ESPN will be dead before 2050. The landscape of modern sports media is currently undergoing a drastic shift that many people don’t realize. We live in a world where anyone who wants to make a sports show can make a sports show. If people like you, and find you entertaining, it doesn’t matter if you are a 17-year-old aspiring member of sports media (like myself) or someone who has been on ESPN for 20 years and has established a platform on TV, you can gain a significant audience
Former Colts Punter, Pat McAfee was at the top of his game and still pretty early into his career before retiring to join Barstool Sports. Members of the media destroyed McAfee for making this decision on TV. ESPN’s Michael Wilbon went as far as to say his friends need to “stage an intervention” for him so he realizes the mistake he made. McAfee started on Barstool and gained a solid platform, but after a while, it just wasn’t working so he left to create his own show. Three years after leaving Barstool and five years after retiring from the NFL, The Pat McAfee Show is among the most-watched and most important shows in sports today, streamed on YouTube from 12-3 PM EST from Monday-Friday. Everything is on the internet with his show, it is not on TV. This frees him up to do whatever he wants. He doesn’t have to worry about being filtered, he doesn’t have to be what any company wants him to be, it is just him and “the boys” talking sports on the internet every single day for three hours. People are willing to be guests on his show over networks because they like his style and some of the best of the members of sports media right now, whenever they come on his show routinely tell him he is “changing the game” and how much they like what he does. People like Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, someone who has been very reluctant to talk to the media over his career, makes weekly appearances on his show during the Regular Season.
Do you think Pat was right to retire and create his own show? His show gets tens of thousands of live viewers every day, and the clips he posts on YouTube do even better. According to hypeauditor.com, McAfee’s YouTube videos average almost 275,000 views per video! For comparison’s sake, ESPN’s YouTube videos average 29,000 views per video. He signed a three-year contract with FanDuel Sportsbook to be the exclusive sponsor for this show for over 30 million dollars per year! Everyone called him crazy for leaving football and if that was his contract in the NFL he would be the 10th highest-paid player in the entire league. What Pat McAfee has done is going to open the floodgates for people who want to talk sports in their own way without being restricted by FCC guidelines. Some of those guidelines include “Profane content includes “grossly offensive” language that is considered a public nuisance.” In theory that is fair but their definition of what is considered “grossly offensive” is very broad and considered outdated by a significant amount of people, including myself.
The other part of this shift is in cable in general. When we say the NFL is king, that is a massive understatement. The Super Bowl is the most-watched broadcast on cable every single year, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. A study by the Sports Business Journal said that 75 of the top 100 most viewed cable broadcasts in the US this past year were NFL games, and zero NBA, NHL, or MLB games made it into the top 100. Despite being the other prominent American sports leagues, there is nobody anywhere close to the NFL. That’s why they were able to sign a 110 billion dollar contract with the networks last year. But, there is one thing starting next season that will change cable as we know it forever. Thursday Night Football will be exclusively on Amazon Prime Video. It will only be available on cable if you’re in the market of a team playing in that TNF game. Amazon (obviously) has a ton of money so I look for them to hire some very prominent people as well as hire some new talent with this new looser style.
Most of you probably know that I have a sports TikTok account with over 100,000 followers called The Next Network. What you may not know is that there are about 20-25 different accounts on TikTok similar to mine that have similar platforms. Not only are we able to kickstart our careers at a younger age than ever before, but we are also all friends online and as we all get bigger, it will pave the way for us all. The platform we are all building is large. These are just a few of the biggest accounts follower counts of January 21, 2022; I have 118,000, Nico (@elitetakes) has 240,000, Burns (@connor.burns3) has 61,000, The Sneaky Sports Podcast (@sneakysportspodcast) has 267,000, Katy Gil (@katlynn_gil) has 277,000, Theo Ash (@theoashNFL) has 150,000, Matt Sponhour (@sponhour) has 321,000, Blaiden Kirk @blaidenk) has 149,000, and the king of Sports TikTok, WeHoopin has over 700,000. Those are just 9 of the hundreds and hundreds of people that are trying to pursue sports media full time, but I think those eight (along with a few other smaller accounts I have my eye on) will become the new faces of sports media for the next generation. The next generation of great sportscasters are all on TikTok so I suggest you pay attention while we are all just getting started.
This shift is not something that is unanimously agreed upon by a lot of people, but the people that see it coming and are getting ahead of the game (like Pat McAfee) are going to have major benefits when cable inevitably dies off, and the internet and streaming services are how we get our media.
MOOSE PRINTS 
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