The End of Around The Horn

The show wasn't for me, but it represented an era of ESPN programming I miss.

Let me open this edition of Press Break with a little behind-the-scenes insight into the creative process: not every idea I begin to write — or even finish writing — reaches your inbox. Honestly, I’ve punched out more commentaries that I didn’t send than I’ve published.

I completed one such piece earlier this week, intending to release it alongside the finale of ESPN’s daytime gabfest Around the Horn. A series of glowing tributes has flooded the sports content ecosystem in recent days, so I thought I might present an alternative viewpoint.

I didn’t like Around the Horn. The show began with an interesting concept—bringing together columnists from major metro newspapers across the country to banter in a light-hearted forum. But with the decline of the newspaper industry and ESPN becoming increasingly homogenized — evident in Around the Horn panels shifting to feature ESPN personalities seen across multiple other platforms — nothing about the show appealed to me.

What’s more, the deluge of praise lavished on Around the Horn often highlights how beloved host Tony Reali is among his peers. My lone interaction with Reali was decidedly negative and, whether subconsciously or consciously, probably colors my postmortem of the show.

All that is to say: I scrapped my original commentary on Around the Horn after taking a step back, inhaling deeply, and reading it with fresh eyes. It came off mean — like I was spiking the football in celebration of something others enjoyed and which was ultimately harmless in its conclusion. Or worse, as if I reveled in people losing jobs.

The latter is most definitely not the case. In an ever-shrinking media landscape, the loss of any positions (that are not actively destructive) is bad for everyone, including the consumer — especially the consumer.

The erosion of news and information affects us all. A modern-day philosopher once offered words that, while delivered in a wholly different context, apply here. It was “Stone Cold” Steve Austin who said, “They say you are what you eat, and in WCW, they fed me nothing but garbage, so I let myself become garbage.”

Think of how many outlets that were flourishing when Around the Horn launched in 2003 — and which were then beacons of sports journalism — are now awash in empty quota-fillers that begin with some variation of the phrase: [INSERT HIGHLY GOOGLE-SEARCHED ATHLETE] took to Twitter/X to sound off on [TOPIC DU JOUR].

That isn’t to suggest that in Around the Horn’s cancellation we are losing sports’ answer to 60 Minutes. It was a frivolous program of manufactured debate that began as sports-media junk food. Attempts to shift away from that during the years of imitators that followed didn’t quite fit. The tributes lamenting Around the Horn’s conclusion as signaling a grave day for journalism miss the mark — or perhaps are instead mourning the media landscape that existed when the show launched 22 years ago.

Around the Horn wasn’t journalism. That’s not meant as an insult; the very format didn’t lend itself to be. Four guests riffing on a series of topics in 22 minutes doesn’t allow for nuance or context — two core tenets that are increasingly missing across all forms of news in 2025.

That isn’t Around the Horn’s burden, though. The show launched with Max Kellerman as host at a time when Sportscenter wasn’t just another opinion-based talk show and when both Outside The Lines and SportsCentury were going strong.

For me, the real shame in Around the Horn’s end isn’t necessarily the show itself but rather ESPN moving one step further away from what it was when the network meant the most to me. There was a variety to its programming in the early 2000s that’s lacking today, with each clone of Around the Horn (itself a spinoff from Pardon The Interruption) diminishing in quality until it’s all just pizza-licking nonsense.

Circling back to the prevalence of “articles” churned out at content mills relying on Twitter, that particular social media app is the quintessential example of how detrimental the platforming of information without context can be. Among the many unpublished commentaries I’ve written for Press Break, one of the longest is an essay on the harm Twitter has done to media — not just in sports — and how its negative influence predates Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform.

I may still publish that piece in the near future. In the meantime, I reference Twitter both as the prime example of context-free media and to segue into my aforementioned lone interaction with Tony Reali.

I’ve never met the longtime Around the Horn host. I probably never will. Hell, I don’t even know if the person with whom I had an especially unpleasant online interaction was actually him or an assistant managing his social media.

Regardless, I tweeted an offhand remark in 2018 deeming Around the Horn a relic of a bygone era. The official Tony Reali account discovered it—perhaps via vanity searching or notification alerts — and quote-tweeted me. For those unfamiliar, quote-tweeting is responding in a way that publicly displays the interaction to an account’s followers — thus intentionally alerting the audience. This continued over a few of my replies, with the Reali account deleting and rewriting responses to be more scathing.

Now, I should acknowledge upfront: I was no victim of cyberbullying. I offered an opinion on a medium that was — even before Musk’s politicization — an intellectual cesspool. It was also an opinion that required far more context than Twitter allows, and offering context while trying to defend oneself against increasingly hostile onlookers is next to impossible.

It was a throwaway opinion that didn’t need to be shared — not in that arena, anyway — and came from a place of personal turmoil. Borrowing again from another bastion of present-day philosophy, this time from the Disney film Frozen: “People make bad choices when they’re mad or scared or stressed.”

This online interaction occurred the same week my second son, Jack, was born. Days before his arrival, we learned Jack had multicystic dysplastic kidney disease and didn’t yet know the severity of his condition. The irony in my unfavorable interaction with someone who may or may not have been Tony Reali is that, as fathers who faced emotionally trying circumstances, we’d probably connect if we met in person.

I also suspect — having read a few of the glowing tributes to Around the Horn — that we might even share similar opinions on the direction of media.