It's been quite a while since I watched Belvedere. Was Uyghur an

ex sports writer or a put upon sports writer? That was my memory. And I think he wasn't in all the episodes. And so he was

a sports writer who had help in the house. Well,

he was away a lot, maybe a sports announcer, which would have been a little more on the nose.

Okay.

You've got television. I'm grandfathering you into whatever this is. Well,

it's a pleasure to be here as always. Thank you, Brian, for having me.

Well, it's so nice to be here. And let me tell you, 48 hours before every edition of the press box, we think, what are we possibly going to talk about today? Yeah. And then we're like, oh my God, it's a story that at least on media Twitter is blotting out the sun. Today, it comes in this form that ESPN has laid off Zach Lowe, NBA writer, NBA podcaster, former teammate of mine at Grantland. What did you make of Zach Lowe's career ending at ESPN?

I mean, stunning. I mean, stunning on the face of it, disappointing for what it says, and kind of tacky, to be honest with you. I mean, you were talking about somebody who, you know, obviously has had a very distinguished career, you know, kind of a groundbreaking career in its own right. And, you know, it's pretty universally regarded as somebody who has been thoughtful, professional, has always represented this company with great integrity and professionalism, and to kind of unceremoniously dump them a couple of weeks before the NBA season begins, feels pretty tacky to me. And, you know, Brian, I speak as somebody who's been laid off before and it sucks. It's a tough blow. That said, I don't worry too much for Zach. I think he will be very much in demand individual if he's not already, which I suspect he is. I think he will have multitudinous options. Maybe he could stay in media. Maybe he could go basketball. Maybe he could be your colleague, Brian. If we believe the betting houses of the internet, the ringer is the leader in the clubhouse, but I got nothing to go on there, but I think he'll be fine. The truth of it is, and I'm sure you would agree here, this is only a tiny, tiny fractional bit about Zach Lowe. What this is really is, This is a story about what's happening at ESPN and the evolution of that place and what it says when somebody who is, again, just widely appreciated, admired, has been quite successful, no longer fits into the future of what this place is. And there we can pick apart at what's happening. And Brian, this is a topic that I know you have discussed multiple times on the show, but ESPN, it's a majorly influential organization, is at a rather radical crossroads here, where they are trying to figure, the existential future of ESPN, what it looks like in a post cable universe. Now, still have cable television, still have a great many people who are paying to watch cable TV, but the good old business of having people who want an ESPN paying for ESPN, and people who didn't care about ESPN paying for ESPN is increasingly an anachron the over the top cord cutting world. And that's the riddle that Jimmy Pataro and all the suits at ESPN have been charged to find out and what they're betting heavily on as we both know, our life rights, right? You know, games, games that we need, games that are critical to our lives and that's what we will pay. That's what we will subscribe for. And I disagree with that. I think that, you know, at the end of the day, the most compelling reason to watch a television network devoted to sports, sports themselves, whether it's the US Open, SEC football, basketball, and so on. But ESPN has always been in all these other parts too, Brian. I mean, you work for the company. I mean, it had things like Grantland, it had little, you know, corners and corridors and, you know, side offices and things and places. And it wasn't just one thing. And I feel what is happening is they are really kind of stripping it down to the bolts here in terms of trying to figure out what is going to work for people to subscribe because that's really the only game here. And the irony of this is that, you know, as much as this is about cost-cutting, I guess I've seen it characterized that way, we are living in the era of the super compensated ESPN star. Like people are being paid to that network in a way they were never paid in the history of the network. And that's actually not the case at like say ABC television news, CBS news, NBC news, where salaries have come down significantly. People in ESPN have never been paid in the way that Joe Buck and Troy Eggman got paid to come award for a Monday night football. The way that Pat Backefi's show has been licensed for ESPN usage. The way that Stephen A. Smith presumably is going to be compensated when his new deal is done. These are these hyper compensated superstars and it's a real choice. It's saying that these are the most significant plays for us right now in terms of personnel, and we might not need all those contiguous parts and individuals that we've had historically, all the little things that make the network go. And I think that this is what this story is. And unfortunately, it's really not about Zach. The

corners and corridors thing, I just completely agree with that. And that's in a way the most striking. And for me personally as a reader and a consumer disappointing part about ESPN now, because it was this big golden corral buffet of stuff. And some of the people you're like, I hate that person. Every time they come on my television screen, I want to be like Elvis and shoot it out because I'm so, so angry right now. But then you'd find this person that was on a website, on ESPN radio, was on TV, but maybe not in a featured spot. And you'd be like, oh yeah, that's my guy or gal. That's great. That's why I'm here. That's my entry point. And to the idea of ESPN's long-term strategy, ESPN has a Super Bowl in 2027. They're going to be here. They're going to have tons of games. But I do think when you reduce the number of people, the number of entry points to the network for sports fans to come back to and to come back to ESPN when it's not just a huge game that ESPN paid billions of dollars in rights fees for. That's dangerous long-term. There's got to be a downside, and we have to be seeing more of the downside now when people like Zach walk out the door. Absolutely.

I mean, I remember, and I'm gonna paraphrase here, when John Skipper was talking about Grandland years ago, him saying that there's a case for a big brand name to have alternate identities, to have this, you know, quote unquote, mothership. I mean, again, ESPN is in no, what's the way I want to say it, they're not star for self regard. This is a news organization that refers to itself as the worldwide leader, okay? But, you know, and the mothership, and, you know, these sort of big sort of Battlestar Galactica, Death Star type of analogies. It's good to have other little things. It's good to have other little, you know, birdhouses in the product that draw people and bring people in. I'm not comparing Grand House again to a birdhouse, although it was a dynamite birdhouse, Brian, and you did a great job. Damn good birdhouse. With that birdhouse. I just don't think that there is an appetite for that kind of thing now. I feel like everything has to better the ball, better the ball in terms of, you know, furnishing the relationships with existing contracts, existing leagues, the sports rights. If you're not in the business of serving somehow NFL product, NBA product, college football product, which are, you know, the sort of central stool points of what this is, I'm worried. So let's talk about Zach and those terms.

Zach Lowe is an NBA writer. ESPN just renewed NBA rights for 2 billion plus, right? So he serves a product that they're really interested in and one they just crazily invested in. Zach Lowe is not niche. Zach Lowe has 977,000 Twitter followers. Not at all. Yes. So he is not some, you know, yeah, it's a really random guy who writes that stuff on a website. Nobody likes it but me. He's mainstream. Zach Lowe has a podcast, which is a medium I am using to speak to you right now and a medium that can be monetized and capitalized to do business with. And I understand like people were valued differently in the skipper era, words, people are words, dominant, people were valued differently. So there's an idea of contracts here and stuff like that to explore. But to me is like, whenever somebody leaves ESPN, we're always, you know, listing these reasons why they left. Well, you know, SportsCenter is not a big deal anymore. Well, they're doing, they got rid of their sports, they're not useful. That's not Zach, he's not that at all. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I mean, listen, there's no question that he contributed greatly to the coverage. I mean, there's, I don't think that anybody within that company would disagree with that. I think it's a question again, of like what they have chosen to prioritize. And again, it is this, the actual lab coverage itself, the sort of social virality that revolves around the talk shows and sort of goosing the internet on a daily basis and sort of having arguments amongst themselves about, you know, whatever the topic du jour is, and a little less interest in the dense, harder stuff that people exact it.

Yeah, but it's just so funny because if you and I got in here and asked Zach the 10 burning questions of the NBA as defined by the first take, Kyron, he would give us five minutes on each one of them, And they'd be great. He wouldn't be like, he'd be like, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm beneath such a question,

Jason and Brian. Like, he played that game.

He's not Kendrick Perkins, but he can play that game just fine.

We should also point out that this also speaks well of what his future presumably will be, which is that, you know, nobody wants to go through what he's going through. But, and I say that again, as somebody who's been through it, it's never been a better time to be a hot shit NBA free agent in media because of the, you know, reorientation of the NBA contracts. And I suspect that he will be, you

know, a prominent part of somebody else's coverage plan in the near future. I assume so, Of course. Now it's funny. It's funny. I was talking to Bill about this a little while ago. There's this thing we do with ESPN where whenever there's a big layoff or another layoff, we always go, well, but ESPN still has, and then we name a universally loved person. Yeah. That is still the network. We name Amina Kimes. We name him right Thompson, a Seth Wicker sham type. That list is getting smaller and smaller every day. We should just know. Zach was on that list. I still have Zach Lowe, still have Bill Barnwell. Man, that list keeps shrinking and shrinking and shrinking all the time. Sure.

And I don't think that they have a clear idea of how that, um, you know, intellectual and community transfers over to the sort of future product of an OTT ESPN, right? And even things like Stephen A. Smith first take Pat McAfee, I get why someone will subscribe to an ESPN over the top product because what are they called flagship or supposed to call it flagship because they want to watch SEC football. I get that entirely. Are they interested in subscribing for talk show programming? I don't know. They're giving it away throughout social media. You effectively don't have to watch the channel to find out what they're saying all day. It sort of exists in this other free medium and social media. I just, I think it's a little bit of an experiment, but again, it is getting consolidated around a few individuals and it's a big bet. I

think their answer to that would be right. So, okay, so what Stephen A. Mc give us is television innings eating to the extent that that's still valuable, perhaps less so than it was once upon a time. Then we can also with McAfee put them on YouTube with first take, we can make it a podcast. We can just reach people wherever they are. Yeah. I still think, and again, I am not sitting in that board room at ESPN, and no one has ever asked me to sit in that board room, but I still think that even if you develop that as your future over-the product, big sports rights and some guys who are reaching people in various ways, there's still ways to make money by like, well, we want a really good, robust podcast network. So we have lots of people. We'll use those people on TV. We're using this part of our coverage. I don't know.

I agree with that. And not to sound like a Wall Street Journal columnist, but it's diversification. It's spreading your investment across multiple investments, hoping that the majority of them pull in a positive for you and not betting too hard on a few specific things because that leaves you in a vulnerable position. They're not alone in this, Brian. I mean, you know, obviously, every media company is facing headwinds, every streaming outfit, save, maybe Netflix is facing, you know, existential headwinds in terms of what they're going to be. Two, three, four years down the road. I expect there was going to be an enormous shakeout in terms of how that's We seem to have lost the, what are we calling it? The spooloo, the ESPN, Hulu plus NBC plus Fox, whatever that was has been knocked down. don't think any of us have a really strong feeling for what the universe will look like other than as you point out correctly, having the NFL, it's like life insurance, basically. It really is. It's relevance insurance. And actually, I feel like that was part of the dynamic of the NBA contract because I think that they all overpaid for NBA rights. But to have NBA rights is to ensure your social currency and relevance. At least you have this. You know you will have some kind of cultural cache because you have this thing going. Now, whether it will justify the price that you've paid for it, who the heck knows? Obviously,

a different calculation for Amazon than it is for ESPN or NBC. Totally. And I think if I were them, I would have made that bet. I would have gotten those big sports rights because that makes me essential, sort of the anti-Zazz strategy of acquiring rights. But then once I sent in that cash cheers check for those rights, I'd want the best people reacting to the programming that was just on my television. So got Scott Van Pelt on that late sports center, and he's talking to Steph Curry in the locker room. Okay, that's cool. I want the guy whose podcast you just have to listen to immediately after the game. Zach was on that short list of people like game two of the NBA Finals. Oh, that. Yeah. I want to hear what he has to say. Like that, that would be my core. That would be my, my roster. Let me ask you a question about, you know, if we're going to do a little overstating

here, what do you think this says about the appetite, the corporate appetite for the nuanced middle of talk? Zach was obviously an important ingredient of their television product, their podcast network, but he was not the guy. He had things that irritated him and he gets upset about, but he's not the person coming in from the top rope. He has a rather nuanced analytic type approach to understanding basketball. He is not a yeller. He is, you know, is there a lane for that, um, in the world that we're occupying increasingly? I think

there is because to me, when I hear the language of Zach Lowe, it's just the language of sports podcasting. Yeah, that's true. Or the language of a big chunk of it. You know, again, I say this from inside the ringer network, but this, this is not supposed to be like obscure. It may be handled at a different way than first take, then a segment on there where you are coming off that top rope, but it's not obscure. It's not, it's for the masses. Again, 997,000 Twitter followers. Somebody was reading his stuff.

No, for sure. 100%. Don't misunderstand. Like, I mean, but you're talking about

the corporate appetite for it. So I would just say, but to answer your question, I would think like, yes, there should be a corporate appetite for really popular sports podcasts that are in a slightly different key because it's a podcast because you're listening to it while you're driving or working out or something that your mind is, you know, your mind is just a little bit of a different headspace than what's working on television. Do

you think there's an economic reset that's happening here? I

just think, I think they're just, I don't know. I mean, I think part of it is like, they're trying to make a number. I mean, that's probably the most obvious part of it, but I think they're trying to guess about what the future looks like. And they're trying to guess what the future looks like, not as John Skipper's ESPN, where you'd put certain people at the front of the line, but as Jimmy Pataro's ESPN, which is just a different place. And I don't under state the fact that Jimmy Pitaro is playing a very, very, very different hand of poker than the people who came before him. It is not the same thing, right? If Jimmy Pitaro wanted to start Grantland right now, he could not do it. That would not be in the budget. It's not possible. It doesn't matter whether he wanted to or not. He could not do it. So he's making different tougher choices than the regimes that preceded him. I totally get that.

He is, but at the same time, he's also making very strategic choices to load up on certain things. Like ESPN spends quite a great deal more, I assume, on the NFL than it ever has in terms of talent in the booth, in terms of the quality of games. I mean, they really went to bat the last contract to try to get, I mean, that includes the Super Bowl, but I mean, wasn't there a whole back and forth about just improving the product that ESPN was getting from the NFL?

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, that was, that was where all the, all the, we got to repair relationship stuff came from. Right.

and then all, you know, and they're putting all the top, top people in all of it, whether it's, you know, Ben Powell, Greenberg, Stephen A. Smith, you know, making everything is sort of moving around that nexus. And, you know, obviously the NFL has been a pretty safe bet programming wise, I don't dispute the wisdom of it, but at the cost of what is the question here. All right. Topic number

two, Jason, the Travis Kelsey backlash. It's not just for vaccine skeptics anymore. We've been hearing some murmurs about Travis Kelsey's level of play. Chris Collinsworth had a little bit on Sunday Night Football this last week. Todd McShay on our own Ringer podcast network. Oh

yes. But

what kind of shape he was in by going to the US Open, things like that. What do you make of the Travis Kelsey backlash as it's manifested itself?