Listened for the Audible podcast on my way to work. oscar Feldman said ESPN is basically going from 42 to 17 college football reporters. That's a lot of bloat. SI has 4 & Fox Sports has 2. ESPN doesn't need 3 people covering the Pac-12. They started hiring cheap, young labor to create content, which sounds nice, but they still had to pay for them to travel.
ESPN made a bet they could become the 1-stop for all college football reporting but with that many writers/bloggers you just end up with 3 people writing the same LHC Bill Snyder story like we saw last week & "best of the conference" articles that they've cycled completely thru. Also, I'm guessing 5 years ago they overpaid to get Brett Murphy and have over paid people like Amdy Katz to keep them from going somewhere in their 10+ years at ESPN. They have the click data that shows while they drive some clicks, it's probably not enough to support their salaries.
The push to make these cuts is cord cutting, but it's forcing ESPN to be better at business, not that they're failing.