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By Root 2391 0

have stood the test of time and have a certain intelligence to them and pedigree, and you know, the people on it are older and have been around a long time. And then you’ll have Around the Horn, that is young and splashy and noisy and gimmicky and all the rest, and you say, “How can this all be the same network?” Well, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week is a lot to fill. And for a guy who started ESPN2 and said, “How can you have a second ESPN?” so now look and see ESPN Ocho is not that weird a reality, that may happen one day, so you just have to accept it. The landscape is huge and this is like flypaper and it catches a lot of different types of programs, and I’m just glad they haven’t bounced Sports Reporters. They say, “You’re not as angry as the rest of them.” But I also think Sunday morning at 9:30 is not the time to be doing an Around the Horn sensibility. It’s a different mood. Seven days a week there’s a lot of different moods at different times.

DICK EBERSOL:

Every one of us would give our eyeteeth to have even a small piece of those subsidies that are just floating in to them, but for all that power, they don’t do a lot of special things with it, other than a couple of studio shows. Their Baseball Tonight is beautiful television. The college football show with Fowler and those guys, beautiful television. But there’s very little that they do anymore that’s much better than some local cable operation. That’s hard to believe with all the resources they have and the army of people and all that, but nobody seems to care. That’s what I mean when I say they lost their way in terms of quality and everything else.

FRED GAUDELLI:

When you work at ESPN, you work inside this tunnel, and you don’t know it while you’re there—I certainly didn’t—but when you get out, you realize that “wow, we were very insular in our thinking, and there’s a whole other way of doing things around here.” But you never get to that level while working at ESPN, mainly because there’s so much volume that you’re overwhelmed by it and it’s all you can do just to stay afloat.

CHRIS CONNELLY:

The competitiveness that you would assume with people who love sports comes out at ESPN not in people wishing others ill or in backbiting, but in the next producer wanting to do a piece that’s even better than the piece that he saw on Sunday. And the sense that the organization is there to support him or her in those desires, that there’s a sense on behalf of the entity that they want this next piece to be even better than the last one or the one before—tighter, smarter, more creative. And that’s an invigorating thing to be around.

JOHN WALSH:

Moneyball is the most important sports business book written in the last quarter century. Few recognize it. I went down to Baltimore on a train last year, and I am watching the guy next to me read this number-cruncher book. I asked him what he did, and he said, “I’m the chief analytics officer for CVS drugstores,” then went on to tell me there were three books that were required if you’re in analytics in any business. Moneyball is one of them. The city of Boston has won six championships during the last decade, and if you really want to know what’s going on, you need to realize that the Red Sox, Celtics, and Patriots are going into Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Boston University to hire the smartest people. These new young analytic minds are looking at the way their teams do business, the way they sell tickets, the way they evaluate players, and it’s a whole new way of looking at the way sports are played. So I went in and I talked to our guy who’s doing our hiring. Sure enough, he says he was trying to hire this terrific candidate from BU, but it turned out the competition to get him was fierce as hell. We wanted him to be at ESPN as one of our top guys with numbers, but the Celtics and the Red Sox were battling for him too.

DAVID STERN:

I saw a poll which said that Walmart is the most successful symbol of American business, and in some way, I think ESPN is the most successful