Who Knew The Sports Emmys Were So Catty?

Dan Levy wrote about who won what at the Sports Emmys on Monday, but SportsBusiness Daily has perhaps the best nugget of the night in an exchange that is reportedly causing friction between NBC Sports and Olympics chair Dick Ebersol and ESPN execs.↵↵⇥Ebersol and [Cowboys owner Jerry] Jones went on stage to introduce John Madden, who was accepting a lifetime achievement award. With many ESPN execs, including ESPN/ABC Sports President George Bodenheimer and Exec VP/Content John Skipper, in the audience watching, Ebersol took out a cell phone and pretended to record Jones. He then said, “I just wanted a call out to my friends at ESPN-TMZ.” At a party after the event, many ESPN execs were fuming at the remark.↵↵↵I’ve never attended or watched (is it even broadcast/clipped up anywhere?) the Sports Emmy Awards, but I always pictured it as a sort of mundane affair, kind of like the awards handed out before the show even comes on air. The remarks didn’t feel that malicious to me, but reading that it had ESPN execs “fuming,” it’s worth another look.↵

↵↵There has been a lot of debate about the newsworthiness of the video -- which, for full disclosure, we posted here on TSB. It inspired some true windbaggery on the part of one local newsman. In the end, you’d be hard-pressed to find an outlet that didn’t have the Jones video posted. Even an NBC Sports web property -- Pro Football Talk -- ran posts about the video and the comments, so it’s not like NBC and Ebersol didn’t see some traffic benefit. It seems a little odd that Ebersol singled out ESPN. Perhaps it’s because they were the only ones to broadcast it, as opposed to posting it on a website, but NBC Sports didn’t really have the opportunity to air it. Would the answer have been the same if the video came out during the season and NBC had a Sunday night broadcast?↵

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