SMW Top 20 of the 2010s: #10-#6

It seemed like ESPN was in good hands when John Skipper took over as president in 2011, but the Skipper years will long be remembered as some of the most difficult in ESPN’s history. His six-year tenure included its fair share of successes, like launching the Scott Van Pelt-hosted SportsCenter and renewing ESPN’s NBA deal, but also a number of questionable decisions.

Under Skipper, ESPN acquired Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which never seemed to fit under the ESPN umbrella; brought in Jason Whitlock to run a website, a move that still defies logic; moved the His & Hers duo of Jemele Hill and Michael Smith to SportsCenter, a decision that eventually ended both of their ESPN careers; and spent years developing a morning show for Mike Greenberg, only to pair him with Michelle Beadle, with whom he had no chemistry.

More importantly, Skipper was unable to guide ESPN through the minefields of the decade’s culture wars, with the company appearing to have no clear strategy when Hill was targeted by the White House in 2017, and making bizarre decisions like pulling play-by-play voice Robert Lee from an assignment in Charlottesville, Va., shortly after the white supremacist attacks there. By the time Skipper abruptly resigned in 2017, citing a substance addition and extortion attempt, it was clear that it was past time for ESPN, and Skipper, to move on.

Fox was late to the game on launching a national cable sports network, but it made up for lost time. Even before it officially launched in 2013, Fox Sports 1 positioned itself as a rival to ESPN in way that NBCSN and CBSSN never had, aggressively bidding for rights and luring away prominent ESPN personalities.

The initial FS1 ad campaign touted the network as “The 1 For Fun,” a response to the often self-serious ESPN. Fox brought in the TSN SportsCentre duo of Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole to replicate the sensibility of SportsCenter in the 1990s on its flagship show Fox Sports Live. Onrait and O’Toole would be joined by a nightly panel of Charissa Thompson and ex-athletes like Andy Roddick and Donovan McNabb. During the day, Regis Philbin would co-host a daily talk show alongside a group that included Katie Nolan. None of it worked.

FS1 abandoned “The 1 For Fun” as soon as possible and shifted into the poor man’s ESPN2, paying Skip Bayless a king’s ransom to anchor a First Take clone with half of that show’s audience. If you were an ESPN hot taker in the first half of this decade, you moved to FS1 in the second half (Stephen A. Smith a noted exception).

The strategic shift has helped FS1 catch up to ESPN2, but ESPN is a different story. With Fox prioritizing its broadcast network for its Big Ten football coverage and FS1 biggest live event — the MLB League Championship Series — lasting about a week each year, the threat that seemed possible at FS1’s launch has not materialized.

It seems quaint now that people could be so upset by a player exercising his free agent rights, but LeBron James’ nationally televised Decision to leave the Cavaliers for the Miami Heat was greeted with the kind of outrage that would later be reserved for much more serious stories.

This was not mere ’embrace debate’ provocation. A not-insignificant amount of the criticism went over the line. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s Bill Livingston invoked James’ “posse” and “the hood” (language so thinly coded as to be transparent). Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski treated readers to weeks of melodrama (“On your knees, people. Bow down to the King. Bow to the chaos,” read one particularly regrettable passage). Esquire’s Scott Raab provided the most disgusting invective, labeling James “The Whore of Akron” and proudly telling his readers that he would be happy if James “blew out both knees and an elbow.” Raab, it should be noted, would bask in James’ Cavaliers NBA championship not six years later.

If the backlash was over-the-top in the moment, it grew more so in retrospect. James returned to the Cavaliers after just four years and led them to the aforementioned championship in 2016. The endless player movement since The Decision — the three greatest players of the decade, James, Kawhi Leonard and Kevin Durant, are each on their third different team since July 8, 2010 — has been greeted with a comparable shrug. All the more reason to shake one’s head in amazement over the level of disdain James (and ESPN) received back then.

It would be fair to point out that ESPN had laid off hundreds of staffers prior to April 2017 with little uproar. The people behind the scenes who are as responsible as anyone for what we see and read on ESPN’s platforms faced multiple rounds of job cuts during the 2010s. Some had been with ESPN for 25 years — like Howie Schwab — or even since the beginning. To be sure, those layoffs were discussed and condemned in some corners, but not quite to the level of the company’s 2017 talent bloodletting.

It had been known for weeks that ESPN was going to lay off talent, and that the cuts were going to be significant, but even with that knowledge it was still surprising to see how many familiar faces were shown the door. ESPN dropped reporters with decades of experience like Jayson Stark, John Clayton and Andy Katz; one of its best-known NFL analysts in Ron Jaworski; SportsCenter regulars like Sara Walsh and Jay Crawford; and that is just a small sampling. It cut so many Major League Baseball analysts that it dropped the weekday versions of Baseball Tonight altogether.

ESPN would eventually bring back some of the talent it jettisoned, including NFL reporter Ed Werder, MLB analyst Doug Glanville, and via the ACC Network, play-by-play voice Dave O’Brien and reporter Dr. Jerry Punch. It would replace others, filling the Jayson Stark vacancy with Jeff Passan and swapping NHL reporters Pierre LeBrun and Scott Burnside for Greg Wyshynski and Emily Kaplan.

ESPN took a great deal of justified criticism for the cuts but has come out on the other side largely unscathed. The same cannot be said for everyone it dropped.

In February 2011, ESPN reached the unreachable star: 100 million television homes. It was the culmination of a trend of exponential growth for the network, and for cable generally. For all the talk of the impending pop of the cable bubble, it would have been hard to believe that ESPN would end the decade in fewer than 90 million. If there was a sense earlier in this decade that ESPN was a virtual equal of the broadcast networks, the distribution gap between broadcast and cable is as unmistakable now as it was in the mid-2000s.

ESPN’s problem afflicts all of cable, though you would not know it from the coverage. Because ESPN’s subscriber slide coincided with the broader culture wars, and the company’s habitual rake-stepping in the John Skipper era, some not-so-honest brokers painted the declines as part of a boycott of the network. The real issue was that the long-anticipated collapse of the cable bundle finally began in earnest. Cable networks had long benefited from the bundle, which forced subscribers to purchase networks they never watched in order to receive the ones they wanted. For non-sports fans, this meant paying ESPN’s exorbitant subscriber fees each month in order to get TNT, USA or HGTV.

The rise of streaming services like Netflix allowed these non-sports viewers to receive the entertainment programming they want without having to pay for sports. Their cord cutting has had a significant impact on revenue (see ESPN’s multiple layoffs) and has also affected how the cable outlets view their broadcast counterparts. While viewership for ESPN’s live events has been relatively stable amidst the subscriber losses, the company has made a noticeable effort to program more events for long-neglected sibling ABC.