Colin Cowherd claims he saw this ESPN doomsday coming years ago.
The longtime ESPN voice, who now spouts his opinions on Fox Sports, said he was not surprised by ESPN’s decision to lay off about 100 employees Wednesday after he witnessed the Worldwide Leader jump at billion-dollar TV deals at a time when the TV business was on the decline. Cowherd retroactively pointed to the nine-year, $24 billion contract ESPN inked with the NBA in 2014, when Cowherd still resided in Bristol, as an example of the financially alarming trend in his eyes.
“I told my producers, ‘Fellas, it’ll never be the same here,’” he said Wednesday on CBS’ “Bull & Fox” show. “You cannot pay four times for the house [more] than what you paid for the house last year. And I said this company will never be the same. It was at that point I started looking, and this is not going to end today. They have really cost-prohibitive contracts, combined with cord-cutting.”
The ESPN cuts were drastic, but were not unprecedented. In 2015, Bristol laid off about 350 employees, and Cowherd claimed he knew then — with the price ESPN had paid for sports TV contracts — that the cycle would continue.
“I said it the next day [in 2015], it’s awful, and it will happen annually for the next decade,” Cowherd said.
Of the scores of employees ESPN president John Skipper fired Wednesday, reportedly about half represent popular, on-air talent. Those big names included NFL reporters Ed Werder and Trent Dilfer, radio host Danny Kanell, baseball writer Jayson Stark and former “SportsCenter” anchor Jay Crawford. “SportsCenter” anchor Hannah Storm, “Baseball Tonight” host Karl Ravech and Kanell’s co-host Ryen Russillo reportedly face limited roles.
Cowherd, who worked alongside many of these people during his 12 years at ESPN, seemed to offer a soft recruitment for the ones left now on the street.
“These firings are awful. It makes me sick,” Cowherd said. “The good news is most of the people let go are really talented, but this is all about business, and when you have overpaid for products — sometimes six and seven hundred million more than you had to pay — certainly with the NBA that’s the case, they just pay way too much for it.
“They’re often letting go of the most expensive people they feel they can let go,” he added. “So there’s a lot of really talented people out there over the next couple of weeks on the market. My feeling about it is that a lot of them are going to land in really good places.”
Cowherd’s criticism of ESPN’s business deals represents his latest line of evolving reasoning for what he sees as the fall of ESPN.
The talk-show host argued in March ESPN was losing talent, like him and fellow ESPN-to-Fox Sports personalities Skip Bayless and Chris Broussard, because “no one wants to live in rural Connecticut.” ESPN has had its headquarters in Bristol since it was founded 38 years ago.
Cowherd’s Fox Sports’ “Speak For Yourself” co-host, Jason Whitlock, gave his own dubious take on the day’s casualties.
The mass layoffs were months in the making after it was reported ESPN was looking to cut its budget by hundreds of millions of dollars. The network has lost 12 million subscribers over the past five years and launched a company-wide reform that included shaking up many of its traditional shows and letting go of familiar faces.