ESPN is parting ways with two women’s basketball legends.
At an NCAA women’s Final Four preview event in Phoenix on Tuesday, ESPN senior vice president Meg Aronowitz announced that Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi will no longer host The Bird & Taurasi Show on ESPN2.
The altcast ran for six years. But Aronowitz, who oversees most non-football college sports programming at the Worldwide Leader, said a new secondary broadcast will take its place for the Final Four and national championship game on April 2 and 5.
“We are reimagining for what we call our alternate telecast,” Aronowitz said at the kickoff event. “It has been Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi for the last six years, and we are grateful for them and our time with us. But we are going to reimagine and rethink how we bring the viewer that alternate telecast.”
Aronowitz said details on the new format will be released soon.
The Bird & Taurasi Show was a hit for ESPN. The two lifelong friends brought real chemistry to the air, drew fantastic guests, and generated news-making moments. It was everything a network could want from an altcast, even drawing 1.4 million viewers for the 2024 national championship game (for reference, the ManningCast averaged about 810,000 viewers for ESPN’s NFL Wild Card game last month).
Since the ESPN2 telecast launched, however, both players have retired. Bird became involved with USA Basketball and took an ownership stake in her former team, the Seattle Storm. She also hosts two podcasts for Vox Media, which are co-produced by her media company, Togethxr.
Taurasi has largely stayed out of the spotlight since retiring, aside from the release of a documentary about her on Prime Video last year.
The two stars have not commented on the end of the Final Four altcast.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.