The SportsCenter brand might live on, but much of the draw for audiences to watch ESPN’s 34-year-old highlight show is long gone.
Neil Everett anchored his final SportsCenter last week, departing ESPN after 23 years amid significant layoffs and cost-cutting at the Worldwide Leader. Everett’s departure from ESPN ended his run with co-anchor Stan Verrett, closing the chapter on ESPN’s last great SportsCenter duo. Friday morning, Everett joined The Dan Patrick Show. After the interview, Patrick briefly discussed the challenge of making your mark as a SportsCenter anchor today.
“It’s the end of an era when it comes to those SportsCenter teams,” Patrick said of Everett’s split from Verrett. “I mean, SportsCenter anchor, you think of Scott Van Pelt, because he has his own show and there’s a tune-in factor that Scott’s gonna be there. But it’s changed so much, in fairness to the anchors.
“When we were doing SportsCenter in the mid-90s, you didn’t have social media, you didn’t know the results. And if you knew the results, you weren’t able to have access to the highlights, so you tuned into SportsCenter.”
Going to SportsCenter for highlights each night and morning was an integral part of many people’s sports fandom, until those highlights became easily accessed in real time on social media. But there’s little need for a sports highlight show that now essentially airs old highlights. If fans aren’t going to SportsCenter for the highlights, and they’re not going there for the anchors, it becomes increasingly difficult to sell audiences on watching the show that was once vital to ESPN’s success.
“We had an incredible tune-in factor,” Patrick said of his reign as one of SportsCenter’s elite anchors alongside Keith Olbermann. “Because we could bring you all the highlights and we could do it in an entertaining fashion that hadn’t been done before. Trying to be a SportsCenter anchor, I can’t imagine how difficult that would be because we already know the results, now what are you doing that’s different?”
Van Pelt hosts a show, he doesn’t anchor a traditional sportscast when he does his nightly SportsCenter. And that helps keep it an attractive product. But as SportsCenter becomes less important to ESPN, its daytime programming has relished debate and transitioned into more of an informercial for the network’s game offerings, leaving little room to develop the next great SportsCenter anchor or duo.
