Dan Patrick suggested Linda Cohn as potential Keith Olbermann replacement

When Keith Olbermann left SportsCenter, Dan Patrick didn’t pick Kenny Mayne to be his replacement. ESPN did. But this week, Patrick revealed for the first time that he had someone else in mind.

Rich Eisen stopped by The Dan Patrick Show this week, and during the conversation, the two looked back at what it was like inside ESPN when Olbermann departed the 11 p.m. SportsCenter — better known as The Big Show — in 1997.

“When we did SportsCenter, you’re just trying to survive because it’s really, really competitive,” Patrick recalled. “I tell people that it was cutthroat. Like it wasn’t, ‘Hey, we’re rooting for you.’ You had people who were circling the SportsCenter set waiting for somebody to keel over so they could sit in the chair.”

By 1997, SportsCenter was ESPN’s most-watched show, and the 11 p.m. edition with Patrick and Olbermann was the crown jewel. Patrick and Olbermann had spent five years together building something that had no real predecessor in sports television. The show had made SportsCenter the defining sports media institution in the country, making the chair next to Dan Patrick in 1997 the most coveted seat in sports television.

Patrick didn’t want to be the one handing it out.

“I wanted management to do it,” Patrick said. “Because I wanted them to be on the hook for that person to sit in Keith’s chair, which is almost irreplaceable, you know, trying to get somebody to sit in there. And so I turned it around to management. I said, ‘Tell me who you want to watch at night.'”

He did, however, have one idea of his own.

Patrick said this week that he suggested Linda Cohn as a possibility specifically because she would neutralize the inevitable comparison problem. Whoever followed Olbermann was going to be measured against one of the most electrifying anchors the show had ever produced, a man who had essentially invented a new way of doing sports highlights. Patrick figured the only way to avoid that trap was to not try to replace Olbermann at all, but to put someone in the chair who wouldn’t invite the comparison in the first place.

“And then I thought, well, Linda Cohn could sit in, and then there won’t be any comparison,” Patrick said.

Cohn wouldn’t have been some consolation choice. She had been at ESPN since 1992, the same year Olbermann arrived, and had already established herself as one of the network’s most consistent presences. By 1997, she had been one of the network’s defining anchors for five years and was no one’s fallback option.

But management didn’t go with Cohn. They didn’t go with any of the anchors circling the set, either. Patrick found out who they went with while he was off the grid on a Boy Scout camping trip with his son.

“I’m on a scouting trip with my son,” Patrick said. “I have no contact with anybody. They say they’re going to make the decision over the next two days, and all of a sudden, I go to a convenience store to get a six-pack of beer — because I couldn’t survive the scouting trip without having beer, even though they frowned upon that — and I see my phone. It’s got a message, and it says, ‘We’re gonna go with Kenny Mayne.’ And I called my boss, and I said, ‘I got your message.’ And that was it.”

Cohn and Olbermann briefly reunited at the desk in 2018 for a throwback SportsCenter, the same year Patrick and Olbermann pulled off their own surprise reunion episode. Whatever goodwill those reunions generated did not survive an ugly public exchange earlier this year in which Olbermann called Cohn “a self-obsessed, politically motivated clown,” and Cohn told him he sounded “bitter and miserable.”

And while she never sat in Olbermann’s chair, the two of them ended up in each other’s orbit anyway.