Photo: Phil Ellsworth/ESPN Images
In the fall of 2009, Aaron Solomon, the longtime coordinating producer of ESPN’s Around the Horn, knew his humble sports debate show had finally reached critical mass. After seven years in the network’s 5 p.m. slot, Around the Horn had earned the distinction of being parodied on 30 Rock, a show with a rich tradition of zany cutaway gags poking fun at the conventions of an increasingly indulgent entertainment industry. “I’m a frequent guest on Sports Shouting,” says Tracy Jordan — cut to a clip of four men, rendered in a quadrant of talking heads, yelling over one another unintelligibly as the chyrons beneath them display patently ridiculous headlines like “Jacksonville residents ‘no longer aware’ of Jaguars.” The bit drove home the idea that sports commentary, a few years removed from the personality-driven talk radio boom of the 1990s, was becoming even more of spectacle — the domain of carnival-barking pundits who shouted about the Yankees and the Cowboys with the kind of fiery, self-serious disposition typically reserved for matters of national security.
This was initially the charm of Around the Horn, where a rotating cast of beat writers from across the country called in from their respective newsrooms five days a week to argue about the biggest topics in sports. Presiding over them was host Max Kellerman, and later Tony Reali, who distributed points to each guest according to the efficacy of their arguments — or the vigor with which they delivered them. The host could withdraw points too, or mute the guests entirely with the click of a button. When Solomon was first interviewed by ESPN’s Bill Wolff for the job in 2002, he was skeptical of the conceit. “There’s no fucking way this show’s going to last,” he remembers thinking. But it would, for another 23 years.
In March, though, ESPN announced it was cancelling Around the Horn, which will air its final episode on May 23rd. The move has left some in and around the Bristol orbit wondering why, exactly, ESPN chose to move on — and what the pivot suggests about the network’s strategy going forward. Today, the show’s rambunctious, freewheeling id is reflected across the Worldwide Leader in Sports, in the bellicose spirit of Stephen A. Smith’s “First Take” and the muscle-tanked, man-cave appeal of The Pat McAfee Show, for which ESPN paid the former NFL punter — who also helms “College GameDay” on Saturday mornings — a reported $85 million over five years. But compared to ESPN’s current slate, Around the Horn now seems downright refined, a place where the vanishing few who still credibly call themselves sports journalists could convene for mostly well-reasoned and only occasionally maddening dialogue. If the age-old activity of arguing about sports will always make for good television, the era of doing so live from a newsroom might now have passed.
At some point over the show’s 4,900 episodes, Around the Horn evolved into a tamer and more meditative version of itself, diversifying its roster of panelists and its general tone, with moments of sincerity peppered between the procedural sparring matches. The figure most responsible for the show’s progression was Reali, the handsome and amiable host who governed Around the Horn like a benevolent monarch, deploying the mute button on his rogue’s gallery of panelists with good-natured amusement. Reali took the reins in 2004, after a contract dispute between ESPN and Kellerman, the show’s original host, left the host’s chair temporarily vacant. He was just 25 years old at the time, his only previous television experience being brief but popular appearances as the “Stat Boy” on Pardon the Interruption, where he’d fact-check hosts Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon at the end of each episode. As the quarterback of Around the Horn, though, Reali quickly emerged as one of the network’s standouts: charming, telegenic, possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of sports and an easy chemistry with the show’s panelists. (It helped, too, that Reali was beloved by his ESPN colleagues, all of whom spoke effusively of both his character and his stewardship of the program through a rapidly changing sports media landscape.)
When I asked Reali to venture a guess as to why the show had been cancelled, he offered a correction. “We are being sunsetted,” he said, diplomatic but mournful. “We are being invited back to dock.” Over two-plus decades at the network, Reali continued, he got little in the way of feedback from Bristol before being told earlier this year that Around the Horn was coming to end. He acknowledges, however, the network’s incentives to modernize in an oversaturated business where competitors offer sports fans the ability to watch dozens of games, simultaneously, on one screen. “I was trying to work in feelings, and sports is feelings,” he said. “ESPN is trying to drill down on games right now, and I can understand that.” Indeed, as viewers flee cable in droves and the network’s enormous subscription base shrinks, ESPN is making big changes, with its first standalone streaming service set to debut sometime before the 2025-2026 NFL season. But the Worldwide Leader must still fill several hours of the day with opinion-based programming, leaving a generation of viewers raised on Around the Horn questioning why the network felt it had run its course.
I posed that question to David Roberts, who oversees ESPN studio shows like PTI, First Take, and Get Up, as well as Around the Horn. He maintained that the program’s viewership had not appreciably declined. “Ratings were not a factor for this decision,” he told me. “After 23 years, we’ve just made a determination that we have to evolve.” What that means remains unclear. Roberts, who’s worked at the network since 2004, noted that marquee talent might nowadays be culled from “digital platforms,” where armchair pundits thrive and professional athletes themselves can be found demystifying the kinds of things reporters and columnists write about from afar. (Take, for example, Lebron James’ and Steve Nash’s podcast Mind the Game, or The Edge, with Dallas Cowboys star Micah Parsons.) Roberts went on: “You have to have a diverse group of people watching this content so that you’re not operating in a vacuum.”
There are other theories about the show’s sudden cancellation. According to Jay Mariotti, the former Chicago Sun-Times columnist who was a mainstay on Around the Horn from its inception until 2010 — when he was charged with seven misdemeanors relating to a domestic disturbance — the show’s increased emphasis on diversity became a kind of albatross, rendering Around the Horn out of step with a viewership that simply wanted sports with a dollop of bombast. In a series of Substack columns posted days after news of the show’s cancellation broke, Mariotti railed against Around the Horn producers and ESPN’s former president John Skipper, bemoaning their decision to expand the show’s roster of contributing panelists, a move that brought more women and people of color into the fold. “Too many veered off into anti-Trump stances, which took a cue from Skipper and his half-cocked view of sports coverage,” wrote Mariotti, who now hosts a podcast called Unmuted, a wink at Around the Horn’s most famous gimmick. “Wokeness,” he added, “was an institutional culture too consumed by politics and not consumed enough by the greatest sports arguments.”
“Wokeness” has become a familiar if specious scapegoat for critics of ESPN, and Mariotti may have overstated the degree to which Around the Horn had become political — it remains, at its core, a sports debate show. But he was right to note that, in a radioactive climate increasingly hostile to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives — and in a country that elected a president who’d suggested NFL owners ought to fire players who kneeled during the National Anthem — disgruntled viewers were becoming increasingly skeptical of traditional journalists, seizing on the faintest whiffs of politics in order to smear them, and the network writ-large, as agenda-driven progressives.
Case in point: during a March 2025 episode, Mina Kimes used the customary 45-second victory lap allotted to each episode’s winner to passionately denounce the Department of Defense’s efforts to erase a webpage celebrating Jackie Robinson’s military service. Robinson, Kimes noted, not only broke baseball’s color barrier, but had also served in a segregated unit of the U.S. Army. A clip she posted of the speech to her Instagram and X accounts, she said, got more engagement than anything else from her 300-plus appearances on the show.
You cannot tell the story of Jackie Robinson–the ballplayer, serviceman, or human–without acknowledging our country’s history of racial discrimination.
From @AroundtheHorn: pic.twitter.com/k5HY7v9gbp
— Mina Kimes (@minakimes) March 19, 2025
“I saw some of the backlash, folks saying things like, ‘Oh, this is why Around the Horn was cancelled, [because] they don’t talk sports,” Kimes told me. “First of all, we spent the entire show talking about March Madness. And Jackie Robinson is very much a sports story.” The episode, she said, “was a reminder that a lot of the people who criticize the show don’t actually watch the show, which, I think, is representative of something that’s happening generally around sports.”
For Woody Paige, the show’s elder statesman and all-time leader in both wins and appearances, Around the Horn had no choice but to take a more fleet-footed and sophisticated approach as American sports became evermore globalized — and flush with cash. In the show’s early years, he told me, “it was always middle-class white guys,” with the avuncular Paige flanked most often by Mariotti, Bill Plaschke of The Los Angeles Times, and Tim Cowlishaw of The Dallas Morning News (Jackie McMullan, the prolific former columnist at The Boston Globe, was the first woman journalist to join the panel regularly, racking up 890 appearances before her retirement in 2021.) Among the subjects he and his cohort might debate, Paige said,were whether or not a Chinese player named Yao Ming could be successful in the NBA, the viability of a professional women’s golf tour, or the Yankees’ exorbitant payroll. “The point,” Paige continued, “is that we had to grow and expand not only with the people on the show, but expand our talking points. I think that kept us fresh, but it also might have kept us from reaching higher heights in our ratings.”
Staying fresh, sometimes, meant going off script. And Around the Horn positioned itself as a show that could handle the occasional encroachment of events that rendered sports less significant. Since 2018, Reali has worn black every day to honor the memory of his son, Amadeo, who died in childbirth (Amadeo’s twin, Enzo, was born early in an emergency delivery and is now seven). In an episode just after Father’s Day that year, he used his platform to deliver a monologue about his experience of grief, encouraging viewers not to suppress their emotions, to find solace and community with one another. Then, in an apparent rebuke of the Trump Administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents, he choked back tears and continued: “If I’m brutally honest, today my thoughts are with children in cages. That’s parents experiencing loss, too.”
Today we welcomed @tonyreali back to the show! In FaceTime he shared his feelings about his recent loss, his recent addition, and how he’s getting through it all. pic.twitter.com/myaoby0kzO
— Around the Horn (@AroundtheHorn) June 18, 2018
In the years since, Reali has spoken openly about his diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, once using his perch to make a heartfelt plea for greater systems of care and understanding for those struggling with mental health and addiction after videos surfaced of the former NBA player Delonte West being handcuffed by police. And earlier this month, in her final appearance on the show, former ESPN writer Kate Fagan made an appeal on behalf of trans athletes. If sports commentary was once the provenance of box scores and highlight reels, Reali and Around the Horn helped usher the network into an era where the definition of a “sports story” has become decidedly more expansive.
Bristling at the notion that the show had veered from its central premise, Reali stands by his occasional forays beyond the traditional lite fare of game recaps and GOAT debates. “I poured my heart out once about the Special Olympics, and I would do that again,” he told me. “If the Special Olympics is too political for you, I can live with that.”
ESPN, now, appears to be organizing around its household names, talent like McAfee and Stephen A. Smith, who frequently and cannily engineer television moments for an era of virality and outrage bait. (Pardon the Interruption remains an exception.) But in a moment of intense fragmentation, where fans are spoiled with countless places to take in sports commentary, the name recognition of a show like Around the Horn might have provided a kind of bulwark against the rise of YouTube channels, player-driven podcasts, and data-aggregating X accounts. “We’re in an era in which merely being aware of something is currency,” said Pablo Torre, who’s appeared on “Around the Horn” over 600 times since his 2012 debut and now hosts a popular podcast with Meadowlark Media. “I’m actually most mystified by the fact that you’d take a brand lots and lots of people know about and discard it in an era when it’s just hard to ever achieve that level of scale again, let alone favorability.”
The show also blazed a now-disappearing trail whereby workaday journalists could become front-facing television personalities. Around the Horn is where I learned to do TV, how to give takes, how to be concise,” said Kimes, who now delivers football analysis on ESPN’s NFL Live, among other platforms. “Around the Horn really started this idea that you needed to be multidimensional,” said Elle Duncan, who anchors the 6:00 pm hour of SportsCenter. “You needed to have a profound knowledge of sports, but the entertainment aspect also had to be great.”
As Around the Horn airs its final episodes, the very idea of a sportswriter — let alone one who’s parlayed their column into a steady television gig — has begun to feel quaint. Sports Illustrated, a magazine that for decades stood as the gold standard for American sports journalism, enacted mass layoffs last year. In 2023, SI was caught publishing AI-generated columns bylined by authors who never existed. That same year, the Los Angeles Times laid off beat writers covering the Dodgers and the Clippers while the New York Times disbanded its sports section. The Times did acquire The Athletic, but even that outlet, initially a beacon of local and regional sports coverage, has begun to take a more nationalized approach.) “What I worry about,” Kimes said, “is whether everything, not just TV, is being driven by what does well or what’s the hot topic of the day, rather than a curatorial instinct Around the Horn had.”And while ESPN still boasts a robust news-gathering operation, the Worldwide Leader hasn’t been immune to the industry-wide purge, shuttering its longform magazine in 2019 and laying off a bulk of on-air talent in 2023 and 2024, including Jeff Van Gundy, Suzy Kolber, and Todd McShay.
While the network has yet to announce its plans for the soon-to-be-vacant 5:00 p.m. block, the weather vanes suggest the replacement will look less like “Around the Horn” and more like Pat MacAfee, or the torrent of podcasts, streamers, and YouTubers with which ESPN must now compete for the attention of viewers coming of age in a world of smartphones, not newsprint. “The graph of how many talking heads started off in anything resembling a newsroom has so vanished over time in favor of former athletes, former coaches, influencers, and I mourn that,” said Torre. “I mourn how that changes the way we talk about sports and what that means for credibility as co-signed by anything resembling a journalistic institution.”
To rising sportswriters hoping to one day leverage their journalistic prowess into a career in broadcasting, he had a word of advice: “Go start a YouTube channel.”
