Sean Salisbury thinks ESPN lost sight of the person coming home after a long day at work who just wanted to watch some sports. That viewer wanted highlights and a few laughs. Instead, Salisbury said, too much of the programming became another argument about politics.
“If I want that, I’ll get it on a different channel,” he told OutKick.
I spoke with the former NFL quarterback and ESPN analyst in October about the network where we both worked. Salisbury spent 12 years there, leaving in 2008. I arrived in 2012 and stayed until 2021.
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To me, ESPN was at its best in the early 2000s. Salisbury was part of that, along with the people who made you want to watch a studio show even when you already knew what happened in the games.
“It was sports first with entertainment personalities,” Salisbury said.
He remembered watching the same edition of SportsCenter several times because he enjoyed the people delivering the highlights.
Salisbury’s father was a blue-collar worker, and that shaped how he thought about the people watching him on television. Someone who had spent all day working construction probably wanted to sit down and enjoy a game or some highlights.
Salisbury believes ESPN made that harder by letting political and social arguments take up too much of its programming.
“We really weren’t concerned with what the color of the skin of the quarterback was because we were just talking football,” he said of his years at the network.
He also blamed the pressure to generate a reaction on social media. In his view, talking about the sports news increasingly gave way to trying to become the sports news, with arguments designed to get people sharing clips.
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I think that’s a big part of it. Once getting a reaction becomes the goal, there’s always a reason to make the next argument more outlandish and controversial. Eventually, the viewer who wanted to hear about his team has to sit through a debate about something an analyst said on another show.
Salisbury acknowledged that politics and sports overlap, and he said those subjects deserve coverage when they’re relevant. His complaint was about how much of the programming those discussions consumed.
“That should be the outlier, not the every single day grind,” he said.
Our conversation started with the argument over Emmanuel Acho’s comments about NFL Live. In July, Acho credited Ryan Clark with building the show into a “juggernaut.” He acknowledged that Clark hadn’t created it, but dismissed its earlier audience by claiming “nobody was watching NFL Live then.”
As I pointed out on social media, that’s false. NFL Live averaged around 650,000 daily viewers in 2011 and 2012, before Clark was even hired by ESPN. The version featuring Clark never averaged an audience that size.
Salisbury and former host Trey Wingo both weighed in on social media, as well. Wingo wrote, “‘Let your apology be as loud as your disrespect.’ I think somebody said that once.”
Salisbury posted, “Should one of us tell him” and tagged NFL Live alums Wingo, Mark Schlereth, Mike Golic, Merril Hoge, and Mark Malone.
“Acho was about two decades late to the party on that one, so no shock there,” he told me.
He compared overlooking the original group to talking about Led Zeppelin without Jimmy Page. Other people could come along and do good work, but that didn’t erase what the earlier crew had built.
And Salisbury’s memories of that period went well beyond wanting credit for NFL Live. He talked about learning from broadcasters whose personalities made the shows worth watching, particularly Dan Patrick, Chris Berman and Mike Tirico.
That’s the ESPN he wants people to be able to turn on again.
When I got hired at ESPN in 2012, the reaction from my family was pretty much what you’d expect: “You got a job at ESPN? That’s incredible!”
By the time I left in 2021, some of those same people had a very different reaction to hearing where I worked. “You work at ESPN? Oh.”
I told Salisbury that I don’t miss working at ESPN. But I do miss producing live radio.
I’d spend all week preparing a four-hour Saturday show, then news would break while we were on the air and we’d have to adjust. I loved that part of the job. There were a lot of moving pieces, and getting it right gave me an adrenaline rush.
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Salisbury knew exactly what I meant. For him, live television was about as close as broadcasting could get to the feeling of playing quarterback in the NFL.
He recalled sitting beside Tirico on Monday Night Countdown when a camera went down just before the show started. Salisbury was sweating over how they were going to handle it. Tirico made it look routine.
“Nobody at home would have ever known,” Salisbury said.
He also repeatedly credited the producers and other employees behind the scenes who made those shows work. His years at ESPN gave him close friends and taught him how to do the broadcasting work he still does.
“Those 12 years changed my life,” he said.
Salisbury still sees programming at ESPN that delivers what he’s talking about. He singled out College GameDay, calling it “the best studio show on the planet.”
Salisbury wants ESPN’s analysts saying what they actually believe.
“I think sometimes we all get caught up in it, saying stuff to appease somebody else as opposed to what you actually believe, and I’m just not willing to do that,” Salisbury said. “I think it loses credibility.”
The ESPN Salisbury and I remember gave viewers a reason to keep watching after the highlights were over. He thinks the network still has the people to do that, provided it remembers why those viewers turned on a sports channel in the first place.
“Hopefully we can get back to where we’re actually talking sports more than we’re talking about why somebody should have voted for somebody else,” he said.