preseason, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began sitting out the national anthem, and eventually taking a knee during its performance, in silent protest of police killings of unarmed African American men and women. He continued doing so through the end of the 2017 season, after which NFL teams refused to sign him.

Kaepernick’s protest, which was emulated by a number of other NFL players, generated swift backlash, as protests tend to do. Whether offended by Kaepernick’s methods, his cause, or both, a number of the aggrieved vowed to boycott the NFL until the league cracked down. Every drop in the NFL’s ratings was used as proof that the boycott was working. One’s decision to watch, or not watch, an NFL game became a statement of values, in keeping with a culture war both deadly serious and astonishingly trivial.

The NFL never did crack down, but team owners blackballed Kaepernick. The protests have largely stopped but are not prohibited. Ratings went up in 2018 and 2019, but are still below where the NFL was before the decline. The NFL is a lock for a massive payday in its media rights deals. Was there a boycott? Did it work? Is it over, or still going? There are data points for whatever argument one wants to make.

ESPN’s relationship with its most important business partner was endangered during the 2010s after the network committed the cardinal sin of any sports media partnership: journalism that made the league look bad.

ESPN’s first error was daring to put its name on its own reporting. ESPN journalists Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru chronicled the NFL’s apparent effort to conceal the danger of concussions in their 2013 book League of Denial. A companion documentary for the PBS show Frontline originally bore the ESPN logo, until NFL executives complained. The NFL said jump, ESPN said how high, and the logo was removed (though ESPN would promote the documentary on Outside the Lines).

During the NFL’s remarkable run of controversy from 2014-18, which included a domestic violence crisis, concussion crisis, player protest crisis, and of all things Deflategate, ESPN was occasionally forced to paint the league in an unflattering light. According to Sports Business Journal, the league could not abide such insubordination. By 2018, NFL executives said the league’s relationship with ESPN was the worst it had ever been, citing, among other things: “the number of times ESPN’s ‘Outside the Lines’ covered the concussion issue to the number of stories from feature writers Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham about Commissioner Roger Goodell’s salary, the league’s handling of the player protests, palace intrigue at the Patriots and the ongoing dispute between Goodell and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.”

The NFL response was to put the squeeze on ESPN. The network’s Monday Night Football slate, never stellar, brought new meaning to the word subpar. Its NFL Draft coverage suddenly had to compete with a FOX simulcast. As a final insult, the NFL was seemingly prepared to give ESPN’s NFL Wild Card Game to FOX.

John Skipper’s resignation marked a turning point in the relationship. Per Sports Business Journal, new ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro made it a priority to repair the company’s relationship with the NFL. While much of that work was no doubt done behind the scenes, some things speak for themselves. Outside the Lines will be reduced to one show a week starting in January. Michelle Beadle was jettisoned from Get Up! within days of blasting the NFL last year. Meanwhile, ESPN’s MNF schedule has improved dramatically, it no longer has to compete with FOX on the Draft, and it kept its Wild Card Game.

Jemele Hill was no stranger to controversy as this decade began, but those controversies were the types of things written about on sports media blogs rather than the front page. Few could have imagined that the day would come when Hill, or any sports media professional, would fall into the crosshairs of a presidential administration.

This is no ordinary presidential administration, as its detractors and supporters would both readily agree. It is an administration that spars with pretty much any critic, no matter the person’s national profile. Hence, when Hill called the president a “a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists” shortly after the president said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., the blowback was fierce, with the president and his press secretary calling for her firing.

Had Hill still been hosting ESPN2’s His & Hers, perhaps ESPN could have ducked for cover and waited things out. It just so happened that this controversy happened at the worst possible time for the network, with Hill co-anchoring the 6 PM ET SportsCenter with Michael Smith every night. SC6 was already flailing by the time Hill became an enemy of the state, with the hosts’ His & Hers vibe an ill-fit for SportsCenter (one ESPN executive, per The Hollywood Reporter, said the show was “too black.”)

ESPN’s initial strategy was to distance itself from Hill with no other punishment. As one would expect, that satisfied nobody. It later suspended Hill for two weeks for suggesting that people upset with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones boycott the team’s sponsors. All that did was turn Hill into an obvious lame duck, languishing in a high-profile role nobody believed she would still have in a year. Hill eventually left SportsCenter, and ESPN altogether, but by that point the culture wars had moved onto something else.