For a certain segment of American sports fans, all change is automatically bad – especially when it comes to their favourite shows. Minor tweaks to beloved theme songs, shuffles to commentary booths and analysis teams, new scoreboard graphics, even changes to the duration and placement of ad breaks: all of these can trigger days, sometimes even years, of volcanic debate. For a certain type of sporting masochist it’s possible to plug into corners of the online sportingverse that are still litigating, say, the chyrons from the 2010 NBA finals, or ESPN’s decision – originally made in 2011, reversed in 2017, then reinstated in 2020 – to cut ties with Hank Williams Jr and his legendary All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night intro song for Monday Night Football.
The outrage prompted by the latest upheavals at ESPN certainly fits the pattern of involuntary fan resistance to change, but on closer inspection this is more than a case of a few disgruntled cable TV subscribers reenacting the “old man yells at cloud” meme. In August ESPN announced it was bringing on Katie Feeney, a recent Penn State graduate with 14 million followers across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, to produce sports and lifestyle content – offering “a blend of on-site access, fashion, and culture”, as the press release put it – for the network’s main broadcasts and digital channels.
