The Coming ESPN Bloodbath/Dilfer, Schlereth out

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Getting canned at ESPN is called getting "Dilfered." You know things are bad when your proper name is turned into a verb.....
 

SteezyEndo

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Did anyone notice the ratio of males getting canned compared to females???...The timing is impeccable.
 

Jacobarch

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Getting canned at ESPN is called getting "Dilfered." You know things are bad when your proper name is turned into a verb.....

hahahahaha!!!!!

I hated that guy with a passion. There's nothing worse than hearing a terrible ex QB calling out other current QB's. The guy was so full of hot air. Glad to see him go.

TBH most of those guys they let go are in the same boat. ESPN has become a bloated pig that needed to be taken to slaughter.

Hopefully they fire a lot of producers, they're the ones to blame for only talking about the Cowboys and Pats.
 

LACHAMP46

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Trent probably thought he was safe....welp, guess he can continue working with QB's at his camp.
 

MTRamsFan

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Welp, I got my wish with Dilfer. :mrburnsevil:

The next one to go should be Josina Anderson. I remember when the Rams cut Michael Sam and all she could come up with was his showering habits with the team. She should have been let go right then. My daughter has a better knowledge of football than she does.
 

Elmgrovegnome

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hahahahaha!!!!!

I hated that guy with a passion. There's nothing worse than hearing a terrible ex QB calling out other current QB's. The guy was so full of hot air. Glad to see him go.

TBH most of those guys they let go are in the same boat. ESPN has become a bloated pig that needed to be taken to slaughter.

Hopefully they fire a lot of producers, they're the ones to blame for only talking about the Cowboys and Pats.


Yeah Dilfer was one of the most annoying guys on the air. He thought he was the authority on QBs. His personality sucked too.
 

Dan Poplawski

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This is the 1st I've heard about Greenie going solo. Not sure what to think about that. He's obviously gonna have a different guest host or something everyday.

I honestly can't stand Golic anyway... and it's not because of his golden dome homerism. It's because of his horrible, ridiculous, freaking annoying fake laughter. It grates on me unbelievably. So, I do look forward to Golic's exit.

Dude really? Greenie getting his own show has been news for 2 months..... Catch up.
 

Tron

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Listened to Russillo and Kanell on way home from work. Had a lot of nice guests on and liked the chemistry they had. Will be wierd with no Kanell. Only thing I didn't like about the show was the 10 minute long commercial breaks and 5 minutes on air.
 

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  • Thread Starter Thread Starter
  • #72
http://deadspin.com/a-running-list-of-espn-layoffs-1794664091

Premier Boxing Champions Host Marysol Castro

Sports Gambling Writer Dave Tuley

Enterprise Reporter Tom Farrey

Auto Racing and College Football Commentator Jerry Punch

SportsCenter Anchor Jade McCarthy

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NFL Contributor Jarrett Bell

SportsCenter Anchor Darren Haynes

Soccer Writer David Hirshey

ESPNU Producer Josh Parcell

MLB Analyst Doug Glanville
 

Zero

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Did anyone notice the ratio of males getting canned compared to females???...The timing is impeccable.
Seem to be letting go of a lot more men than women.
I guess with less men running ESPN they will
require more women to run errands and
assist the men who do all the important stuff
that requires skill and intelligence.
 

jrry32

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I really feel for most of these people. It's rough what's happening. But yea, I'm with y'all on Dilfer. Good riddance. He's a pompous asshat.

ESPN needs to change directions if it wants to survive. Honestly, I doubt most people care about who does Sports Center at this point.
 

ScotsRam

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Seem to be letting go of a lot more men than women.
I guess with less men running ESPN they will
require more women to run errands and
assist the men who do all the important stuff
that requires skill and intelligence.

But surely there are significantly more men than women in these roles?
 

ScotsRam

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Claire is ours and they can't fucking have her.
 

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  • Thread Starter Thread Starter
  • #80
http://deadspin.com/a-running-list-of-espn-layoffs-1794664091

College Basketball Reporter Andy Katz

College Football Reporter David Lombardi

Outside the Lines Reporter Steve Delsohn

ESPN 710 Host Jeff Biggs

http://theweek.com/articles/694772/how-espn-went-from-powerhouse-bloodbath

How ESPN went from powerhouse to bloodbath
Jeff Spross


BR70D0.jpg

Aurora Photos / Alamy Stock Photo

There was a bloodbath at ESPN on Wednesday.

A dramatic round of layoffs had long been expected at the Worldwide Leader in Sports, but the numbers turned out much bigger than predicted: Roughly 100 on-air reporters and personalities were let go, plus some additional behind-the-camera crew members.

By Wednesday afternoon, people like Ed Werder and Scott Burnside — who'd worked at ESPN for 17 and 13 years, respectively — had announced on Twitter that they were toast.

The network, which employs about 8,000 people around the world, actually let a whopping 300 go in October 2015. But this week was unusual for the deep cuts to on-air talent.

The bloodbath was the result of several colliding forces.

First off, ESPN's personnel costs are unusually expensive. Shows like SportsCenter, for instance, feature a raft of well-paid anchors. Stars at the network often earn anywhere from $1.5 million to $3 million. Hundreds of reporters and analysts get paid handsomely to gab on ESPN. All that hot air costs a lot of dough.

The next problem was falling revenue, thanks to a collapse in subscribers.

After peaking around 100 million in 2011, ESPN subscribers fell to 88 million in the most recent quarter, largely because of cord-cutting, or when customers abandon paid cable and TV packages for viewing options on the internet.

Each subscriber pays as much as $7.21 per month — it's a basically invisible charge baked into your cable TV bill — which means the overall decline adds up to something like a $900 million drop in annual revenue for Disney, ESPN's parent company.

"ESPN seems to be bleeding money because of cord-cutting, so my salary was unattractive to them," Adam Rubin, who used to cover the New York Mets for ESPN, explained to The 30. "And the new MLB editor at ESPN wants to get away from 'thorough' beat coverage — that's the precise word she used — and I suppose I was the sacrificial lamb to hammer home that point."

And then there's the third force driving ESPN's troubles: the rising costs of broadcasting sporting events.

Any company that broadcasts a game for the NFL, NBA, MLB, or any other league has to pay a massive fee to do so. And those fees are ballooning: Collectively, television, radio, and internet companies paid $10.8 billion for broadcasting rights in 2011 and over $15 billion in 2015. Those costs are projected to top $21 billion in 2020.

The NFL takes in about $7.5 billion each year from charging fees to media companies. Recently, ESPN paid $2.66 billion to secure an NBA broadcasting package through the 2024-25 season.

To get a sense of scale, the very first national TV sports contract, inked between ABC and the American Football League in 1960, was a piddly $8.5 million over five years.

Companies like ESPN have to pass some portion of those costs onto their customers to stay financially viable. Since 2007, the monthly fee ESPN subscribers pay has jumped 120 percent. Needless to say, as that price tag rises, the constantly improving (and often free!) options for viewing sports on the internet become more and more attractive to people.

As for why the leagues are hiking their fees, the simplest answer might be because they can. While the individual teams ostensibly "compete" with one another, the leagues operate as something akin to a trust or monopoly, controlling the number of teams and the supply of sports entertainment.

And while different teams used to do their own individual deals, the leagues long ago figured out the advantages of offering broadcast rights as a unit.

There's obviously some upper limit to how much the leagues can score before they drive away too many customers. But we don't seem to have hit it yet. People love sports. And there's only so many businesses that can offer pro sports to consumers. The NFL doesn't exactly have a lot of competition.

There's one other possible factor in ESPN's troubles worth mentioning: the general turn in sports reporting to a far more outspoken social liberalism. Setting aside the moral merits, it's certainly true that plenty of sports viewers don't share those liberal politics.

That may have produced an extra shove for some customers: "When people begin realizing they can live without your business model, you can't give them more reasons to object to paying for it," as conservative columnist Steve Deace put it.

At the same time, parsing the degree of ESPN's liberalism, or how much it irked some portion of its viewership, is an impossibly subjective question to answer.

So in the end, like so many media companies, ESPN is trying to adapt to this digital age. The network is trying to increase its digital offerings, and Disney bought a $1 billion stake last year in a new streaming service launched by Major League Baseball.

"Dynamic change demands an increased focus on versatility and value," ESPN's president, John Skipper, told employees Wednesday. "As a result, we have been engaged in the challenging process of determining the talent — anchors, analysts, reporters, writers, and those who handle play-by-play — necessary to meet those demands."

That's dry language, but in practice it amounts to nudging out a lot of people with contracts about to expire, by telling them they could only stay on with a big pay cut. In some cases, ESPN offered people with years left to go just 50 percent of the money remaining to them — or they could finish out their contracts while effectively being benched.

For the moment, ESPN's costs will be slimmer and its books will be easier to balance. But neither the internet nor the heavy hand of the sports leagues are going anywhere. So the squeeze will continue.

In the end, all ESPN may buy with this bloodletting is time.