March 12, 2025
Around the Horn is ending in May after 23 years on ESPN. We talked to former programming chief Mark Shapiro about the show’s early days, overruling internal dissent (“We can’t sell it”) and the transition from Max Kellerman to Tony Reali.
Who are your favorite ATH panelists, and who did you prefer as host? Reply to this email and tell us why. You may be featured in a future Reader Response section.
—Ryan Glasspiegel and Michael McCarthy
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Mark Shapiro had to scratch and claw to get Around the Horn on the air.
Shapiro, now the President and COO of Endeavor and TKO, was the ESPN programming chief who spearheaded the creation of Pardon the Interruption in 2001. The network’s great success with PTI helped lead to the launch of Around the Horn the following year. The “Happy Hour” block from 5:00 to 6:00 ET has endured for over two decades, a profound rarity in TV.
With Around the Horn set to conclude in late May, Shapiro reflected on the process of getting the show off the ground in an interview with Front Office Sports.
“It was really the same process as Pardon the Interruption,” Shapiro said. “I laid out a template of what I was looking for—opinions, debate, and news—from various corners of the country.”
Similarly to how PTI’s Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser were affiliated with the Washington Post, Around the Horn worked with newspapers like the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Post, and Dallas Morning News to get writers like Bob Ryan, Jackie MacMullan, Bill Plaschke, T.J. Simers, Jay Mariotti, Woody Paige, and Tim Cowlishaw to appear on the show. The logos of their newspapers appeared on glass behind them on the screen.
“What we knew we wanted is—sports is argument,” Shapiro said. “Look at the power and success of sports radio. We wanted that on TV…so we built it backwards.”
Shapiro said was met with ample internal resistance to the idea, but nonetheless plowed ahead.
“All the sales guys were telling us, ‘It’s gonna hurt SportsCenter. We can’t sell it. It’ll never do ratings. It’ll never hit critical mass.’ I can’t tell you what we were up against,” Shapiro said. “If I wasn’t running programming—and don’t get me wrong, the success of a show has to do with talent and format, and a lot of people deserve credit for that—but in running programming, I was able to kind of stuff it through.”
The success of the “Happy Hour” block with PTI and Around the Horn led to another hour of talk programming preceding the programs, with Jim Rome is Burning and 1st and 10, the predecessor to First Take that was part of the Cold Pizza morning program featuring Jay Crawford as moderator with Skip Bayless debating Stephen A. Smith, Woody Paige and others.
Around the Horn was originally hosted by Max Kellerman—who got the job before his 30th birthday—and produced by Bill Wolff, who later went on to produce Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show.
Shapiro credited Jim Cohen, who worked for him at ESPN and later was an NFL Network executive, with hammering down a lot of the details, bells, and whistles on turning elements of sports talk radio into a gameshow on TV.
“I’m not gonna call them misfits, but Jim threw in a collection of eccentrics. Some experts, some not so expert. He put them in a conference room for a week, and they came up with a bunch of ideas. We debated them and ultimately came out with a format that we thought was workable,” Shapiro said, recalling that Cohen even brought his sports-fan dentist in for input.
Reached by phone, Cohen said, “That sounds like me.” To read more about the early days of Around the Horn, as well as what led to the departure of Max Kellerman and promotion of Tony Reali, you can read Ryan Glasspiegel’s full story here.
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Fox Sports is already eyeing ESPN’s Major League Baseball media properties.
ESPN and MLB are headed for a divorce after 35 years in business together. That means ESPN’s rights to the Home Run Derby, Sunday Night Baseball, and wild-card playoff games will come up for grabs as early as next season.
When Fox Corp. COO John Nallen was asked at an industry conference if the media giant was interested in additional sports rights, he pointed to ESPN’s expiring package.
“Baseball has been a great product for us, and we’ll probably look at that and look at it in the context of how it makes sense to us overall,” said Nallen at the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet & Telecom Conference.
Pursuing ESPN’s rights would be a natural fit for Fox. The network is already MLB’s biggest media partner, paying $729 million per year for the regular season, All-Star Game, and World Series. Fox’s coverage of the 2024 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees averaged 15.8 million viewers, up 67% from the year before, marking the best viewership since 2017.
But don’t count out NBC Sports and Amazon Prime Video either. As Ryan Glasspiegel explored last week, NBC has a long and illustrious TV history with the Grand Old Game dating back to 1947. Landing Sunday Night Baseball in addition to its NFL and NBA properties would enable NBC to offer a premium live sporting event on Sunday nights year-round.
Sources say Prime wants to continue adding live premium sports rights, given its success with the NFL, and its successful bid to land the NBA starting next season.
Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
To corral more East Coast viewers, CBS Sports and the NCAA are moving the tip-off time for the men’s basketball championship game up by a half hour this year. But there’s an argument to do so earlier.
This year’s final will tip off at 8:50 p.m. ET, instead of the normal 9:20 p.m., on Monday, April 7, from San Antonio. That’s a good start. But I’d prefer an 8:30 p.m., or even 8 p.m. tip, to grab some of the younger viewers who are not watching live games. I’m not the only one. When I tweeted the new tip time Tuesday afternoon, reaction was mostly negative. “Still an hour too late,” wrote Darren Stoltzfus, sports director at WESH 2 News in Orlando, on X/Twitter. Troy Appel tweeted: “Welcomed, but an 850 pm tip is still ridiculous. As you get older, staying awake for One Shining Moment gets tougher and tougher.”
Networks don’t want to pass up Pacific Time viewers by beginning a game before many arrive home from work. But fans in the Eastern U.S. pay the price.
Meanwhile, former ESPNer Jalen Rose is joining CBS and TNT Sports’ joint March Madness coverage. Rose will work as a game analyst for the first two rounds, and as a studio analyst for the First Four and Final Four. The CBS lead college basketball team of Ian Eagle, Bill Raftery, Grant Hill, and Tracy Wolfson are set to call their second Final Four in a row. This year’s March Madness coverage kicks off March 18–19 on truTV.
—Michael McCarthy
Brian Fluharty-Imagn Images
Palm Beach Post
“If you watch it on television, it’s paced a lot more like a football game. It allows you for the commercial opportunities where—the shot clock is important, but TV timeouts are important too, to commercialize and make sure that you can monetize the business.”
—TMRW Sports CEO Mike McCarley to CNBC’s Alex Sherman on why he deliberately based TGL’s media model on NFL telecasts rather than golf.
TGL cofounder Tiger Woods announced Tuesday he had ruptured his Achilles tendon, adding uncertainty to his prospects for competing in the future.
ESPN
“Tuned In” reader Matt Bowman e-mailed us about Stephen A. Smith scoring a monster five-year, $100 million contract extension with ESPN. “Hi, I wanted to offer my opinion on Stephen A. Smith’s recent contract extension that you mentioned in your email newsletter earlier this afternoon. I definitely do not think he is worth it. His style is so abrasive and argumentative that I am turned off by it. I used to watch his show a lot but instead I have gravitated towards more podcasts now.”
David Marcus is also not a fan of Smith, writing on X/Twitter: “Canceling everything worth a crap and paying all the really annoying people.”
But Jermaine Burns saluted Smith for getting the bag, tweeting: “Congrats on new deal with @espn which is WELL DESERVED! However, you work more than the some tv sports analyst. I think YOU ARE GROSSLY UNDERPAID compared to the Brady, Romo, Strahan and Barkley per show! You generate viewership and ad sales! Come’ on.”
Who did you prefer as the host of Around the Horn?
Friday’s result: 28% of you thought Stephen A. Smith deserved to be ESPN’s highest-paid employee.
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