'Biggest Flops in Sports Media' List Conspicuously Leaves Off Bomani Jones and Jemele Hill
Awful Announcing brands itself as a watchdog of the sports media industry. This week, the site listed "the biggest sports media flops of the last decade."
Awful Announcing is not the most credible blog. Bottom-rung PR reps and talents willing to retweet articles compromise the site. Agents humor themselves with how easily they plant propaganda for their clients through AA.
Still, this latest list is overly mockable even for the blog's notoriously low standards. The site listed ten flops but excluded two of the most notable flops over the past decade:
Jemele Hill and Bomani Jones.
The author lists Bill Simmons as one of the failures, citing his time on "NBA Countdown" and HBO. Simmons eventually asked off of "Countdown" because of the schedule and landed at HBO, where his show struggled.
Ultimately, Simmons was not a dynamic television host. We agree.
But contrast him with Bomani Jones.
Bomani also had a show on HBO, one that drew less than half of Simmons' viewership. Simmons lost around 40 percent of his HBO lead-in. Bomani lost 82 percent of his.
Bill Simmons failed at HBO after a generationally successful run at ESPN. Bomani Jones failed at HBO after failing twice at ESPN.
Bomani's last three shows set then-record lows on their respective networks: ESPN Radio, ESPN television, and HBO.
Simmons has since created one of the leading brands in sports media, The Ringer, which he sold for more than $200 million in 2020. Bomani now hosts a YouTube show.
No talent in sports media has failed more and succeeded less than Bomani Jones in the last decade. It's not close.
So, we had to ask Awful Announcing: How is Bill Simmons on this list for having one show canceled, but not Bomani Jones who had three shows canceled?
We await an answer.
And then there's the conspicuous omission of Jemele Hill.
Only once in ESPN's history has the network aggressively revamped the format of its flagship 6 pm "SportsCenter." In 2017, ESPN renamed the show "SC6," building the hour around Hill and her male sidekick, Micheal Smith.
"SC6" focused less on news, stats, highlights, and sports talk – the exact formula that grew the brand into a monocultural juggernaut. With Hill, "SC6" prioritized social issues, black history, hip-hop, and banter between the co-hosts.
"SC6" failed, losing as much as 20 percent of the normal audience.
Hill embroiled the show in controversy by calling then-president Donald Trump a "white supremacist" and urging NFL sponsors to boycott the product after the Dallas Cowboys decided not to kneel during the National Anthem.
ESPN removed Hill from the program less than a year later, effectively canceling the show. The network returned to a traditional "SportsCenter" format with Sage Steele two months later.
Ratings increased by double digits upon Hill's exodus and Steele's promotion.
Jemele Hill has since signed a deal with Spotify, which dropped her last summer. She also authored a memoir that sold less than 5,000 copies during its first month.
So, you have to ask why? Why would a list purporting to name the biggest flops in sports media not include arguably the two biggest flops in sports media?
The answer is obvious: Jemele and Bomani are sacred cows.
They are black liberals known for their apoplectic coverage of race. Challenge them, and they will call you racist. Praise them, and they won't.
Awful Announcing just wants to be one of the Sports Media Cool Kids. Most bloggers do.
Reporting the truth about Hill and Bomani angers the Cool Kids and Sports Twitter. Awful Announcing understands that. Mina Kimes and Dan Le Batard won't share the list if the author includes their pals.
Notice that all five of the "failures" on the article's cover photo are white men who don't usually respond to critics on social media:
I recently talked to Will Cain on his Fox News Digital show about the unwritten rule in sports media that only a few talents are "on-limits" for criticism.
You can probably guess the list:
Cain, Clay Travis, Jason Whitlock, Skip Bayless, Stephen A. Smith, Colin Cowherd, Dave Portnoy, Sage Steele, Dan Dakich, and Bill Simmons.
Outlets like Awful Announcing, Front Office Sports, The Athletic, New York Times, Washington Post, and Sports Business Journal expect their writers to cover the other names with delicacy.
So do networks, agents, PR reps, and the talents themselves.
Think about it: other than OutKick and Whitlock, has anyone of note ever uttered a negative word about the likes of Bomani, Mina, Katie Nolan, and Sarah Spain?
There's a protected class within the sports media, as the list of "biggest flops" again proves.