E$PN: Dollars and Sense

2 thoughts on “E$PN: Dollars and Sense”

1. Like most great empires in history, ESPN has overextended their reach. The jokes about their small-time beginnings (Australian Rules Football? Pro Wrestling? Roller Derby?) are long past. And they’ve made some horrible, horrible recent mistakes.

   While the NFL deal does give them extraordinary access to the league (and is almost imperative for their highlight shows), it also hamstrings their ability to be critical of the league when needed. The sheer amount of money invested into the deal also makes it important to justify the expenditure by devoting year-round coverage to the NFL, and even make mountains out of molehills of league-related stories (Tim Tebow, anyone?)

   First Take is also a disaster that flirts with turning the network into a cable news clone, centering on debate and opinion as equally important as the games themselves. Sportscenter has focused on only the big three leagues that ESPN has contracts with, and any other events that happen to fall into the ESPN broadcast schedule. For instance, ESPN has promoted the World Cup, which was a large chunk of ESPN programming, but made almost no mention of the Olympics on any of their shows, even though it is a similarly massive international event.

   As a result, ESPN is finding out what Sun Tzu said of a similar situation: “He who tries to defend everything will lose everything.” In going all in on their rights partners – as they must, since they have invested such sums into them – they have given upstarts like NBC Sports and Fox Sports 1 a chance to move into the game. Sure, the NHL, Formula One, Pac-10 Football and the English Premier League aren’t usually lead stories on Sportscenter…but if you gave me the choice between getting lost in the Baseball/NFL/NBA/Pundit Debate schedule on The Worldwide Leader or going to a hungry upstart channel that will treat me like a valued commodity, it’s a no-brainer.

2. Hear you, Drew. It is no longer about people and we are loosing the human touch and the art of life, really.