The first four days of 2015 have been among the most eventful ESPN has ever had.
On Thursday, the network aired the inaugural college football playoffs. The two games were the most-watched programs in cable television history. That was followed by an even bigger milestone on Saturday, the network’s first ever NFL playoff game. That brought another top-ten cable audience to ESPN.
Just a decade ago, ESPN airing championship college football or postseason NFL action was an unlikely proposition. While ESPN has always been the big dog of sports media, this week cemented its transformation into a peer of the major broadcast networks.
Then came Sunday and the loss of Stuart Scott. For all the recent success ESPN has had, for the financial windfalls, viewership milestones, and the sheer breadth of its portfolio, ESPN has always been about the people and personalities delivering the highlights — sometimes sarcastic, sometimes exuberant, and especially in the ‘golden era’ of the 1990s almost always entertaining.
The games were almost incidental by comparison. Attracting NFL rights fueled the ESPN’s growth in the 1990s, but it was the camaraderie and irreverence of Dan Patrick, Keith Olbermann, Kenny Mayne, Rich Eisen, and others — and of course Scott — that gave the network its image. It is not so difficult to acquire big-ticket sports events, at least if one’s parent company is sufficiently flush. It is extremely difficult to create a culture and an ethos, a connection to sports that goes beyond any individual game being played. Scott as much as anyone was part of that.
Much like Chris Berman today, Scott faced frequent criticism throughout his career. In the early days of the sports blogosphere, including on this site, he was dinged for his catchphrases and creative touches (poetry jams to lead into highlights, for example). Some of the criticism was justified, but much was unnecessarily personal.
Whether one appreciated his style, it is hard to imagine SportsCenter without “Booyah” or “getting some bunnies with a badooka dunk” or something as simple as “have some” and “what ha-ha-happened was …” Yes, those were silly catchphrases, and some might have rolled their eyes at them. However, they were part of the sports fan soundtrack for two decades and they will never be heard again, at least not the same way. It is hard to imagine SportsCenter without the particular energy he brought to a big highlight, his enthusiasm and occasional incredulity. All those bits that might have been annoying in 2005 will be missed in 2015, and in their absence one might ask oneself why they were ever annoying in the first place.
Scott’s passing is a reminder of what ESPN is at its core, and why it has been so successful. Beyond airing big-time sporting events, ESPN has been defined by the men and women delivering the highlights (and the off-screen men and women who enable them to do so). Even as the network has become more dominant than anyone could have predicted twenty years ago, the highlights and the delivery thereof are still, deep down, the main event. Perhaps that why ESPN has not had a single legitimate competitor, despite all the criticism of its excesses, its sponsorship, synergy and self-promotion. Any network can air playoff games and set ratings records, but outside of Turner Sports with Inside the NBA, none has been able to replicate the winning formula that SportsCenter had in its heyday, one of which Scott was an integral part.
