Bristol Finally Gets Tired Of The Noise That Has Been Pissing Us Off For While.

Will Stephen A Smith Become The Scapegoat?

(Sorry Gator Fans: I Needed To Get This Off My Chest Before They Put The Ball Down On The Grass) 

Stephen A. Smith didn’t invent or build “Embrace Debate.” He just outlasted everybody who did.

That’s worth remembering this week, because if you believe the reporting coming out of Bristol — and by all accounts you should — ESPN’s new sheriff, Mike Foss, stood in front of a room of a hundred nervous employees and told them the manufactured shouting match that built the network’s daytime schedule for two decades isn’t working anymore.

He didn’t call out Stephen A. by name. He didn’t have to. Everybody in that room knew whose ratings they were talking about.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know a corporate mea culpa when I see one, and this qualifies. Although I don't pretend to have any inside scuttlebutt.

ESPN spent nineteen years teaching America that two guys yelling about LeBron’s legacy was appointment television, and now the exec in charge of sports news is standing up in a town hall quoting internal research that says, actually, folks are exhausted by it. 

Bless their hearts. It only took losing half their audience to cable-cutting and a generation raised on podcasts to figure that out.

The Man Jamie Horowitz Built

Understand something about Jamie Horowitz before you feel sorry for anybody in this story. He’s the fellow who took a perfectly reasonable morning show — Cold Pizza, then First Take with Dana Jacobsen and Jay Crawford doing a little bit of everything — and in August of 2011 turned it into two straight hours of professional arguing. 

Skip Bayless said it himself: People in the hallway told both he and partner Woody Paige it’d be career suicide. Instead it became the ratings model half the industry has been chasing ever since, right down to Horowitz trying to bottle the same lightning twice at Fox Sports and mostly proving that lightning, once caught, doesn’t strike the same barn again.

Stephen A. Smith walked into that model in 2011 and never left it. He outlasted Bayless’s defection to Fox and Woody’s lengthy run on Around The Horn. He outlasted the Skip-and-Shannon marriage and its ugly divorce. 

He signed a five-year, $100 million deal last year that made him the highest-paid name at the network, and he did it by being the last man standing in a format everybody else eventually got tired of building — or tired of watching.

Scapegoat or Coronation? Wrong Question

You ask me whether Stephen A. becomes the scapegoat or ascends to some kind of throne? I’ll tell you what I think: He’s already both, and neither, which is the most Stephen A. outcome imaginable.

He’s the scapegoat in the sense that “Embrace Debate” is now a phrase Bristol executives use the way a man uses his ex-wife’s name at a dinner party — carefully, and only when necessary. He’s the survivor in the sense that when ESPN pulled Ryan Clark off NFL Live mid-broadcast and laid off Cam Newton, Stephen A. pushed back to his bosses and lost, publicly, on his own YouTube show. 

Read that twice. The $100-million man couldn’t save the colleague from the very show that made him rich. That tells you everything about where the actual power sits in Bristol right now, and it isn’t with the debate guy. It’s with the audience research.

He won’t be run out of town. He’s too valuable, First Take still moves a needle, and ESPN isn’t in the business of writing off $100 million just to make a philosophical point. But the growth in that building isn’t happening around him anymore — it’s happening around Pat McAfee, and now apparently around Josh Pate and the Bussin’ With The Boys boys building a college football show. Notice what those three have in common: They built their audiences on their own, on YouTube, before ESPN ever called. That’s the new model. Stephen A. built his audience inside the machine Horowitz built for him. Different currency entirely.

What About the Rest of Us?

Here’s my actual answer to the question you asked, the one about people who are just tired of conflict — because I hear from plenty of them, and they’re not wrong.

Manufactured debate works like hot sauce. A little bit wakes up a bland dish. A steady diet of it and you can’t taste anything else, including the parts of sports that are actually good — the kid from a small Georgia town who worked his way onto an SEC two-deep, the coach who’s rebuilding a program without burning it down first, the box score that tells a story all by itself if you let it. 

ESPN spent so long pairing people up to disagree on command that it forgot some of its best television was never an argument at all — it was two guys who actually liked each other, like the Pardon the Interruption boys, or a guy behind a desk just showing you a great catch and letting the catch do the talking. That’s the show Foss says he wants back. SportsCenter as SportsCenter, not SportsCenter as a preamble to a screaming match. Or a promo for the next WWE fake event. Or telling us it’s not too late to get our bet down with Fan Duel.

If you’re worn out on conflict, here’s my prescription, and it costs nothing: Change the channel to the folks being honest instead of combative. I dare you!

Authenticity, it turns out, is actually a lot more interesting and better currency than manufactured outrage — Pat McAfee didn’t get rich yelling at Skip Bayless, he got rich being unmistakably himself. (Although I am suspicious of how McAfee bought his way in.)

Support the shows and the writers who’ll tell you a coach is overmatched without needing a debate partner to disagree with them for effect. 

Vote with your remote and your clicks, because that’s the only language a $100-million industry actually speaks.

Bristol didn’t get religion overnight. It got a spreadsheet. But even a corporate conversion is still a conversion. If ESPN really walks away from Embrace Debate and back toward just letting good broadcasters be good broadcasters, I won’t miss the shouting one bit — and neither, I suspect, will you.