Earlier this month, ESPN came under fire for failing to broadcast the national anthem before the Sugar Bowl, which had been postponed to the following day after a terrorist attack in New Orleans, the host city. But the network has now apologized for the incident and vowed to be better in its coverage of a major sporting event coming up.
During an appearance on Sports Business Journal’s “Sports Media Podcast” on Wednesday, ESPN Vice President Burke Magnus spoke on the network’s failure to show the national anthem ahead of the Sugar Bowl, calling it a “horrible error” and an “enormous mistake.”
Magnus explained that the mistake partly resulted from the game being rescheduled to 4 p.m. the next day, which disrupted ESPN’s production schedule.
“There’s a group of people in Bristol who just made an enormous mistake. It was a human error, it happens,” he said on the podcast. “I don’t want to minimize it by any stretch. Nothing was normal about that next day, including our programming lineup where we normally would have had College GameDay and that crew leading into the game. It wasn’t that, it was SportsCenter, which is done out of Bristol instead of on-site.
“I could give you a whole host of reasons why it was not the normal circumstance, but at the end of the day, that was just a horrible error that was made by a group of really well-intentioned people who feel terrible about it.”
Magnus made it clear that ESPN took responsibility for the failure and promised to be better in its upcoming broadcasts, including Monday night’s College Football Playoff national championship game between the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
“We want to be as good as we can possibly be at all times. And even though it was not a normal situation – our traffic got fouled up, our timing got fouled up. We happened to be in commercial break when the anthem happened. It was just not good by any measuring stick and not up to our standards,” he said.
“I think what you have seen since then in terms of the other CFP games or NFL games in Week 18 and the Wild Card, we are not avoiding the anthem – quite the opposite. It’s a special moment for all sports fans at big events, and you’ll see the same treatment at the college football championship game coming up on Monday.”
Clearly, ESPN wants to correct their mistake.
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