ESPN’s embrace of WWE has officially gone overboard

Before anyone says it, I know. The first letter of ESPN stands for entertainment.

Yes, the Worldwide Leader in Sports shares its “E” with WWE. That’s World Wrestling Entertainment, decidedly not a sport.

Last August, ESPN embraced its dual mandate by signing a media rights deal to become the exclusive presenter of WWE’s Premium Live Events. And in the process, the Worldwide Leader in Sports has increasingly sacrificed some of its S in favor of E. But no one is calling ESPN the Worldwide Leader in Entertainment, at least not yet. In fact, there’s another network for that. It’s called E!.

So, while I acknowledge entertainment is quite literally in its name, please miss me with the suggestion that ESPN, a brand synonymous with sports coverage, is operating within its mission statement by giving an obscene amount of real estate on its daily studio programs, which ostensibly cover sports and not entertainment, to the WWE this week as WrestleMania 42 rolls into Las Vegas.

This didn’t happen for the several decades that ESPN had no financial stake in WWE. And when it occasionally did, it certainly did not happen at the levels seen this week during ESPN’s flagship programming.

Per data compiled by Awful Announcing, ESPN’s three flagship studio programs — Get Up, First Take, and The Pat McAfee Show — spent more time discussing WWE this week than MLB and the NHL combined. In total, these shows dedicated 14 segments to WWE this week, while dedicating only 7 to MLB and 5 to the NHL.

WWE was the third-most-discussed “sport” in ESPN’s daily programming this week, behind the NBA (44 segments) and the NFL (25 segments).

And generally speaking, the WWE segments went much longer than those dedicated to MLB or the NHL. Across the three shows, WWE segments accounted for 104 minutes of programming, while MLB and NHL segments each accounted for 56 minutes. However, the MLB and NHL data come with some massive caveats.

One would expect the inclusion of The Pat McAfee Show in this dataset to skew the numbers towards WWE and away from MLB and the NHL, especially considering that McAfee himself is a storyline for the upcoming WrestleMania main event. However, the opposite is actually true. If not for extended segments with MLB insider Jeff Passan, MLB Network analyst Mark DeRosa, Pittsburgh Penguins star Sydney Crosby, and NHL reporter Jackie Redmond on The Pat McAfee Show this week, the MLB and NHL representation would’ve looked much more dire than the data shows.

McAfee’s program accounted for nearly 90% of all MLB and NHL content across the three shows. Yet all three shows contributed about equally to WWE coverage.

On Get Up and First Take, WWE coverage took up exponentially more real estate than both MLB and the NHL. Only one MLB segment extended for more than a couple of minutes. Each WWE segment, however, lasted longer than the longest MLB or NHL segment on those shows.

I’m not here to tell ESPN to stop promoting WWE, a property it reportedly pays $325 million per year for. I’m here to tell ESPN it doesn’t need to jam professional wrestling down the throats of viewers who, by and large, enjoy their sports unscripted. (By the way, ESPN pays $400 million per year for the NHL and $550 million per year for the MLB. The price ESPN pays for WWE isn’t a justification for the amount of time the network has spent promoting it.)

So what’s going on here?

Well, WWE is backed by some of the most powerful individuals in sports business. Ari Emanuel, Hollywood superagent and CEO of the UFC and WWE holding company TKO, reps Pat McAfee, who is increasingly vital to ESPN’s bottom line during daytime hours and on key programming like College GameDay. Then there’s WWE president Nick Khan, who has previously repped some of ESPN’s biggest talents, including Get Up host Mike Greenberg.

When it comes to the dark arts of influence, WWE has two of the best in the business.

So it’s no surprise to see ESPN going all out to promote WrestleMania. Stephen A. Smith and First Take will be live from Las Vegas on Friday, while Randy Scott and Gray Striewski’s SportsCenter begin their on-site coverage on Thursday. On Saturday, ESPN2 will simulcast the first hour of WrestleMania, and on Sunday, the flagship ESPN channel will do the same. Both nights will also include a one-hour pre-show on the linear networks.

All of this for something ESPN showed next to no interest in prior to September 2025, when it aired its first WWE Premium Live Event.

There are plenty of ways ESPN has changed throughout the years. Once upon a time, Outside the Lines was a daily show. You would have expected cogent and well-reasoned discussions on The Sports Reporters. We all acknowledge that those days are gone. Most of us have come to accept, and even sometimes appreciate, the new era of ESPN anchored by First Take and Pat McAfee.

But the reason we’ve stuck around all these years through every iteration of ESPN is that the network’s north star has been sports. WWE is a lot of things. It’s fun. It’s entertaining. It’s athletic. But it’s not sports.

Sure, there’s plenty of overlap between WWE fans and traditional sports fans. But hardcore wrestling fans are not turning to ESPN for their coverage; they’re going to myriad online publications, podcasts, and social media communities. Meanwhile, loyal ESPN viewers accustomed to NBA and NFL coverage this time of year are getting bombarded with promotional WWE segments.

The question, as is often the case in sports media these days, is who the hell is this for? It’s not for wrestling fans, who are getting their coverage elsewhere, nor for ESPN viewers, who are tuning in for sports talk. Yet, WWE was the third-most-discussed topic on ESPN’s big three studio shows this week.

There’s promoting your network’s content, and then there’s piledriving your viewers into submission. This week, ESPN viewers have simply had to submit to WWE, whether they like it or not.