Not airing national anthem before Sugar Bowl was ‘mistake’
ESPN’s president of content Burke Magnus called the network’s decision not to air a pregame moment of silence and the national anthem at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans on Jan. 2 an “enormous mistake.”
The network came under fire over not broadcasting the two moments on its Sugar Bowl broadcast a day after a terror attack on Bourbon Street that killed 14 people and injured over two dozen more.
Speaking on an episode of “The Sports Media Podcast” that was published on Thursday, Magnus called the situation a “human error,” adding that it was “a group of people in Bristol, Connecticut, who just made an enormous mistake.”
“I don’t want to minimize it by any stretch, but … nothing was normal about that day, including our programming lineup, where we normally would have had ‘College GameDay’ and that crew leading into the game,” Magnus said. “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.”
Users on social media were quick to criticize ESPN after they noticed the pregame moments had not been shown on the broadcast.
ESPN did air a montage of fans with their heads bowed with a giant American flag draping the middle of the field as the Sugar Bowl broadcast began, and the SEC Network aired the moment of silence and national anthem in its entirety.
But it still led to people suggesting — including former ESPN host Sage Steele — that the network had purposefully made the decision not to broadcast the moment of silence or anthem.
Magnus pushed back on this notion, calling it “misplaced.”
“It was just a mistake that we feel terrible about, and by the way, we should be held to account for,” he said. “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.”
The ESPN content boss noted that it has aired the anthem ahead of the College Football Playoff games since the Sugar Bowl.
The network has done the same for NFL playoff games.
The CFP wraps up on Monday when Ohio State faces Notre Dame for the national championship at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
