Stephen A. Playing Solitaire During NBA Finals Underscores Bigger Problem In Sports Media

The optics of Stephen A. Smith playing Solitaire on his phone during the NBA Finals, which ESPN pays him tens of millions of dollars to cover, aren't great.

While him playing on his phone is hardly worth a scandal, it underscores a grander issue with the current era of sports media. The people paid to talk about the games make it seem like a chore.

Covering sports in America is work, by definition. But it's not really.

No one in sports media works that hard. Cutting meat is a far more challenging job than predicting who is going to win a game or who sits on the unofficial Mount Rushmore of all-time NBA players.

The average person would trade places without hesitation to cover sports for a decent living, let alone the millions of dollars most on television make doing so.

So, seeing sports commentators look and sound disinterested is incredibly off-putting to the average sports fan. And far too many of them do. Just read some of their tweets. Most of them are bitter, miserable, and begging for an excuse to talk about something else.

In fact, one of the reasons ESPN mainstay "Around the Horn" lost its way toward the end was because its panelists considered themselves too important to stick to sports. Hence, the conversations about genocide in China, religion, and the Trump administration on the show before its (long awaited) cancellation last month.

Between 2014 and 2017, former ESPN president John Skipper staffed an entire roster of pundits who liked but never loved sports, including Bomani Jones, Sarah Spain, Kate Fagan, Jemele Hill, Michael Smith, and Dan Le Batard. Not a single one of them remains at ESPN. Sports fans rejected each of them.

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