ESPN’s president of content material Burke Magnus known as the community’s choice to not air a pregame second of silence and the nationwide anthem on the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans on Jan. 2 an “monumental mistake.”
The community got here beneath fireplace over not broadcasting the 2 moments on its Sugar Bowl broadcast a day after a terror assault on Bourbon Road that killed 14 folks and injured over two dozen extra.
Talking on an episode of “The Sports activities Media Podcast” that was printed on Thursday, Magnus known as the scenario a “human error,” including that it was “a gaggle of individuals in Bristol, Connecticut, who simply made an infinite mistake.”
“I don’t need to reduce it by any stretch, however … nothing was regular about that day, together with our programming lineup, the place we usually would have had ‘School GameDay’ and that crew main into the sport,” Magnus stated. “It wasn’t that, it was ‘SportsCenter,’ which is finished out of Bristol as a substitute of on-site. I might offer you an entire host of explanation why it was not the conventional circumstance, however on the finish of the day, that was only a horrible error that was made by a gaggle of actually well-intentioned individuals who really feel horrible about it.”
Customers on social media have been fast to criticize ESPN after they observed the pregame moments had not been proven on the published.
ESPN did air a montage of followers with their heads bowed with a large American flag draping the center of the sector because the Sugar Bowl broadcast started, and the SEC Community aired the second of silence and nationwide anthem in its entirety.
But it surely nonetheless led to folks suggesting — together with former ESPN host Sage Steele — that the community had purposefully made the choice to not broadcast the second of silence or anthem.
Magnus pushed again on this notion, calling it “misplaced.”
“It was only a mistake that we really feel horrible about, and by the way in which, we ought to be held to account for,” he stated. “We need to be pretty much as good as we are able to probably be always, and despite the fact that it was not a traditional scenario, our site visitors bought fouled up, our timing bought fouled up, we occurred to be in business break when the anthem occurred, it was simply not good by any measuring stick and lower than our requirements.”
The ESPN content material boss famous that it has aired the anthem forward of the School Soccer Playoff video games for the reason that Sugar Bowl.
The community has achieved the identical for NFL playoff video games.
The CFP wraps up on Monday when Ohio State faces Notre Dame for the nationwide championship at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.