ESPN Willfully Destroys Sports Blogger/Competition

You probably know that we read The Big Lead a fair amount. It’s like Deadspin with actual connections to the sports journalism world and minus the hypocrisy.

What you might not know is that if you click the link above, it might not work right now. That’s because The Big Lead, a blog and a person’s business (he runs ads on the blog), was willfully destroyed by ESPN today.

Colin Cowherd, an ESPN radio host, blew up The Big Lead this morning. Intentionally. As good a transcript as we can make typing as we listen follows:

“You and I are straining the system, that what I heard…We occasionally, once a week…we’ll mention a website, our listeners will flee to it, and we’ll shut it down. We feel bad about this, we don’t mean to do it. It usually forces that young guy or young gal to buy more bandwidth and can be expensive. I don’t know that…but wouldn’t it be great if every day we gave out a new, young website and blew it up? If I told my audience every day–just one that’s annoying–and we could give it to them, and our audience would blow it up?

I want everyone to go to it as fast as you possibly can. When I say go, go….it’s three words. THE BIG LEAD dot com. THE. BIG. LEAD. DOT. COM. Go now.”

If you think about it, this is sort of like Pizza Hut going around the country and burning down various mom and pop pizza shops. I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. I’m also pretty sure The Big Lead should hire some feisty lawyers.