A new era in Bristol? ESPN is looking to turn the page on ‘Embrace Debate’ era

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Credit: First Take; Edit by Liam McGuire, Comeback Media.

ESPN is trying to distance itself from the studio format that built its daytime lineup for the better part of two decades, according to new reporting from Puck’s John Ourand. At a Bristol town hall this week, newly elevated executive Mike Foss told a room of roughly 100 staffers and talent that he wants the network to “embrace authenticity” rather than manufactured conflict.

Foss, promoted two months ago to executive vice president and executive editor of sports news and entertainment, brought internal research showing ESPN’s brand of synthetic debate isn’t resonating with viewers the way it used to. He wasn’t asking combative personalities to change who they are — Stephen A. Smith wasn’t mentioned by name — but nobody in the room needed him to be. The distinction Foss drew was between talent being genuinely combative on their own and producers pairing people up specifically to manufacture disagreement. In his write-up, Ourand pointed to shows like Pardon the Interruption, where hosts are just as likely to be found agreeing with each other as they are to be closer to what he wants going forward.

Awful Announcing has learned that the meeting itself was a standard monthly gathering Foss holds regularly, though turnout ran well above normal with football season approaching. Notably, the room included a wave of first-time attendees from NFL Network, now that the dust had settled from the layoffs that hit that group particularly hard. Awful Announcing has also learned that a return to a more highlight-centric SportsCenter came up as a specific example of the kind of show Foss wants moving away from manufactured debate and toward their authentic individual identities.

The strategy ESPN is now trying to move forward from is inseparable from one executive: Jamie Horowitz. He joined ESPN in 2006 as a senior producer and left in 2014 as vice president of original programming and production, and in between he helped create SportsNation, Olbermann, Numbers Never Lie, and — the one that mattered most — First Take.

First Take didn’t launch as a debate show. It started in 2007 hosted by Dana Jacobsen and Jay Crawford as an evolution of ESPN2’s morning show Cold Pizza, part news, part variety, part debate. Skip Bayless was on the show from that first year, but by his own account, the format was still finding itself.

“We were still kind of this hybrid morning variety show plus sports debate, which was pretty weird in [2007–2009],” Bayless recalled on The Sage Steele Show last year.

The pivot came in August 2011, when Horowitz restructured the show into two straight hours of argument.

“Embrace debate, which I didn’t love. I didn’t love it,” Bayless continued. “Look, we were told by a lot of people in the hallways in those days that this would be career suicide for everybody involved. For Jamie, for me, for anybody who was on the inside of the new First Take, that it would collapse quickly. And the rest is ratings history.”

That same year, Stephen A. Smith returned to ESPN full-time, setting up the pairing that would come to define the format for the next decade. It worked, and ESPN leaned in, as the phrase “Embrace Debate” became shorthand for the network’s entire daytime identity, well beyond First Take itself.

Horowitz left ESPN in 2014 for a three-month stint running NBC’s Today show that ended in his firing before he officially took over. He landed at Fox in 2015 as president of Fox Sports’ national networks, and immediately tried to rebuild what he’d built in Bristol — “Embrace Debate 2.0.”

Horowitz brought over Colin Cowherd and Skip Bayless, hired Shannon Sharpe, and also looked to Jason Whitlock to counter-program ESPN, but ultimately Fox was just cloning ESPN’s model rather than finding an actual gap in the market.

Meanwhile, ESPN continued down the Embrace Debate ethos. If anything, the network doubled down once Bayless left for Fox in 2016, with Stephen A. Smith becoming the format’s singular face. Smith outlasted Bayless’s run at Fox, brought on Sharpe as a new partner in 2023 after Bayless and Sharpe’s own split, and signed a five-year, $100 million extension in 2025 that made him ESPN’s highest-paid talent. Even now, the format still trades on its own nostalgia, as Bayless returned to First Take for a one-off reunion with Smith this May.

But ESPN has been chipping away at that same show’s foundation all summer. Ryan Clark — a First Take regular Smith has called “arguably the best NFL analyst in America” — was pulled off NFL Live mid-broadcast and laid off, along with Cam Newton. Smith pushed back to ESPN’s own executives and lost. “The bosses know I’m not happy about this decision,” he said on his YouTube show. “I’ve made that very, very clear.” Even ESPN’s $100-million man couldn’t save a colleague from the very show that made him a star.

If Smith couldn’t stop those layoffs, it’s because this appears to be bigger than any one personality. Last year, ESPN canceled potentially the most palatable show of the Embrace Debate era, Around The Horn, which has since been replaced by SportsCenter. The soon-to-be-announced 2 p.m. show centered around Peter Schrager seems like another step away from debate and towards personality and authenticity.

Smith is still powerful inside ESPN’s walls, and First Take will still be First Take, but the Worldwide Leader’s actual growth is happening around Pat McAfee’s model, not his. And for better or worse, that’s the direction of the company now, signaled by ESPN reportedly building a college football show around Josh Pate and the Bussin’ With The Boys duo of Will Compton and Taylor Lewan instead of another debate pairing. All three built their audiences independently, on YouTube and podcasts, before ESPN came calling, the same playbook that made McAfee work.

ESPN didn’t invent hot takes, but it perfected the assembly line for producing them. Now, as the industry drifts back toward personality-driven programming, the network is trying to prove that the assembly line can still keep pace.

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