You could make a near-powerhouse sports network strictly using the on-air talkers who’ve been chased off by ESPN over the past year-plus. It’s a stunning roster.
I won’t name them all, but let’s at least include the following:
Max Kellerman. Jeff Van Gundy. Suzy Kolber. Todd McShay. Neil Everett. Jalen Rose. Mark Jackson.
Oh, and: Ashley Brewer. Chris Chelios. Steve Young. Keyshawn Johnson. Matt Hasselbeck. Ed Werder.
Also, as of a few days ago: Robert Griffin III and Sam Ponder (who’ll be replaced by Mike Greenberg, ESPN announced Tuesday).
That’s not to mention some of the folks who saw the writing on the wall and left earlier, like Kenny Mayne, who lit out in 2021 after being offered a 60% pay cut to sign a new deal. As he told The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch at the time, “They made an offer and I wasn’t exactly flattered and I rejected it…They did not seem to care that I made that choice.”
There’s a lot of that going around, it seems. But when people invoke “market forces” as they attempt to explain what’s been going on around the Worldwide Leader, they’re not wrong — they just don’t necessarily have all the pieces put together.
To put it simply, ESPN is being stripped of assets by Disney because Disney owns ESPN and because, let’s face it, Disney’s gotten pretty used to doing this to the sports network. For years and years, the Mouse stripped massive profit from ESPN and used it to buy other properties (very successfully, by the way). Now it’s churn and burn, as the conglomerate slashes ESPN payroll in response to viewers’ great resignation from cable, among other things.
Griffin and Ponder were the two latest victims of budget squeeze, and that’s all it was. They’ll both be paid the balance of their contracts, but in the larger picture they will come off the books and join the ranks of former ESPN employees gutted in the name of Disney — not ESPN, but Disney — slashing 7,000 jobs companywide to save $5.5 billion.
That thinking precipitated last summer’s bloodletting, with more than 20 folks scuttled, and in addition to being too bad for the human beings involved and certainly worse for viewers, it was also at least a little ironic. ESPN, after all, was Disney’s ATM.
After years of not disclosing the financials, Disney finally opened a small look into the numbers last year. It was shocking. For the fourth fiscal quarter of 2023 alone, ESPN produced $1 billion in profit. In fiscal ‘22, ESPN’s total profit of $2.9 billion far outstripped Disney’s entire entertainment wing ($2.1 billion). From 2018 through 2022, ESPN is reported to have made $22 billion in profit for the Mouse.
That’ll buy you some stuff. In Disney’s case, ESPN money was used to help fund purchases of Pixar and Lucasfilm — Marvel, too. But Disney’s execs also saw cable subscriptions falling off, and with ESPN commanding significant coin for each of those subscriptions, there was at least a medium term in which the sports network’s insane profit margin would finally calm down a bit.
ESPN still makes money. It just doesn’t make money in the multi-billions as reliably as it once did. And wouldn’t you know it, the network is part of an entertainment industry behemoth. So it goes.
Ultimately, who you miss at ESPN will likely come down to which sports drove you to the network in the first place. Ponder, for example, was the very popular host of “Sunday NFL Countdown,” a role in which she succeeded the estimable Chris Berman in 2017.
On Tuesday, ESPN announced that Mike Greenberg will take over in Ponder’s former position, about which, you know, whatever. Greenberg already hosts “Get Up” in the morning, along with the “Greeny” radio program, and he does the NFL Draft, and — you get the drift. He just keeps adding jobs. As ESPN starts leaning on its existing well-paid workers to cover more shifts, there will be more of this.
Looking at that roster of ex-WWLers above, it isn’t hard to see the damage done to viewers. That’s a lot of talent shoved out the door, a lot of fun, funny or smart broadcasters. Most of them got popped for the crime of working for a network whose operating income is coming back down to merely “you’ve got to be kidding me” levels of corporate wealth. But, hey, stock price.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
