Dan Le Batard was so wrong that he is now contradicting himself.
In 2016, on his radio show, Le Batard said that the ego in the sports-opinion business caused people to make decisions as if they were big-time free-agent athletes. Le Batard criticized Colin Cowherd and Skip Bayless for exiting ESPN for Fox Sports.
“You leave, you’re going to get lost, you’re going to do it for the money and no one’s going to know where to find you,” Le Batard said at the time.
Cowherd and Bayless have done just fine at Fox Sports. Each earned new multimillion dollar contracts after the original deals ran out. Both are still in the conversation.
Now, Le Batard is following them out the ESPN door. He and the network announced he will leave next month.
He was making around $3 million per year with a little less than two years left. And the two sides finally figured out it was time to stop the strife and get divorced.
Le Batard gets to keep Stugotz and the rest of the kids, while ESPN receives some financial relief and no longer has to deal with Le Batard’s headaches.
There is life after ESPN. Many have proven it in many different ways. Now, Le Batard will join SiriusXM, Spotify or some other podcast company or do his own thing.
He will probably expand further out of sports — and his smaller, but very loyal audience can work in a subscription, direct-to-consumer world.
Since 2016, the media world has further changed. Le Batard doesn’t really need ESPN and it doesn’t need him. On its networks, it needs to focus on games and news, which aren’t of strong interest to the 51-year-old Le Batard these days.
He wanted to act counterculture inside the machine. But how long could ESPN support putting someone on the air who was so openly loathing of its actual product?
Le Batard went out of his way not to talk about sports. It was fine, sometimes funny. But it wasn’t a match.
ESPN slowly disassembled Le Batard’s perch, piece by piece, slicing off an affiliate here, and an hour there, making this ending inevitable.
He loved to say he negotiated freedom instead of money as if $3 million per year were minimum wage. That is always the golden prison for the “edgy folks” at ESPN.
You can talk all you want, but when Mickey Mouse is your boss, there are boundaries that come with the big contracts. So while the new bad boys and girls on social media and podcasts can say what they want — even swear — ESPN still has rules.
Le Batard didn’t want to play by them, which is fine if you rate better. He didn’t work on radio and his TV show was at its peak with his dad on it. He can thrive digitally.
So now, nationally, ESPN will have sports shows. In the morning, “Keyshawn, J-Will & Zubin” is not perfect, but it is better than its predecessor, “Wingo and Golic.” At 10 a.m., Mike Greenberg is more vanilla than Le Batard, but vanilla is a good flavor to sell in bulk because a lot of people like the reliable taste. Bart Scott and Alan Hahn (12 p.m.-2 p.m.) receive a nice promotion to national, followed by Max Kellerman from 2 p.m.-4 p.m.
In New York, ESPN is still figuring out what it might do. It could return an hour to “Humpty, Canty & Rothenberg,” moving it to 9 a.m.-12 p.m. on the FM dial. Greenberg would lose his FM hour, but could be on AM 1050 in New York. “Bart and Hahn” could follow from 12 p.m.-2 p.m. before Kellerman and then “The Michael Kay Show before its night-time shows featuring Chris Carlin and Larry Hardesty.
They will all talk sports. Le Batard can go do his own thing. He’ll probably rip on ESPN to earn publicity, which is a pastime after people leave the four-letter network.
In 2016, Le Batard also criticized Bill Simmons when he left ESPN and Simmons’ HBO show quickly failed.
“It’s another reminder, do not leave ESPN,” Le Batard said then. “ESPN is a monster platform that is responsible for all our successes.”
Simmons recently sold The Ringer, the company he started after leaving ESPN, to Spotify for a reported $200 million.
ESPN doesn’t need Le Batard. But Le Batard will be heard from again.
