The future of ESPN after the layoffs (2024)

Last week proved once again how there are no safe harbors for the sports media when it comes to employment. ESPN announced it was cutting 300 staffers and not filling 200 open positions — the sports giant’s fourth round of layoffs since 2013. As I wrote last week: ESPN remains one of the great destination jobs in the sports media, but it is not immune to the writ large changing habits of consumers including cord-cutting and cord-nevers (those who have never purchased a cable or satellite subscription). ESPN was in an estimated 82.9 million homes in October, with ESPN2 around that figure as well. That number was 100.13 million households in 2011.

In an attempt to get some understanding on what ESPN will be heading forward, I invited James Andrew Miller on my podcast this week. Miller is the author of the New York Times best-selling book, “Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN,” which is a deep examination of the history of ESPN. Here is an edited version of our talk.

Were the layoffs expected?

Miller: It wasn’t a surprise. I think this is something that the network, and in particular, (ESPN chairman) Jimmy Pitaro, have been trying to avoid for many months. I think probably from a strategic business point of view they knew that some sort of adjustment would have to be made prior to even COVID because of the nature of the way the business is changing. Several years ago they had to do a round of layoffs as they migrated from linear to digital. There are transformations that are going on apart from the pandemic that required them to make adjustments. But it’s brutal. Somebody asked me why do ESPN layoffs seem to register more prominently on the cultural radar. Look, the airlines have had to lay off people and they will have to lay off tens of thousands of flight attendants and maintenance workers and others. We’re talking about 500 people here. But it’s still a big deal and it’s certainly a big deal to these 500 individuals. ESPN for most of its history, since Sept. 7, 1979, has known nothing but unbridled advancement and expansion. So when these things hit, it’s very difficult for the people inside, and obviously for the people affected. It’s noteworthy to see just how big a discussion this is.

It all sucks a lot. When I was writing the book, I realized that most people don’t date ESPN, they marry it. Because you’ve got to go to the middle of Connecticut, you buy a house there, you put your kids in school there. ESPN is a commitment. It’s a lifestyle. It is for many people a place they stay for 20-30 years. One of the things that I painfully remember from other rounds is it is not only torturous for people who are laid off and are losing their job, but the people who escaped the layoffs are really sad because their best friends and colleagues for 10, 15, 20 years are gone. It has all these ripples. All you can do is hope these valuable people get jobs someplace else and ESPN figures things out in a way going forward where this becomes much less the exception to the rule than the new normal.

Deitsch: ESPN is a bellwether in the sports media and will likely be for some time. People grew up with the company. It is a cultural signpost for many in the U.S., even with a diminished labor force. The company itself will remain news because sports fans at their core — even those who do not like ESPN’s programming – have a reaction to it. The potential for layoffs had been discussed for months, and talent agents were leaking information that the date was coming. I agree with you: ESPN was looking at strategic ways to reduce headcount prior to COVID. The pandemic, as it has for everyone, exacerbated some of those issues. Many ESPNers who were part of these layoffs announced the news on their social media feeds. It was a massive amount of brainpower lost. It sucks.

What will happen next for ESPN?

Miller: I think it’s important to throw out a little bit of context. There is the situation at ESPN and then there’s the larger equation that’s at work in the industry itself. ViacomCBS saw their ad revenue drop six percent in the third quarter. That’s tough stuff and that impacts their valuation, which has been incredibly damaged during COVID. I think it’s important to recognize that what is going on with ESPN is not just an ESPN situation and not to conflate it with past ESPN layoffs. There are some industry trends at work. NBC Sports, CBS Sports, Fox Sports, all of them are under financial pressure and trying to make tough decisions about their workforce. I’m not trying to be an apologist for ESPN or Disney, but I do think particularly with the pandemic there are a bunch of things at work here that all of these places are going to be grappling with for quite a long time.

Look, one of the things that started to happen when the pandemic became part of the fabric of our lives is all of a sudden you started to see Jimmy Fallon was in his basem*nt. There was Savannah Guthrie in her home upstairs. This is happening all across all different networks. There was a bunch of us who said this could be the toothpaste out of the tube. I have friends in pharma, investment banking or whatever, people who have like a million miles on their frequent flier accounts, and over the next many years their companies will figure out that we can do a lot of this stuff through Zoom and that they don’t need to fly five people out to a meeting at the home office. There’s all sorts of adjustments being made across industries and people have figured out what they can and can’t live with. ESPN has done a great job of pivoting to get things on the air, and they’ve had to figure out ways to engineer remote production in ways that they’ve never done before. I don’t think anybody’s anxious to just go back to the way it used to be so they can spend more money and not take advantage of what they’ve learned. It’s a really, really precarious time.

Deitsch: ESPN’s remote production group (the group that travels to games) was hit very hard during this layoff. As part of the industry-wide shift among companies who broadcast sports that you referenced, more events will be called at network headquarters and elsewhere as opposed to on-site. In the era of COVID, you will continue to see announcers calling games from home. I think ESPN’s college sports presentation from the production side has already started to shift and will shift even more with games being called away from stadiums. The network — at least from everything I understand — was buoyed by how well the NFL Draft went from them as far as production and critical praise. That’s a template for the future.

How will on-air people be impacted by this heading forward?

Miller: For people who watch ESPN, there are a ton of people behind the scenes who really make the place hum, from coordinating producers on down. There are unfortunately numerous people in this latest round who have been there for quite some time and who just love what they do. They really love the games. It’s hard to measure a loss that this will be for ESPN. There’s a lot of institutional memory and a lot of intellectual capital that’s walking out the door. For example, Ivan Maisel is a wonderful writer and the stuff he did with the College Football 150 was extraordinary. Person after person after person like that.

In terms of talent, one of the things that you and I have talked about in the past is this: Apart from the Stephen A. (Smith) and probably less than two dozen individuals at ESPN who really have bargaining power and were able to extract significant increases during times like these, it’s not a great time. (Former CAA Sports head) Nick Khan picked a great era when (former ESPN president) John Skipper decided to be the George Steinbrenner for on-air personnel. There were big contracts and long contracts — and the economics of the time and the threat by FS1 justified it. But now that’s all gone. I think what you’re starting to see and I heard from several on air people at ESPN this week is, “I told my agent, look, I don’t want a raise, I don’t need a raise, I just want to continue. I just want the years. We’re going to change our strategy.” That may work for some people. But I think we have to acknowledge the fact that with reduced remote production there also may be changes in terms of what that might mean for further cuts in terms of on-air people.

Deitsch: It was gutting to see some of those names (such as Claire Smith — a true pioneering legend in sports journalism.) Let me run something by you on this topic that an ESPN on-air person posited to me. The theory was that we may be seeing the end of the on-air sports talk specialist. Not necessarily someone like Stephen A. Smith, who will obviously still lead “First Take” and whatever “Pardon The Interruption” or “Around The Horn” is. But those that are hired at ESPN to be opinionists who don’t have a set show. There was another on-air talent who suggested to me that studio hosts may be significantly reduced over the next couple of years.

Miller: I don’t buy it because ultimately at the end of the day ESPN has 8,760 hours to program. I think that it could be just the opposite because a lot of rights are going still through the roof, even though the numbers may not justify it and even though it sounds counterintuitive given the economic realities of these sports businesses. I think sports talk is going to maybe have a whole new renaissance because at the end of the day it’s far less expensive. How many sports is ESPN or other competitors really going to be able to afford now, or spend the money on in the future? If you decide that you’re not going to bid on X Sport, you’re still going to have to program that time on your network. So I think that you’re going to start to look at programming and content that is cheaper to produce. There will be a need for talent, for content, and proprietary branded content. I think that some of those jobs are just going to be reimagined in ways that will be cheaper and may not have the kind of cash expenditures next to them in terms of salary for these on-air people.

How do you think this will impact ESPN’s desire for added NFL media rights?

Miller: I think I mentioned to you several years ago that I thought that (Disney chairman) Bob Iger was going to be very aggressive with this new (NFL) package. I never thought that they would be satisfied with just Monday night. I always thought they’d go after a Sunday package – which they are doing. There is a disconnect, though. There’s a huge irony or paradox going on because as we’ve been discussing, a lot of these companies are facing serious economic challenges. Yet the NFL still is expecting and demanding and getting competitive bids for these packages. I look at ViacomCBS’s market cap. How do you justify spending billions on football when your valuation has been reduced so much? But everybody wants these packages. ESPN spends $1.9 billion annually on the Monday night package which they thought was going to be the old Sunday night package. It turned out to be a cable package. It was for a while the third-worst schedule and lo and behold Thursday night came along and it’s the fourth-worst schedule. So the league says now well of course Disney wants Sunday night because they want a better schedule.

The way out of it is — and I think that the players would applaud it — is just to get rid of Thursday night football. I mean, (NFL VP) Howard Katz, who does the Lord’s work and is a magician with NFL scheduling, tried very hard since the advent of Thursday Night Football to make everybody happy. But the truth is that there is such a disparity of quality and scheduling, it is such a difficulty for the league in terms of really giving all the packages value. Remember, each of these packages have fundamental tenets. If you get a Sunday night package or if you get a Sunday afternoon package, there are certain guarantees that you get in that package. That means that other games, like C- or D-level games, they have to go someplace. Which is why even though ESPN’s Monday night schedule has gotten a bit better in the past couple of years, I remember three, four, five years ago when the schedule would come out, you’d have to put some ESPN people on suicide watch because these were brutal games.

So just cancel Thursday night. It was a greedy move. The players don’t like it. I really don’t think the numbers have ever shown that it’s something that the audience really wants to stay along with. Most importantly, it cannibalizes the product. If you get rid of those Thursday night games, then you can have a legitimate Monday night schedule. You can have Sunday afternoons, and you can have Sunday nights. You’re going to have much happier bidders for your product. The NFL is still going to get great bids but I still think that for me, at least, the key is to get rid of Thursday night.

Deitsch: I understand that, and I think you laid that thesis out really well. I just don’t think that’s going to happen. Thursday Night Football is going to continue given the dollars (a five-year, $3.3 billion deal that runs through 2022) from that contract. They created another market for revenue. That doesn’t mean I think Thursday Night Football is a great product. I just don’t see them changing it. On a similar note: If I had to guess today, I would guess that ESPN/ABC becomes part of the Super Bowl package in some form when the next rights are doled out. Agree/disagree?

Miller: Agree. If I were CBS, I’d be worried about Sunday afternoons because (disgraced former CBS CEO) Les Moonves was always a key architect and a key driver of the relationship between CBS and NFL. He is obviously not there anymore. Nothing against (CBS Sports chairman) Sean McManus or (CBS Sports president) David Berson or anybody, but I think their valuation and economic uncertainty may hurt them. Even though Disney is going for Sunday night right now, if NBC/Comcast were to prevail, ESPN will set its sights on CBS’s Sunday afternoon package and try to get into the Super Bowl rotation.

The Ink Report

1. There was a running joke at ESPN last week between College GameDay staffers Rece Davis, Drew Gallagher and Jim Gaiero, as well as ESPN vice president of production Seth Markman. The joke was that the presidential election would be called by the networks at 9:01 a.m. ET, which is of course when Davis (and producers Gallagher and Gaiero) bring College GameDay on the air to the country.

The group was not so far off.

During an on-air FaceTime interview with Clemson coach Dabo Swinney around 11:30 a.m. ET, Gaiero got in Davis’s ear to tell him that he would be announcing to ESPN’s audience that sister network ABC News was calling the presidential election.

Announcing the results of a presidential election is not something Davis expected to be doing during his sports career.

“You don’t anticipate doing something like and as I was driving back to the hotel after the show thinking back to 1996 and the night that Stuart Scott and I were doing SportsCenter,” Davis said. “We didn’t anticipate reporting on an Olympic bombing for hours and hours on air. Obviously, this was much easier – a one-shot deal. You just have to be able to be able to tell people something that they need to know and then get it back on track as quickly with your show.”

Here’s how that moment looked on air from South Bend, Ind. courtesy of Clippit user mvbuckeye01:

Davis said he did not overanalyze the job at hand, even though he would be delivering one of the most important news stories of the year. He simply did not have a lot of time to process how to pass along such important information.

“I wish I could give you some in-depth process, but I think it’s just that I’ve been doing this a long time,” Davis said. “I think we handled it the way our viewers would prefer. We gave them the news, we gave them the information, and then the direction to get more if they wanted to. I think the best course of action was to keep that pretty simple and to make sure that you don’t venture into any editorial territory there. Just announce what the facts are, what has happened, and then kind of move on from there.”

For those on Twitter on Saturday, it was amusing and interesting to read of the people who learned of the results of the election through Davis. Some examples:

i just got out the shower and walked in the living room to hear Rece Davis on College Gameday say Biden won Pennsylvania https://t.co/Lj8NHyr9eE

— zach schoeneman (@zcschoeneman) November 7, 2020

I was sitting on my couch half-paying attention to Rece Davis talk about some non-Texas football team on College Gameday. He paused to say that ABC had projected Biden to win the presidency. I then flipped to a news channel to see more coverage of the historic moment.

— Joe Hutchinson (@Joe_Hutch_) November 7, 2020

I wonder how many of us got the Biden announcement from College Gameday instead of any of the normal news networks

— Carter Lee (@CarterB91) November 7, 2020

2. One of the tricky configurations for networks airing sports over the weekend was how to navigate the telecast of a sporting event with the possibility of having to break for significant political news. That turned out to be the case for NBC and ESPN. The former aired the much-anticipated Clemson-Notre Dame game, which was scheduled to begin at 7:35 p.m. ET on NBC. The network decided on Saturday to move the game to USA Network as NBC News took over NBC to air President-elect Joe Biden’s speech. Upon the conclusion of the speech, NBC picked up the coverage.

Last Thursday I asked NBC Sports Group chairman Pete Bevacqua how NBC Sports would navigate its high-profile sporting events over the weekend with the prospect of significant breaking political news happening during one of these events.

“Obviously major breaking national news is always of critical importance, and we will break in accordingly,” Bevacqua said. “The good news and the added benefit we have and maybe a bit of what’s advantageous to us compared to some others who are invested in sports as much as we are is we have MSNBC and CNBC, and now we have a 24-hour news portal through Peaco*ck that’s available to. We’ll balance it. We have a lot of experience in terms of people handling those decisions. We’ll break away as needed. We’ll try to minimize any interruptions of these great sporting events, but it’s always just a bit of a balancing act.”

ESPN moved the Stanford-Oregon game from ABC to ESPNEWS and the ESPN App during Biden’s Saturday night speech. They rejoined Stanford-Oregon following the conclusion of its speech coverage.

2a.Notre Dame’s thrilling overtime win over top-ranked Clemson drew a Total Audience Delivery of 9.44 million viewers across NBC TV and NBC Sports Digital, the most-watched Notre Dame on NBC game in 15 years. The game is likely to draw an even higher average in a couple of days when out-of-home viewership is added. Prior to Saturday’s game, the most-watched Notre Dame game on NBC since 2005 was No. 5 Notre Dame’s 24-17 win over No. 14 Michigan in 2018 (7.195 million total viewers). I’ll add here what a great job NBC’s production staff did during Saturday’s overtime, where the network seemingly had every replay angle as the officials reviewed scoring plays endlessly.

2b. The Boston Globe’s Chad Finn spoke with Steve Levy about his first year calling Monday Night Football.

3. Sports pieces of note

• Death at the U: Who killed Bryan Pata? By Paula Lavigne and Elizabeth Merrill of ESPN.

• Lies and betrayal: The hidden man behind Art Modell and Cleveland’s darkest day. By Jason Lloyd and Zack Meisel of The Athletic.

• Kevin De Bruyne Is Manchester City’s Master of Improv. By Joshua Robinson of the Wall Street Journal.

• Via Pierre LeBrun of The Athletic: On a young NHL player agent coming out, and the support he’s got from some of the game’s biggest stars. Bayne Pettinger’s story: https://theathletic.com/2178746/2020/11/05/nhl-player-agent-comes-out/

• No blooms, no fans, no roars make this Masters like no other. By Doug Ferguson of the Associated Press.

• How Alex Trebek’s love of sports helped one contestant (me) connect with him. By Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic.

• Seahawks star DK Metcalf is impossible to miss. So how did the NFL miss on him? By Adam Kilgore of the Washington Post.

• For Blue Jays prospect Mack Mueller, home is wherever the diamond is. By Jordan Horrobin for the Toronto Star.

• How the Missouri Football Protest Changed College Sports Forever. By Michael McKnight of Sports Illustrated.

•The Athletic’s Rustin Dodd profiles sports radio broadcaster Craig Carton post-prison.

Non-sports pieces of note

• An Oral History of ‘Marge vs The Monorail’, the Episode That Changed ‘The Simpsons.’ By Sean Cole of Vice.

• Amazing life here: Viola Smith, ‘Fastest Girl Drummer in the World,’ Dies at 107. By Alex Vaduku of the New York Times.

• South Korea Lost Track of North Korean Defector Who Crossed DMZ. By Andrew Jeong of Wall Street Journal.

• Confronting the age of hate in America. By Jeff Sharlet of Bookforum.

• A Nameless Hiker and the Case the Internet Can’t Crack. By Nicholas Thompson of Wired.

• The wounds that do not heal. By Rachael Lord Elizondo of the Bitter Southerner.

• Politico examined the Trump re-election political strategy and the Biden election strategy via interviews with 75 strategists.

• Dorie Miller saved lives at Pearl Harbor. He’s finally getting his due. By Brent Staples of the New York Times.

• A New Front Opens in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict: Borscht. By Maria Varenikova and Andrew E. Kramer of New York Times.

• When the political divide turned deadly in Portland. By Conrad Wilson of OPB and Bryan Denson of ProPublica.

• Can the West Still Lead? By Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal.

• The National Review’s editorial of the Presidential Election:

• Really interesting look from Anton Troianovski and Andrew E. Kramer on the Russian/Putin view of the last week in America.

• Via NPR: CDC Report: Officials Knew Coronavirus Test Was Flawed But Released It Anyway.

• Meet the scholars who study civilizational collapse. By Ben Ehrenreich of New York Times Magazine.

• 24 James Bond Films, Ranked. By Bob Sassone of Saturday Evening Post.

(Photo: Kevin Abele / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)