(Photo via Keith Allison)
ESPN: The Worldwide Leader in Sports––the slogan that so many Americans are familiar with. While some of ESPN’s supporters vehemently deny its falling into irrelevance, many others are calling ESPN a sinking ship.
I’ll start with a little preamble; picture yourself as a kid again. You wake up an hour before school, get dressed, run downstairs, turn on the TV, and switch to Channel 49. You run to the kitchen to make yourself a bowl of cereal, when suddenly you hear the upbeat guitar riffs and finally “DA-NA-NA, DA-NA-NA.” You run back to the TV and sit down as Stan Verrett and Neil Everett break down yesterday’s "Top 10" plays with their witty banter and smooth back-and-forth. Life is good.
These were the “good old days” of ESPN when it was just popular enough to keep the network buzzing. It wasn’t fighting for relevance, but it wasn’t so in-your-face all the time that people got sick of it. ESPN spent a lot of time as the former, but is currently in the latter state.
To be clear, saying that ESPN is a “sinking ship” is utterly hyperbolic; ESPN contributes more to Disney’s (ESPN’s parent company) profit than Marvel and Pixar combined (The Economist). However, ESPN is over the hill and past its golden days, simply because fewer people are watching TV nowadays.
To compensate for this and maintain pertinence, ESPN has adapted to the social media world. Now, ESPN garners viewership by posting highlight videos on Instagram, clickbait articles on Facebook and Twitter, and just about as much LeBron James material as a single person can handle––ESPN wouldn’t be ESPN if they didn’t beat things to a pulp (my PTSD flares up whenever I hear ‘Deflategate’). Despite these attempts, according to Crowdtangle in January of last year, SportsCenter’s Instagram account had an interaction rate (likes, comments, and views) of 1.43 percent––compare that to the similarly popular sports account House of Highlights’ 2.43 percent.
ESPN seems like they’re trying too hard to stay relevant. They lost a lot of their revenue from people getting rid of cable, and their compensatory social media presence feels very forced and attention-hungry. They often seem to be a few minutes behind the aforementioned House of Highlights and its parent company Bleacher Report for every big moment on Instagram, and their Facebook presence often riles people up and fabricates unnecessary controversy.
Here’s an article posted on ESPN’s Facebook yesterday:
"In big-time college basketball, blacks miss opportunities on the bench" (Jesse Washington)
Listen, I’m all for clickbait and controversy; I think it’s a good way drum up views, and although Third and Long has never had any problems with our ratings, many sports media networks use clickbait to lure people in. I just think it’s a little obnoxious that the “Worldwide Leader in Sports” continues to push the envelope with racial issues and politics by posting articles like this and employing “sports journalists” like Jemele Hill, who inappropriately use their platform to push politics in people’s faces.
Politics aside, ESPN has clearly felt pressured to revamp their television presence; they use outrageous personalities such as Stephen A. Smith and Max Kellerman to stir the pot on air. I can’t emphasize enough how much I hate both of those clowns. They are unnecessarily hyperbolic, pessimistic, and ostentatious as a clear ploy to generate publicity, and they try to become the story rather than just report or analyze it. While these frauds are merely symptoms of the larger issue, they still bug the crap out of me, and I'm certainly not alone. I can’t say for sure that these absurd puppets will be the downfall of ESPN, but they certainly lessen the network’s credibility and have turned ESPN into the villains of the sports world. These sports media goons have helped devolve ESPN from a showcase of live sports and highlights to a try-hard and pushy ripoff of TMZ who focuses its attention on the drama side of sports.
In addition to degenerate sportscasters, ESPN continually hires former athletes to large positions in hopes that they’ll offer their “insider knowledge,” however many of the athletes they hire have a difficult enough time forming an articulate thought and actually tend to have less insight than well-educated journalists who know the sport from studying it. These former athletes occasionally struggle with properly displaying themselves and their opinions without being incoherent or even offensive (see Curt Schilling, Ray Lewis).
The changing times and cord-cutting habits have turned the almost-50-year-old company into a bunch of talking heads who simply manufacture controversy, and I’m beginning to feel like the executives at ESPN don’t understand what it takes to appeal to millennials without seeming like a white suburban dad who uses too much slang. Attracting today’s generation may seem like a daunting task for a bunch of suits in an office, but I feel like ESPN could learn a thing or two from companies like Bleacher Report if they want to maintain not only relevance, but dominance in the sports media world.
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