“AROUND THE HORN” ENDED A LONG TIME AGO ON ESPN — WHEN I LEFT THE SHOW

Something weird happened to a program that once was about spark and combat — didn’t Snoop Dogg ask me, “Who do you think you is?” — before too many panelists turned off viewers and will leave the air

A television show is accompanied by mushy political overtones. Today, let’s undo the critical fraud. When I appeared on ESPN’s “Around The Horn” for eight years, we settled into bigger ratings. Why? Because we had fun. Because we were entertaining. Because we fired on each other, or at least I fired.

We had a regular group of panelists, seven or eight, and I started to wonder if we’d pass “Pardon The Interruption” in audience numbers when we were supposed to set up Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser. Each quarter brought an increase — at one point, close to a million viewers daily. I was on almost every day. My life changed, such as the time I upset Snoop Dogg and heard him say, “Who do you think you is?”

Then, I left.

And the show became god-awful boring. Seven or eight people became 18 or 23 or 30. Who were they? Were they sportswriters or performers or stick figures? Why were they so damned pretentious? They mused more than they spoke with freedom, as I always did, and somehow, they became involved in discussions that fatigued viewers. The panelists liked each other. Host Tony Reali liked the panelists.

Some were woke. Some were on dope. No one cared anymore.

Where was the loathing? I didn’t like Woody Paige for 30 minutes. I didn’t like Tim Cowlishaw for 30 minutes. I didn’t like Kevin Blackistone and Jackie MacMullan for 30 minutes. Then we enjoyed the prosperity and the paychecks and the good times. I did around 1,700 shows. I co-hosted “PTI.” Those were the entitled days of “ATH.”

Now the show is leaving the air, on May 23. I keep reading how the program became more reflective in recent years when people simply stopped watching. Such thinking is ass-backwards. Anyone who reads my column — the fire, the passion, the demands I make on leagues and owners in a business of billionaires — can’t be mistaken about our runaway spirit. No one was more combative on the air. That’s why I was in the lineup every day, as directed by Erik Rydholm and Aaron Solomon, who later welcomed variety and less individuality. Did the producers think the program was about them?

Without me, the show became tedious, only to appease what is left of media writers, who also are tedious. The daily ratings dropped by hundreds of thousands. Wilbon and Kornheiser received the best money. “ATH” was a chump-changer.

I cringe when truly stupid people, such as Pat McAfee, bring up allegations that Ole Miss student Mary Kate Cornett slept with her boyfriend’s father. Justin Cornett, Mary Kate’s father, wrote that McAfee has “shared these utter and complete lies with zero interest in the truth.” Will he be sued?

McAfee is a hot topic among media critics. They never rip him. I’ve yet to see anyone attack him for Cornett. Yet they write about “ATH” becoming more profound when all it did was lose a ton of viewers.

Which is why it’s going away.

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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.