Former ESPN host Trey Wingo now says that, after spending decades appearing on TV and talking about sports, the idea of a 24-hour network dedicated to the topic is “pretty stupid.”
Wingo made his comments during an appearance on the God Bless Football podcast, where he talked about his more than 20-year career with cable sports news network ESPN and said that looking back on it all makes it seem far less important than he thought it was when he was working there, the New York Post reported.
“I didn’t think it was stupid at the time,” Wingo said of his time at ESPN. “I’ve come to the realization [that] when I don’t do this five days a week, eight hours at a time, most of what we used to do was pretty fucking stupid. Let’s just be honest about it. Let’s just be honest about it, right? There’s not enough real information to talk about this stuff 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There’s not.”
Wingo, who worked for ESPN from 1997 to 2020 and hosted NFL Primetime, as well as having a stint on ESPN radio, admitted he was part of the problem by coming up with nonsense to fill airtime because there wasn’t enough real news to cover sports for 24 hours a day.
“That’s why you come up with stuff like the schedule release or funny little bits like ‘Wing Go or Wing No,’ because there really isn’t enough to talk about,” Wingo added. “That’s the issue. That’s like half the stuff I watch now, and I’m like, ‘Why are you talking about that?’ Oh, ’cause you have to. Cause you have to fill the time.”
He went on to note that, unless sports reporters are covering a live game or event, the rest is just vamping to fill time. He insisted, “It’s all just fodder. It’s all just filler. It is.”
“I enjoyed it while I did it. If they asked me to do it now, I’d say, ‘Put a power drill into my head.’ … All you’re doing is you’re setting up the times. We know how they’re playing, it’s just a matter of when you play it,” Wingo admitted.
He also had a damning accusation, saying that back in the day, ESPN operated by the saying, “We don’t take ourselves seriously. We take sports seriously.”
But now that is no longer true, he feels.
“And now I feel like it’s the exact opposite. We may talk about sports, but, ‘Look at what I have to say,” he explained.
“It’s just a very different dynamic now, and if people are enjoying it, God bless you. Go for it. Have fun. I couldn’t do it right now for all the money in the world. I just couldn’t do it,” he said.
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