Sometime in the late 2000s, ESPN decided it was going to be everything to everybody.
It was a bold, ambitious play at what seemed like the right time. ESPN was a couple years away from its 2011 zenith of over 100 million cable subscribers, so who cared if the new NFL rights deal cost $15 billion? Local newspapers and TV outlets looked like they were on their way out in major cities, so why wouldn’t ESPN expend enough resources to replace every one of them? Why would costs matter to a company whose money grew on trees?