Kovacevic: You're grinning about ESPN's demise for the wrong reason

Nov 10, 2017 • 2:41 am

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ESPN's been as big a part of Pittsburgh sporting culture as it has across America, and this for the better part of three decades.

But apparently not for a whole lot longer.

100-plus employees were laid off this past April and now, courtesy of the excellent reporting Thursday by Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch, we know that 100-plus more will be gone after Thanksgiving. What's more, those of us who regularly communicate with people at ESPN know that it won't stop there. Not within this new generation of cable cord-cutting and TV via Internet. The financial losses in recent months have been massive and, by all accounts, even this slashing of nearly 10 percent of the staff amounts to little more than a symbolic tourniquet.

Some will rejoice in this, of course. That's how things roll when someone or some entity climbs to the top and, yeah, maybe mutates into something we no longer recognize. And ESPN, like most mammoth companies, has made its share of mistakes.

My own perspective on some of those, in no real order:

• 'SportsCenter' completely lost its way. It began as a somewhat snarky but still smart look at the day's events. It was fun. It had personalities, but the foundation was always highlights. That flipped about a decade ago to all-snark-all-the-time, and the highlights were reduced to a sprinkle.

It became Neil Everett.

I don't know the man, but I do know that if I watched him host 10,000 consecutive episodes of 'SportsCenter' that I'd still not believe for a second that he cared in the slightest about sports. Not to pick on him because there have been countless clones like this in the Kenny Mayne mold, not one of them successful, but Everett always symbolized this for me. Smug smirk. Wrists crossed at the cufflinks. Semi-witty intro. Forced phraseology. Never once a syllable spoken that sounded authentic.

Again, Everett's hardly alone, probably not even the worst. But he's what 'SportsCenter' became, what led it to feeling so much less relevant in my life.

• The '30 for 30' films are, by and large, excellent. And they're one of the few features left on the network that feel indispensable. And vital. The Ric Flair entry this week had people all over our own city buzzing, as best I could tell. So have so many others. Same goes for the extended recent piece on O.J. Simpson. I'll never forget it.

But this kind of quality might as well have been compartmentalized within one small subsection of the Bristol headquarters, because it was so sparse in all other programming. And that's stunning, not just for the obvious but also because this is precisely the programming that's catching on with countless other channels. It's reality TV. To boot, it's the ultimate American reality TV because it's built on our sports legends, the people who, for better or worse, represent our mythology.

How, when no one could possibly do it better than ESPN, with all its talent and resources, could this not have been furthered as a concept?

• ESPN became clickbait TV, if you will. And that's really the best way I can word that because the very worst of sports journalism is generally seen in clickbait, the phony or misleading headlines, the non-issues that get overblown into real issues just because they were overblown, that sort of thing.

This network that, on one hand, employed -- and still does -- some of the most gifted, reasonable, professional sports journalists on the planet somehow thought it wise to push to the front its brashest, loudest and, in some cases, your least informed or informative. Your Skip Bayless. Your Stephen A. Smith.

On a personal level, I'm a big admirer of Stephen A. The man made an enormous impact on my career with a conversation we had at the Athens Olympics in 2004, and I'll be forever grateful. On top of that, he's one of the very best at what he does, which is to his credit.

But that doesn't mean he was the right choice to put forth. Not when the newest generation of diehard sports fans routinely -- and rightly -- lampoons the standard 'hot takes' of the older generation. Not when the network needed to prioritize substance over all else.

There have been a ton of mistakes. Too many to mention without eating up your whole morning here.

That said, I typed all that out to point out, as forcefully as I possibly can, that none of the above is responsible for what's happened at ESPN. None of that and none of the other silly self-serving reasons that people are now conveniently claiming, most of those political.

The network's failing because cable is failing.

This isn't complex, much less controversial: In May of this year alone, ESPN lost 3.8 percent of its subscribers, and extensive data has shown that those users didn't dump the channel but dumped cable altogether, moving to streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. Get this: By the end of 2017, more than 22 million American adults will have cut cable. Moreover, the number of adults who've never used cable at all will rise by 5.8 percent this year, to 34 million.

One group is called the cord-cutters, the other the cord-nevers. They even have names.

The reasons we talk so much more about ESPN failing than the many, many other channels being hit hard is that ESPN might be the one with the furthest to fall. As rapidly as it grew and snapped up TV rights deals with most of the major sports leagues for untold billions of dollars, that's the same pace it needed to expand its channel count and, predictably, its cost to the consumer.

This is how it works: ESPN costs each of us $6.10 a month on our cable bill, whether we see it there or not, whether we watch it or not. And we don't have the option to call our local cable company and demand that it gets taken off because ESPN insists on being included on the plans we're least likely to drop. That's been the strategy -- or scam -- for a long time.

Well, people have gotten sick of that, and they're leaving cable.

That's it.

Laud or lament the great fade of ESPN as you will, but let's not pretend it's about anything other than that.

• Staying in that lane, the great fade of cable as a whole should absolutely terrify local baseball fans. Because what I've been writing here for years -- that the Pirates completely blew it by signing one of Major League Baseball's least lucrative local TV contracts in 2009 with Root Sports, now AT&T SportsNet-- is about to hit home even harder.

Frank Coonelly's negotiated 10-year contract, in the range of just $25 million annually, was miles below the norm in the majors, as this FanGraphs study in 2016 illustrated:

FanGraphs didn't obtain that $25 million figure for the Pirates themselves. They cited a number I'd learned and reported back in 2012. But I've never heard it reported or described as any higher, including in Coonelly's own hollow protests that "the number isn't close."

Regardless, it can't be disputed that it's low. Or that the Pirates are one of only nine teams in the majors that doesn't additionally hold equity in their local TV rights-holder. The process was bungled. The Pirates essentially settled for the White Sox' generic stadium when everyone else was getting Camden Yards.

So what can they do about it?

Hm. Not as much as they could have a few years ago.

The people at AT&T SportsNet are no dummies, and I know some of their key players well. They know where the cable market is heading. They also know that the big lure for TV sports rights in recent years was that they could help sustain cable. Well, that's not exactly the case anymore.

Further, AT&T SportsNet isn't in the position of most of these kind of companies where they'd flat-out die if they didn't have the Pirates. It sure would hurt. It sure would force some difficult decisions. But this network's got a much bigger winner in the Penguins -- on and off the ice, with the NHL's best local TV ratings in the U.S. for years now -- while the Pirates' ratings just plunged this past summer by 27 percent, down to 5.02. That was the fifth-biggest decrease in the majors.

The Pirates will walk into those negotiations with AT&T SportsNet with the same negotiator and a far uglier hand to play.

WHAT'S BREWING?

• Chris Mueller and Matt Sunday offer extensive coverage of Pitt's latest really lousy loss.

• Remember, we're holding our next big PNC Main Street Meetup this coming Saturday -- tomorrow! -- in Indianapolis, where Dale Lolley, Chris Carter, Matt Sunday and I will be waiting to chat with you ahead of Sunday's Steelers-Colts game.

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