Shakeup At FOX Sports

Andrew Marchand is a renowned reporter\ who covers sports media for The Athletic.  Recently he reported on a major shake-up at FOX Sports which involves canceling three shows on FS-1 and firing Joy Taylor.  Here are the canceled shows:

1. Breakfast Ball:  Craig Carton and Mark Schlereth were the main hosts here with Danny Perkins along for the ride.  Schlereth is OK; Perkins is OK; Carton is awful.  For me, he made the program unwatchable.  Some people think he is “provocative” in his takes; I think he is merely “loud” in his takes.
2. The Facility:  This program was worse than Breakfast Ball; it featured four former NFL players who basically freestyle their way through their timeslot.  The concept here was to have four athletes give an audience the players’ point of view on topics in the sports world.  That might have worked with an experienced broadcaster acting like a point guard and setting things up for the players to give their views.  Such was not the case and far too often there were interludes of chaos on the air.
3. Speak:  This used to be called Speak for Yourself and at one time I considered it good enough to be sure to watch it about 3 or 4 days a week.

            When it was called Speak for Yourself it began as a discussion/debate program with Colin Cowherd and Jason Whitlock.  Both are given to looking at sports stories from a vantage point different from just about anyone else.  They played off each other wonderfully and when they expanded segments of the program to include others, they often added TJ Houshmanzadeh to the mix, and he was excellent.  Cowherd left the show – probably due to overwork since he also did a 3-hour radio show that ended just before Speak for Yourself aired; Cowherd was replaced by Marcellus Wiley and the show was just as good as it was before.  Wiley was more like the “straight man” for Whitlock’s “out of left field takes” and the show continued to work.

Then Jason Whitlock left FOX for other endeavors; he was replaced by Emmanuel Acho and the pairing of Wiley and Acho never achieved the on-air chemistry that Jason Whitlock had enjoyed with his two partners.  It did not take me long to go from a “three days a week viewer” to a “once every three weeks viewer”.   Then Wiley left the show and in the current incarnation as Speak, the show has Paul Pierce, Keyshaun Johnson and Joy Taylor.  According to Andrew Marchand’s reporting, Speak has “struggled to find a huge audience”.  Maybe the answer is to get Jason Whitlock and Marcellus Wiley back together on the air?

Moving on …  It appears as if things are moving swiftly regarding the sale of the Tampa Bay Rays to Patrick Zalupski – a real estate developer from Jax.  Reports say that the selling price will be $1.7B and that the deal could close as early as September of this year.  That valuation for the franchise may seem minuscule given the purchase prices for sports franchises in the news recently such as:

• Celtics – – $6B
• Lakers – – $10B.

Nevertheless, the current owner – – Stuart Sternberg – – will make a tidy profit on the deal since he bought the club for a mere $200M about 20 years ago.    Zalupski is reported to be inclined to keep the team in the Tampa area but that he prefers to have the team home field located in the Tampa area and not in the St. Petersburg area.  There had been a deal that had advanced a bit to put a new stadium in St. Petersburg about a year ago, but that deal fell apart before a shovel hit the ground.  The Rays have been actively looking for a new stadium and a new stadium site for about 20 years; maybe this new owner as a real estate developer will have better luck in getting some sort of deal done with local area politicians for a new facility.

Meanwhile, money and effort are being spent on repairing Tropicana Field, which was severely damaged by a hurricane last year, forcing the Rays to play the 2025 regular season in a spring training facility stadium in Tampa.  That seems like a waste of money and effort to me because even if the stadium is renovated, it has never been able to let the Rays draw audiences that are related to the Rays on-field success.  The new owner can only hope …

Finally, I mentioned Jason Whitlock above so let me close with this observation from him:

“It is possible to set your standards too high, which can undermine a man’s confidence and ability to perform. Instead of reaching for the stars and settling for the moon, there is considerable evidence that man is better served reaching for a blade of grass and settling for an under-the-table handshake deal.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………