The connections between ESPN’s college football coverage and the powerhouse agency CAA are the latest source of scrutiny from college football fans who are skeptical of the Worldwide Leader, but the longtime anchor of College GameDay is having none of it.
Throughout Thanksgiving weekend, fans in Oxford and around the country railed against the clear issue posed by top ESPN talent coming to the defense of outgoing Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin. The issue, as others around college football noted, is that many of ESPN’s top analysts are represented by the same agency as Kiffin — and in the case of GameDay analyst Nick Saban, the very same agent.
As the likes of Saban, Kirk Herbstreit, and Booger McFarland defended Kiffin amid his chaotic jump to LSU, this strange symbiosis between Kiffin and the Worldwide Leader led CAA super agent Jimmy Sexton to suddenly become a household name. Sexton represents most of the top coaches in college football, from Kiffin to Kirby Smart to Kalen DeBoer to Steve Sarkisian (and on and on and on).
In an appearance on the SI Media podcast this week, GameDay anchor Rece Davis got his chance to respond to the supposition that Sexton and CAA were putting their thumb on the scales at ESPN. Davis — who revealed that he is a CAA client as well — not only dismissed the allegation but referred to it as a “conspiracy theory.”
“I’ve been at ESPN for 30 years. Never has an executive said, ‘Say this, don’t say that,’ whatever. Never. Not one time,” Davis explained.
“And while I’m very friendly with Jimmy, I’m a CAA client. Jimmy is not my rep directly; Matt Kramer is, but I’m friends with Jimmy. I have great respect for him. He would never do that. He would never come to me and say, ‘Hey, I need you to say this.’ He just wouldn’t do that. That’s not the kind of person he is. Now, is he a tough, hard-negotiating agent? Is he powerful? Of course he is. But it would never occur to him to come and try to tell us what to say about any of this. Or at least, in my experience, [he] wouldn’t. So that aspect of it is kind of preposterous to me. But everybody loves a good conspiracy theory.”
Davis also suggested that it is disrespectful to the GameDay cast to claim that their opinions are not their own.
“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “Think about the guys that are up on that stage. Take me out of the equation, I’m glad to say what I would feel about it. But you really think that Desmond Howard and Kirk Herbstreit, Pat McAfee are going to take a directive from somebody about what they’re going to say?”
The most glaring comments this past weekend came when Herbstreit and Saban argued for Kiffin to continue coaching Ole Miss through the College Football Playoff. What most fans saw as an obvious non-starter for the Rebels’ athletic department, given the potential for Kiffin to poach coaches and players or simply become distracted, became a rallying cry across ESPN airwaves.
Rather than purely standing up for Kiffin or working the narrative, Davis said his colleagues were making an argument that was “rooted in trying to win now.” The analysts, Davis said, were making a case for what was in Ole Miss’s best short-term interests.
As with many of these supposed conspiracies about the media, the people crafting them don’t have as intimate an understanding of the business as the professionals who work in it. Davis denies that his GameDay hosts are being fed information or that ESPN is bending to CAA. The reality could be much more basic than that; cozy relations between ESPN talent and CAA could easily — even subliminally — affect analysts’ perspectives. And the problem is all the more concerning in a sport where measuring success is so subjective.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.