Thursday, February 15, 2018

Katie Nolan's jump from a sinking ship


When taken in the prism of cable sports networks, Fox Sports 1 has been a success, exceeding the scope and quality of NBCSN and CBS Sports. Unfortunately, when it was founded, FS1 was viewed as a challenger to ESPN and in that regard, it has been a failure.
The biggest problem with FS1 has been a willingness to copy ESPN, and a reluctance to stick with anything innovative. In a network that attempted to develop personalities at first seemed unwilling to give those personalities the chance to truly flourish, or at least, for the American Public to get to know them.
Jay Onrait and Dan O'Toole, extremely popular in Canada were to be the centerpieces of FS1's offering. They had developed a cult following in Canada, and were building their base in the US, however the network moved away from their quirky highlight show in the most apparent change in network strategy. The change was underscored by Fox importing high priced talent from ESPN.
Skip Bayless and Colin Cowherd came to Fox to host talk shows that mirrored their offering on ESPN, and were antithetical to what Fox promised at the outset, and to what had been offered up until that point. They wanted to make sports fun again, and didn't want to populate the airwaves with haughty blowhards.
The perfect analog for the network's trajectory is found in Katie Nolan's time with the company. She is one of the very few FS1 personalities that stuck it out from the launch of the network until now. Or at least, until a few weeks ago.
While several ESPN personalities, not the least of which were Cowherd and Bayless, made the jump to Fox, the talent flow has not been a two way street. It's hard to come up with a figure more prominent than Nolan that has made the switch over to the Worldwide Leader, where she now hosts podcasts and SportsCenter on Snapchat.
Nolan popped up first on Crowd Goes Wild, one of the original shows from FS1's launch featuring, anachronistically, Regis Philbin in the hosting role. After withstanding some internet insults from ESPN's Rick Reilly, Nolan rose to Regis' defense on Crowd Goes Wild, and star was born.
After Crowd Goes Wild went belly up, she was the only talent from the show to bounce back with a different role on the network. She collected her own show, Garbage Time, which was a vehicle for Nolan to do mostly what she pleased. It captured the essence of the network, which still sought to have fun and brought a genuine sense of giddy irreverence to sports, but was still trying to figure out the best way to do that.
FS1 wasn't the ratings rocket that Fox had hoped for. Their live events did well, but the programming built around it wasn't as successful. They went out and hired Jamie Horowitz away from ESPN, and he turned the network on it's head, abandoning the sports as fun concept, and "embracing debate," the mantra that ESPN had moved to under Horowitz's direction in the 2000's. This is when Cowherd and Bayless moved over and were given shows like they'd had on ESPN.
Perhaps because of the now bloated schedule and in deference to the bloated salaries of the new additions, FS1 found it difficult to find a spot for Nolan and the whimsical Garbage Time, and she was off the air for 11 months. Itching to leave, she put out feelers and ESPN gladly welcomed her aboard. It was a courtship long in the making, according to Nolan herself, as relayed on the Sports Media Podcast with Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch, and consummated only after FS1 ran out of things for her to do.
The arc or Nolan's career with FS1 is now complete. Her participation in Crowd Goes Wild, a rather off the wall show from FS1's launch introduced her to the masses. As the initial programming fell by the way side, she was one of the few survivors as FS1 started experimenting with new content. Then, she disappeared as FS1's transition into ESPN Lite was completed. 
Ironically, it seems as though ESPN learned the lesson as FS1 lost it's way. ESPN has embraced the arrival of Nolan, and placed her in several high profile roles that emphasize her ability to improvise and work off the cuff. FS1 has not only become a clone of ESPN, it's become a clone of the very version of ESPN it had originally sought to eradicate. 

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