ESPN scraps “Sports Guy on Tape”

BRISTOL, CT — It’s not often that the Worldwide Leader in Sports admits they made a mistake, but ESPN did just that today when it announced the end of its “Sports Guy on Tape” promotion.

“We regret to inform the sports community that we will no longer be able to offer audio versions of Bill Simmons’ columns,” ESPN president George Bodenhemier announced on Sunday, presumably to avoid notice by the weekday news cycle.

In addition to the massive amount of complaints about the ill-conceived idea, Bodenheimer said the promotion no longer made financial sense for the network. The sheer man-hours required for someone to read and record just one of Simmons’ articles nullified any profit ESPN could make from the venture.

“Obviously there’s the length problem,” Bodenheimer explained. “Each article turned into 10 to 15 CD’s, or a 2 to 3 GB download. I mean, do the math. A week’s worth of Sports Guy can max out your Nano.”

Bodenheimer also confided to SSNN that the celebrity reader idea was a complete failure.

“When I first thought about having James Earl Jones read a Bill Simmons’ article, dollar signs filled my head,” he said. “We tried the most distinguishable and eloquent voices: James Lipton, Brian Williams – we even got Barack Obama to do one of them. Of course, with the presidential race and everything he only had time to do the first section, so we had to have Oprah finish it. Then we tried to have athletes read them, but they kept getting lost and emphasizing the wrong syllables. Unmitigated disaster from the beginning, honestly.”

While SSNN did interview Simmons, his response was much too long for us to publish. In short, he’s still optimistic about his future with ESPN, and would like to remind everyone that he’s from Boston. He’s also very disappointed that the veterans lost the final Real World vs. Road Rules Challenge.

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!