On Cue

It's almost as if ESPN read my post from Wednesday and immediately put on its trolliest of trollfaces:

The world's best known sports tweeter is indeed headed back to ESPN. CNBC's Darren Rovell, who worked at ESPN prior to joining CNBC in 2006, is returning to the WorldWide Leader. Several sources including The Big Lead, Deadspin, and Jim Miller have reported the news already with TBL saying the deal is done.

So, yeah. The funny--well, not so funny--thing is, this doesn't fit into either of the two scenarios that I outlined. Now, ESPN is not only adding to it arsenal of mediocrity, it is doing by bringing back a guy that already worked there before. In the end, he's just one more guy at ESPN that most people don't seem to like,* but I just thought that the timing of this hiring was amusing in light of Wednesday's post.

In other news that's actually kind of encouraging, I was alerted to the existence of this article by Chris of BWS. The main gist:

Sure enough, shortly after Horowitz took over, the show's ratings shot up. In July, the month before he began at First Take, the show averaged 223,000 viewers per day, according to Nielsen. By January, that figure had jumped to 420,000 viewers per day. The show saw total viewer increases for each of Horowitz's first six months as producer, according to Nielsen numbers, and ESPN PR went into hyperdrive promoting the great new success.

But those numbers didn't hold. First Take has seen a decline in its ratings in three out of the last four months. It started in February when the show averaged 338,000 viewers, down from the show's January high. Total viewers averaged 349,000 per show in May, down from 367,000 in April.

I'm not quite convinced that we've seen the beginning of the end of this tomfoolery because this slight dip: a) is slight and b) coincides with not-football-season. If ratings continue to go down during the fall and winter months, then we can all begin to Swanson dance sans inhibition.

In other other news, I didn't accidentally turn on ESPN's pregame coverage while Stephen A. and Skip happened to be on yesterday (I'm assuming they were on at some point)...success!

*Then again, there almost always certain things that have fans, things that you wouldn't think do. For example: Creed, Jersey Shore, dubstep, Michael Bay movies, unsweetened tea. These are all things that people, somewhere, enjoy and consume on a regular basis. Think of something terrible, anything. Odds are, thousands of people like that thing. Thus, it logically follows that somebody must enjoy the work of Bayless, SAS, Rovell, etc. A harrowing thought indeed.