Linda Cohn anchored more than 5,500 editions of SportsCenter across 34 years and left ESPN when her contract expired and no new deal materialized; Stephen A. Smith, who has spent the last decade making sure you know how he feels about Kyrie Irving, is under contract for roughly $100 million over five years — and this contrast is not a curiosity, it is a thesis statement.
The Linda Cohn ESPN retirement wasn’t announced so much as acknowledged. Burke Magnus, ESPN’s president of content, issued a statement calling her “a legend and a major part of the history of ESPN.” That sentence is technically accurate the way a parking lot is technically a former meadow. It names what was lost without registering the loss as anything meaningful. Dave Flemming, sixteen years of play-by-play, left around the same time; you may have missed that too, because ESPN more or less arranged for you to.
ESPN has been running a money hose for years now, and it stopped pointing it at highlights a long time ago. The hose goes to First Take, to Get Up, to the general enterprise of people yelling opinions at one another for three hours in the morning; it goes to Stephen A. Smith specifically, who under the new arrangement keeps his flagship show, gains latitude to opine on politics and culture, and earns approximately what a mid-tier MLB franchise spends on its bullpen. The hose does not go to the anchor desk. The anchor desk is where Linda Cohn sat for three and a half decades and is now where the hose does not go.
This is the part where it’s worth acknowledging the obvious: the hose probably should have been redirected. SportsCenter was a delivery mechanism for information that no longer needs to be delivered that way. Scores arrive via push notification before the game is cold; highlights live on YouTube within minutes of the final whistle. No one stays up until 11 PM to find out what happened to the Dodgers. The information function that made SportsCenter essential is dead, and ESPN was not wrong to notice. Arguing that the network should have kept pouring money into a format made obsolete by the smartphone is the argument you make when you want to sound like you miss something without thinking too hard about why it’s gone.
But the contrast still indicts them; it just indicts them more precisely than nostalgia allows. The question isn’t whether SportsCenter deserved saving. The question is what ESPN decided to replace it with, and what that replacement says about who they think they are. They chose the loudest voice in any room over the most reliable voice across three decades; they chose a man whose entire brand is performed certainty over a woman whose career, in her own words, lasted long enough for her to watch little girls grow up on her broadcasts, enter the business, and succeed. That quote from Cohn is the only one in this story that sounds like someone who understood what they were doing. Magnus’s statement sounds like what a corporation says when it’s mildly embarrassed.
https://x.com/ESPNPR/status/2069095777293484506
SportsCenter’s ratings and cultural footprint have collapsed; this is what happens to institutions when the thing that made them necessary disappears and they spend a decade trying to replace utility with volume. The Linda Cohn ESPN retirement gets a press release and a very nice send-off reel. Stephen A. Smith gets a hundred million dollars to tell you his feelings about players he has never coached, managed, or played alongside. ESPN has made its choice about what SportsCenter is for now. It’s just not for highlights anymore, and it’s not for the people who used to make them worth watching.
