Dan Le Batard reveals ESPN focus group axed ‘SportsCenter’ commentaries with Mitch Albom, Mike Lupica

Dan Le Batard has recounted this story before, but he told it again this week on The Dan Le Batard Show, connecting the dots on ESPN’s initial pivot toward debate programming to a piece of focus-group research that killed the format he was working on at the time.

Le Batard was writing and reading short commentaries on SportsCenter alongside Mitch Albom and Mike Lupica, each delivering an individual take on a given subject, before ESPN dragged that format in front of focus groups and got a verdict it didn’t love.

Not because the writing was bad or the argument wasn’t sharp. According to Le Batard, the feedback that kept coming back was that viewers didn’t want to hear one side of anything. They didn’t want Albom’s opinion standing alone, or Lupica’s, or Le Batard’s own. They wanted a counterweight in the room.

“I just don’t want to hear one side of this,” Le Batard said, paraphrasing the feedback. “I want to hear both sides of this. I don’t want to hear just Mitch Albom or Mike Lupica or me talking about one subject. I want two people talking about it.”

ESPN acted on it, according to Le Batard.

“They took that advice,” he said. “They went with their focus groups, and they changed some of that.”

The anecdote — which he’s previously shared — is newly relevant because ESPN executive Mike Foss told a room of roughly 100 staffers and talent at a Bristol town hall last week that the network now wants to move toward “authenticity” and away from manufactured conflict, according to reporting from Puck’s John Ourand. Foss reportedly brought internal research showing ESPN’s brand of studio debate isn’t resonating with audiences the way it once did.

ESPN has already been unwinding pieces of the debate-era identity that grew out of the dynamic Le Batard described. Around the Horn was canceled last year as ratings lagged and replaced with a more highlight-driven SportsCenter. Ryan Clark — a First Take regular Stephen A. Smith has called one of the best NFL analysts in the country — was pulled off NFL Live mid-broadcast and laid off this summer over Smith’s own objections. And the network is reportedly building new shows around personalities like Josh Pate and Peter Schrager rather than assigning them a debate partner, following the Pat McAfee model of talent who built an audience elsewhere before ESPN came calling.

There’s some irony in the fact that the very format ESPN built to satisfy its audience is now the one its audience appears to be rejecting. And there’s an even deeper irony in the fact that this traces back to Le Batard himself, who has repeatedly excoriated the format that grew out of the very dynamic he just described.

In a 2023 appearance on his South Beach Sessions podcast, Le Batard told Stephen A. Smith to his face, “I hate what you two have done to sports television,” referring to Smith and Skip Bayless. Smith pushed back hard in the moment — “Who the hell are you! To sit up there and say, me and him. What about you?” — before Le Batard clarified his issue wasn’t with Smith and Bayless themselves so much as the wave of imitators without journalism backgrounds their success spawned, people who turned every headline into a manufactured argument because that’s what the format demanded. Smith’s counter was that he and Bayless were both career journalists who “maximized” a landscape that already existed, name-checking PTI, Mike and the Mad Dog, Around the Horn, and Jim Rome as shows that came before First Take.

ESPN’s debate era (or differing-opinions era) seemingly didn’t begin with Skip Bayless or Stephen A. Smith, as has been popularly foretold. It began with viewers asking for a second opinion. Two decades later, another batch of audience research may be pushing the network in the opposite direction, away from manufactured conflict and back toward authenticity, though probably not all the way back to three renowned writers reading their own essays.