Jemele Hill was a guest on Jimmy Traina’s Sports Illustrated Media Podcast this week. Traina asked a lot about her past and present relationship at ESPN.
Hill revealed that Colin Kaepernick called her to better understand her side of the story regarding her exit from ESPN. It was something Kaepernick felt like he needed to know before signing the first look deal with Disney last week.
When asked about SC6, the version of SportsCenter hosted by Hill and Michael Smith, Hill said it was not the experience she was expecting.
“Of all the many jobs and roles that I got a chance to have at ESPN, that job is always gonna sit on the side as being the one that was the worst that I had there. Everybody came in well-intentioned. There’s a lot of blame to go around. I certainly accept mine and, I guess, by extension, Mike’s, in the sense that there were definitely things we could’ve personally done better.”
Simply put, Hill says the show was not set up to succeed. She never says that she sensed any malicious intent on the part of ESPN, but she does question a number of decisions made in the pre-production process that got SC6 off to a rocky start.
“If you go back, His and Hers did not end until December, and we were due to be on the air the day after the Super Bowl in February,” Hill said. “Considering the colossal amount of marketing and everything behind it and what they wanted it to be, it made no sense to rush this show on the air. We had less than five rehearsals. We didn’t know what the show was. We weren’t allowed to pick our coordinating producers, which I think was a big mistake.”
ESPN executives used Scott Van Pelt as an example of the success a personality-driven version of SportsCenter could have. Hill points out that Van Pelt was given an extended rehearsal period and was able to handpick his staff. His midnight edition of SportsCenter was not a fair bar to measure SC6 against.
“I think they liked a lot of the things we did on His and Hers,” Hill said in reference to the show she and Smith co-hosted from 2014 to 2017. “The things that made us an attractive fit were not things that necessarily fit SportsCenter.”
Viral videos, sketch comedy, and discussions of movies and music had never been a major part of SportsCenter before. The ad campaign ahead of the debut of SC6 promised that would be the case with Hill and Smith. She says that created a narrative that their version of SportsCenter wouldn’t be about sports.
She got the call from Klappernick??? Well yeeee haaaaa