It’s been two years since ESPN and Bill Simmons parted ways, a breakup that, incidentally, has not gone particularly smooth for either.
Simmons, from the perhaps biased viewpoint of both a jilted ex and (distant) content-producing rival at The Ringer, thinks he knows why ESPN has hit such hard times.
A month after ESPN handed out 100 pink slips as a small measure of offsetting massive losses built from subscribers ditching cable, Simmons said the network was blindsided by the trend.
Speaking at this year’s Code Conference in California on Wednesday, Simmons placed the blame everywhere from a leadership void to forecasting errors to not investing in technology.
“They didn’t see a lot of this coming,” Simmons said, in video uploaded by recode. “They didn’t see the cord-cutting coming, I know for a fact that was there. Summer of 2014 they had bet the [subscriptions] would go a certain way and they just didn’t, they went this way [signaling down].
“They weren’t ready for it. A lot of the decisions they made were based on the sub staying at a certain level.”
They didn’t, and paying for a nine-year, $24 billion deal in 2014 to air the NBA, as well as paying $1.9 billion annually to the NFL for rights, at a time when fewer are willing to pay for cable has led to massive layoffs.
The quality of the products that ESPN churns out also has seen a downturn, Simmons said, which he blamed on the loss of former president George Bodenheimer in 2014.
“When I was there, especially from ’09 to 2013, ESPN was just an awesome place to work and really cared about content and creating stuff and doing quality stuff,” said Simmons, who ran Grantland and headed up the “30-for-30” franchise. “And the biggest reason for that is [ESPN president John] Skipper because he was in charge of the content. Bodenheimer, who’s a legend, he’s in charge of the business. And they worked together, George handled all the business stuff, he didn’t care about content.
“Skipper took George’s job, but he never replaced himself. And what he tried to do is basically a bullpen by committee, with six, seven, eight inner-circle people kind of trying to do his job. And the thing is, he was great at his job. If you’re a baseball fan, when you lose your closer and the team says, ‘Hey, we have all these setup guys who are gonna be the closer’ — it never works. And I think that’s what they did.”
The “biggest mistake,” though, was not investing enough in technology, Simmons says. The same company that created the infamous ESPN Phone did not consider itself a tech company, Simmons said, in a world run by Netflix.
“And I also think the other mistake they made was they had to realize that they were a technology company,” said Simmons, who has bet big on technology with The Ringer. “They always thought of themselves as a broadcasting network. But where the world is going is you have to be a technology company, and the ones that are winning out are Facebook and Twitter and Amazon and Hulu, all these places. ESPN should’ve been in this mix, but they’re in Bristol, they’re over here. It’s hard for them to get technology, guys and girls. I think they should’ve had a place in Silicon Valley. That was their biggest mistake.”
Simmons, perhaps not wanting to seem as if he has an ax to grind even as he ground it, did point out the demise of ESPN is not much of a demise.
ESPN is “going to make $6 billion instead of $8 [billion],” Simmons said. “Like, they’ll be fine.”
