The latest
- Kirk Herbstreit picked Alabama over Florida State even before Jordan Travis injury: ‘No way the SEC champ’s left out’
- Peyton Manning lost his mind over Bengals’ terrible trick play
- Prime Video draws record audience for Week 13 Seahawks-Cowboys ‘Thursday Night Football’
- ESPN’s Ryan Clark deletes post after casually breaking news about quarterback transferring to Ohio State
Now as 2017 approaches, Bayless’ old show, First Take will move from ESPN2 to ESPN next week in hopes of stemming a recent ratings downward trend that began when Undisputed began airing.
With both sides drawing lines in the sand, it’s expected that executives at ESPN and FS1 will ramp up their rhetoric and that’s exactly what they’ve done. In the Los Angeles Times, ESPN and FS1 have their guns a’blazin on each other.
Jamie Horowitz, Fox Sports National Networks President had a big hand in creating the debate programming at ESPN and now he’s doing the same thing at FS1. He says the way FS1 can discuss and debate is different than how it was one at ESPN:
“The Fox culture allows us to talk about sports news in ways that perhaps would be frowned upon at other companies,” Horowitz said. “There is an appetite here for raw fearless talk.”
That’s something that’s been reflected by Bayless himself who said there were topics that couldn’t be broached while he was at ESPN.
Burke Magnus, executive vice president for programming and scheduling at ESPN doesn’t agree with Horowitz’s assessment.
“The bone I pick with it is that the opinion programming they are doing is differentiating the two of us,” he said. “All day long we offer this type of programming, and Jamie Horowitz had a hand in it when he was here. It’s really not something that makes them distinct. They attempted to compete with us on news and information and eventually abandoned that notion. That’s not because news and information is dead; it’s because they couldn’t compete with ‘SportsCenter.’”
Magnus acknowledges that it wasn’t good for First Take to have Bayless leave saying “Those successes are hard to come by,” but he says he considers what FS1 is doing as “healthy competition.”
So the debate competition begins anew in 2017 with First Take on ESPN going head-to-head with Undisputed on FS1, it’s going to be a rather interesting year.
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