ESPN Quotes

And my mistakes are always the highlights on ESPN’s ‘SportsCenter.’

If ESPN ever kicked me out the door and I had to get back to coach, I have to stay on top of what’s going on.

I thought I wanted to be on ESPN, but I didn’t know what the heck it was. I knew it was sports television, but we didn’t have it. We didn’t really watch TV growing up.

For 10 years while I was at ESPN, I lived at the Residence Inn in Southington, Connecticut, near Bristol. I did that because my wife had a great job in New York City, and we had a place in New York City, at 54th and 8th. On Friday, I would come back, and then on Sunday evening I would go back to the Residence Inn.

I feel genuinely fortunate to work with so many friends and talented people at ESPN, who make every day such fun.

You always think as an organization, obviously if you’re in sports, you want to be with ESPN. ESPN is it. But you don’t really realize how good ESPN is and how big their platform really is until you’re in it.

Oh, I still get a little anxiety when I’m doing NFL live for ESPN.

Am I mad about Deflategate? I feel like I’m on ESPN with that question… Yeah, yeah, I’m kind of mad.

The days of the heavyweight champion as civil rights leader are long gone. You think you’d see Ali rolling around on the floor of an ESPN Zone? I don’t think so.

I told another ESPN friend here, I love all sports. I can’t think of any I don’t love. I’ve even come to appreciate cricket. Maybe I could play a sportswriter. I don’t know. Anything in the sports realm is appealing.

From a small market, nobody had heard of me. ESPN had guts, they had courage, they rolled the dice. A guy flew into Portland, we got a rare snowstorm, he was stuck there four days, John McConnell listened to me, and he recommended me.

Ultimately, college football is a huge passion of mine. In my opinion, I really feel ESPN owns college football. The only way I think I could have left ESPN was for an opportunity to call NFL games. That was the opportunity I had at Fox.

I watch a lot of ESPN. I just kind of keep it on for long periods of time and watch guys yell at each other about sports things.

Brand matters. And ESPN is, by far, the most popular sports brand. People trust ESPN.

I started 20 years without missing a race and ESPN started broadcasting on the air waves.

I watch ESPN all day long.

Some of the most racist things that I’ve ever heard come out of people that are on the air at ESPN. There are some of the biggest racists in sports commentating, and you take it for what it is.

I loved my 12 years at ESPN. And I loved working with Stephen A. – and trust me, it’s hard to even talk about it, because I miss him. But the truth was, I never quite fit on a Disney-owned network.

You can criticize ESPN for a lot of things, but one thing you have to give them credit for is their willingness to put women in nontraditional roles.

I am someone who, for many years on ESPN criticized Kyrie Irving mercilessly.

ESPN is a very, very good operation, and it’s a gold mine. It’s an even bigger gold mine than Fox News.

I’ll always be into sports. Sports is part of my life forever. My TV stays on ESPN all day long, I’m one of those. I don’t even listen to music in the car; all I listen to is sports talk.

E! didn’t like it when we’d make fun of clips from ESPN – they’d be like, ‘That’s sports! That’s not our audience!’

Playing at Kentucky, before 24,000 people, you have to learn how to grow real fast and play under pressure and playing on ESPN with millions of people watching. Right away, you learn how to play under control.

Whenever someone says something to me like ‘Oh, another blonde at ESPN,’ I would like to crunch the numbers. First, I think we have more brunettes than blondes. And second, there are only three normal hair colors. You’re either a redhead, brunette, or blonde. It’s really not that complicated.

When they put me on ESPN and they talk about negative things, or when they put me on TMZ and they talk about negative things, I’m just glad that I’m relevant; to have lasted this long being relevant.

The culture at ESPN, I found when I left, isn’t the same as when I came. It wasn’t as much fun.

I’m working for ESPN and ABC doing college football. I do NFL stuff for TSN in Canada. I’m so lucky to have this job.

If you sign a big contract, everybody knows. They’re going to print it in the paper. It’s on ESPN. You can go online and check player salaries and all that. You’re a target.

A political race today, even a primary, is $150 million. The whole political system has become obscene in terms of the absurd amount of money that is required to compete. Just put it on ESPN and call it a sporting event.

Disney hovers over every decision at ESPN.

ESPN takes itself very seriously, but for some reason, I’m allowed to be the court jester.

I’m passionate about the game – just like the fans are, and I’ve coached in the league for a long time, so that’s the perspective I will bring to ESPN.

TV critics came after me for overhyping LeBron. A lot of people don’t know this, but I didn’t want to do the game. I told ESPN, ‘We’re making this kid into something special.’ I always follow orders, whatever my people want me to do.

Remember one thing about ESPN: People can be critical of them sometimes for being a large corporation but nine years ago I had a stroke and I couldn’t talk. That’s the way I made my living. ESPN could’ve dumped me very easy, but they didn’t. They helped me and presented me an opportunity to get back on the air.

I truly believe that ESPN has been in the forefront in terms of the diversity in front of the camera and improving the balance between men and women.

I’ve always thought the expression ‘passion project’ was kind of a cliche until I started working on ‘Big Shot’ for ‘ESPN.’

I didn’t have cable growing up. I never saw ESPN or GameDay.

ESPN wants to scrutinize everyone, but if they’re scrutinized, they run and hide.

I think for me, personally, I’m a guy who has watched ESPN ever since I’ve been growing up. You turn it on, and it’s one of the first stories – the Blackhawks and hockey, which you don’t really see on that station. That’s cool to see.

I always thought that first jump from a small market should be as big as possible. But never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be ESPN.

Going to a powerhouse high school, playing on ESPN a couple times a year, playing a nationally ranked schedule and also playing in the best conference in the world in high school, I was lucky. We’d have no less than nine guys go Division 1 every year.

Obviously, ESPN, that Monday Night gig is a big deal. You don’t just easily dismiss that.

We at ESPN like competition. It makes us better. It makes us sharper.

First thing I do in the morning is give thanks to God for another day, and then turn to HLN News or ESPN to see what’s going on in the world.

I did radio for a year and did some TV things, and I was already in place at ESPN before ‘The Bachelorette’ started.

I really like ESPN. They do a great job.

ESPN is all meat and potatoes. It’s pretty much scouting reports. There isn’t a great deal of humor, and when there is, it’s pretty sophomoric.

Fox does the NFL a lot like they program the rest of the network. There’s sort of a locker room sense of humor that prevails. With ESPN, it’s more like a pat-you-on-the-back kind of comedy. I mean, they’ll all get on each other a little bit, but it’s never mean-spirited.

Hard as it is to believe, there were three magazines fighting over me. ‘Newsweek’ wanted to keep me, ‘ESPN The Magazine’ was coming into existence and wanted me, and ‘SI’ wanted to bring me back. Isn’t that amazing? I had a choice, like a free agent.

If you’re a sports fan and you’re home and you’re washing dishes, usually your TV is on ESPN and you’re just getting the highlights and keeping up-to-date with all of the sports going around, all of the news.

Seriously, until I was 16 or 17, I didn’t care about anything other than ESPN.

I wanted to leave ESPN when control of ‘The Undefeated’ was taken from me.

I love what I am doing on ‘SportsNation’ and to now have the opportunity to do even more on ‘Winners Bracket’ as part of ESPN Sports Saturday on ABC is the perfect situation.

And then ESPN fired me. I did not think that was a fitting punishment.

I’ve been asked a lot about filling Chris Berman’s role – to be honest, I don’t even allow myself to see it that way. He is a total legend and created so much of what ESPN is known for and specifically our NFL coverage. That’s an impossible task.

I don’t know why ESPN asked me to host the ESPYs. I think that they realize we, over at WWE, can engage a live audience. We certainly have an enormous following.

Besides my work doing NFL analysis and commentary for ESPN, I’m also involved in trying to get new products launched, and I have relationships with other companies to try to get things off the ground.

I’m never going to be on ESPN, probably. I’ve burned too many bridges. That’s fine.

I’m thinking about being the best I can be at ESPN in the studio.

I didn’t view myself as attacking the boss. I viewed my boss at ESPN as the publisher and president of ESPN.

Right before I left ESPN, someone suggested doing a NFL story in the spring. The person was laughed out of the room.

I want to give myself options and maybe be able to work at ESPN, or do blogs at NBC or be a sports reporter.

ESPN is a great organization to work for.

ESPN has this problem with sports, it’s impossible to fill 24 hours with sports programming so they have to resort to things like poker and arm wrestling tournaments.

Even though Rush is not me and the situations were very different, I think, in the Rush Limbaugh thing, ESPN was criticized for not acting, and you remember that after a couple days of controversy over Rush.

I got fired – November 8, 1979. And all of a sudden, I got a call, two weeks later, about doing a game on ESPN. And I truly said – Scotty Connal, the head of ESPN production at the time, was the guy that called me – I said, ‘Man, ESPN sounds like a disease. What is ESPN? I know nothing about it, never heard of it.’

I watch ESPN all day. If you come into my trailer, ESPN is on. That’s the first thing I do when I leave the set.

ESPN puts out anything for clicks now, it kind of seems like.

But the rising chorus urging ESPN to change its stripes is missing something: The intersection of sports and politics is natural. And the left-wing lean of ESPN is inevitable. Conservatives bothered by the slant should stop hand-wringing and start their own network.

I’m thrilled that ESPN has been the leader in trying to find opportunities for women in visible and non-traditional roles.

The only job I’d consider leaving ESPN for would be to call NFL games.

I’m different than another person who wants to lay back and do nothing for rest of the life and talk nonsense on ESPN… I will not do that. I want to achieve something else.

If something touches on the world of sports, ESPN has never told me that I cannot discuss a sports-related matter.

Stephen A. Smith is the hardest-working man in sports show business. The ubiquitous basketball pundit appears on ESPN about 10 times a day as a regular on the show ‘NBA Fastbreak,’ a guest commentator on ‘Sports Center,’ and a pundit on ‘ESPNEWS.’

Even as voters, we try to keep up with the guys as much as possible, mainly through television or ESPN.

When I as a fan and a viewer tune into ESPN, I don’t want politics and I don’t want to look at a person and have to think politics.

The consumption of highlights on ESPN is greater than everybody else’s combined. Fifty-six percent of all news and information consumed in sports is consumed on the ESPN platforms.

Broadcasts from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange have propelled once-obscure financial journalists such as Maria Bartiromo to celebrity status and made CNBC to investors what ESPN is to sports fans.

SportsCenter’ is the legacy brand at ESPN, I had a great year doing the show. But it was not a fit for me because ultimately I had a lot of things that I really wanted to say and wanted to express, and the ‘SportsCenter’ vehicle is not necessarily set up for that.