AFTER MY PEAK ERA OF “AROUND THE HORN,” I SAW A RATINGS CRASH AND CRINGED
Producers of the ESPN program grew to love “nuance,” as someone wrote, but the show has died when numbers once boomed and energy and conflict were welcome — “Who do you think you is?’’ Snoop Dogg said
Ever feel like throwing a console at the TV set? I am not a gambler. I am not rooting for sports teams. I like Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. Rather, I had spent eight years as a daily regular on “Around The Horn” and wondered why ratings went pfffft after I left.
We had fun on ESPN, such as the day Woody Paige tried to stuff me in the South Beach sand or when I hid his chalkboard inside a Boston studio. Or when Snoop Dogg trashed me and yelped, “Who do you think you is?’’ Or when Lil Wayne wondered why I smirked when he referred to the baseball commissioner as “Mr. Selig.” The show was supported by impressive numbers — which kept ticking upward each quarter, year after year — and it’s why producers put me in the lineup almost every afternoon.
So what happened to the sizzle? What dooms “ATH” to a crash landing next summer with ratings so bleak, so bland, that I stopped looking at media-site breakdowns? Why were numbers shrinking to the 200,000/300,000 range when ours were multiple times higher? Skip Bayless’ digits were in the 50,000 heap when Fox Sports pulled him. “ATH” also has been yanked, comes word from the network, which should quiet websites that said ratings were “strong.” They were not.
The program slogged into a slow, boring, unwatchable grind. Instead of retaining the familiar six or seven panelists to fill four seats, with host Tony Reali, it became a haven for dozens of people from all walks of network life. How would anyone at home keep up with which commentators appeared? Who were they? In our day, I loved reminding Paige when he didn’t do his homework, and he loved calling me “jabroni” — which got him into trouble in Bristol. I loved dueling Jackie MacMullan in our showdowns and telling Reali that he looked like a Jonas brother. I loved telling Tim Cowlishaw he was half-asleep and dressed like a Texas two-stepper.
The content mattered to viewers who took sides on, say, Mariotti versus Paige. That’s why Snoop and Lil Wayne showed up. They wanted a piece of us, and if you thought I was Stephen A. Smith, I was not. I brought balls and beef. Turns out, for some reason, they didn’t want balls and beef.
And the show eventually died.
In a 2022 profile of Reali, The Athletic’s Stephen J. Nesbitt said the show took a turn for the better — “from a barrage of bombastic debate into a smarter show where banter and nuance can coexist.” Does he realize Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon are more “bombastic” on “Pardon the Interruption” than we ever were? Would someone explain how “nuance” is better than levity and conflict that brought much larger ratings? Yet it was OK to have bombast when Jemele Hill showed up to speak about life.
Worse, the show reminded us of liars in the executive offices. Our original producer, Jim Cohen, reminded us that president John Skipper and the gents refused to watch. But, boy, Skipper loved those ratings. Months ago, content boss Burke Magnus said to ignore rumors that “ATH” was ending. “There’s absolutely nothing imminent with that,” he said, not telling the truth.
I am thrilled to have been on the program at its peak. I also groan about how it passed away. Sometimes, media managers notice how I write columns and propose plans for me. Some are worth considering as the holidays near.
ESPN? Few people on the air seem happy in the cut-cable-cords era. Add dozens who have to trudge a few more months after Nesbitt mistakenly wrote, “Reali has developed from a facilitator, a pass-first point guard, into a host whose voice and vulnerability have made a glorified game show into a refreshingly genuine space.”
A refreshingly genuine … space?
Let me push the final mute button.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.