Bomani Jones on ESPN: ‘They’re out of ideas’

Bomani Jones was part of many of ESPN’s most adventurous content experiments during his nearly 20 years at the company, from writing on Page 2 to the Erik Rydholm universe of shows to podcasting.

Two years after departing the company, Jones fears that ESPN is no longer in the business of trying much of anything adventurous.

During an appearance on the Marchand Sports Media podcast this week, Jones — who is typically reticent to weigh in on his former employer the way many others do — described his concerns over the lack of vision under the current leadership in Bristol.

“From where I sit, I don’t see a vision for the content. And maybe a vision exists. But I don’t see a vision for content,” Jones said. “This used to be a place that was in the business of developing shows. That’s not what they care about anymore. That’s not really what they do.”

During the network’s heyday as a cable television cash cow, it minted stars and provided viewers with interesting, engrossing programs. ESPN reimagined sports and news on TV and minted stars for multiple generations, dating back to its beginnings in southeastern Connecticut.

But particularly since Jimmy Pitaro and Burke Magnus took over in the late 2010s, Jones explained, he thinks that the “creativity” is sorely lacking.

“When I watch ESPN … I don’t feel like creativity is what anybody’s looking for,” he added. “What I think they are looking for, and I think this has been made abundantly clear, is they used to be like MTV in the 1980s. And they were notorious for this in the sense that they weren’t paying people a whole lot of money because they felt like, ‘We make stars.'”

“They can’t do that anymore.”

Before running content, the seemingly hands-off Magnus came up overseeing college sports and then overall sports programming. Magnus effectively was in charge of negotiating live sports rights deals for the network. As content head, Magnus has remained primarily focused on games — at the expense of new programming or editorial ideas.

Jones pointed to the megadeal signed by Stephen A. Smith earlier this year as an example of the trap ESPN now finds itself in. The ESPN of yesteryear would have played hardball with Smith under the pretense that they could replace him internally. Now, they have to pay up to keep stars or partner with external ones.

Based on his experience as a viewer and then a staffer, Jones credited ESPN for being “visionary” earlier in its history. But now, Jones argued, the company is drawing blanks.

“They’re out of ideas. Or at the very least, nobody is in the business of coming up with new ideas,” he said. “And you could say what you want about ESPN, but for the majority of its existence, it was a fairly visionary company when it came to content. They took a lot of chances that didn’t necessarily work.”

When pushed by host Andrew Marchand, who also worked at ESPN under former president John Skipper and has covered sports media in the year since, to account for the fact that ESPN has always been geared around live games, Jones agreed.

But Jones also highlighted the big difference he sees now, which is that the Worldwide Leader is far more obvious about its ties to leagues and reliance on live game rights than ever before. A pregame or postgame show may, in previous eras at ESPN, have included an irreverent Lee Corso, a wisecracking Bill Simmons, or an impassioned Stuart Scott.

Now, when the games aren’t on, ESPN is largely overtaken by former athletes. While Jones acknowledged the push for ESPN to conduct capital-J journalism may be overblown, he believes the network’s perspective is far more informal and positive than it once was.

“What I think is different is the shoulder programming around the live events feels much more geared toward promoting the live events than discussing them, critiquing them, so forth and so on,” Jones said. “I think the part that jumps out to people now is that symbiosis feels a bit more transparent, perhaps, than it did before.”