Who is the most racist ESPN personality? A scientific study.

It was another humdrum Thursday afternoon. I was whiling away the time until it was late enough in the day where I could convince myself another day’s ‘work’ was over, when suddenly a question popped into my mind, ‘I wonder who is the most racist ESPN personality’?  

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. ESPN personalities occasionally spew inane bullshit that could be interpreted as racist bullshit so why not find out who spews the most? This was not a task I could take on alone however as it involved looking at a lot of people saying lots of things on a very regular basis. I needed a sidekick. Someone who could distill everything that’s ever been said by prominent ESPN personalities into quick and manageable opinions. I needed the Internet.

I choose seven of what I considered to be some of the most prominent people working at the worldwide leader. I tried to pick from a variety of demographics and ethnicities that accurately represented ESPN’s hiring policies but I realized that could be quite time consuming so I picked the first seven that popped into my head instead. But that was the easy part. It’s ranking the seven and crowning a winner that would take all the work. But then I realized something. In the year 2015 we do not need to pour over hours of dialogue and conduct thorough analysis. No. In this day and age, if you want an answer, you type it in to Google. In fact, you don’t even need to construct coherent sentences, just go with the most important words and click search. So that’s what I did. The following is a list of the top seven racists working at ESPN, as per the Internet.

No.7 Jemele Hill – 12,500

I don’t know a huge amount about Jemele Hill except that I see her alongside the human shouting machine that is Michael Smith a lot during the afternoons. I also vaguely remember reading about her getting disciplined by ESPN a few years back for something, but I was a bit sketchy on the details. Anyway, the Internet doesn’t seem to have labelled her much of a racist which is nice for her. It has however taken over her own personal domain name.

The second search that popped up directed me to jemelhill.com/controversies which I thought was a brave and transparent way for Jemele to deal with any missteps she my have had in her career. It was not. I naturally assumed jemelehill.com was her own promotional site but it seems to be some sort Jemele Hill hate site but was also maybe, possibly once owned and operated by Jemele herself. It’s confusing. I’m not very au fait with domain name ownership. There’s also a completely random review of some 1990’s movie called Flatliners. This website is very strange. The real Jemele Hill should try to get it taken down.

Anyway, as for racism there is some reference to Hill being labelled a race baiter by the same ridiculous website and then a lot of stuff about her being racially abused by some absolute knucklehead who wrote in to ESPN which she dealt with in an amazingly mature and restrained way. 

No. 6 Michael Wilbon – 13,200

Woah. The Internet is not messing around with this one. The first result is a headline with the title ‘Michael Wilbon is a racist bigot’. A quick scan of the post on the IGN boards tells me that this rational person believes Michael Wilbon is a ‘racist bigot’ because Wilbon doesn’t think Michael Phelps is the greatest Olympian ever. It’s not exactly Riley Cooper levels of overt racism but the poster backs up his assertion by claiming Wilbon also thinks Tiger Woods is better than Jack Nicklaus. Well I guess that’s that then, IGN poster has provided us with an open and shut case.

The more interesting results come from pieces written on the topic of what Wilbon said about Jurgen Klinsmann last year when he angrily told Klinsmann to ‘get the hell out of America'. As someone born in another country who comments on American sports, it’s pretty unpleasant to watch someone like Michael Wilbon tell a well respected sportsman from a European country to ‘get the hell out’ because he dared to offer an opinion on an American sports star. Wilbon comes across as a cranky old man who seems to personally dislike Klinsmann, not an impartial journalist commenting on a news story. For the record, Klinsmann was commenting on the insane contract given to Kobe Bryant, you know, the contract that almost everybody agreed was crazy and based solely on what Kobe had done in the past, not what he could do for the Lakers in the future. Which was exactly what Klinsmann said. 

No. 5 Colin Cowherd – 15,800

I was expecting more from excitable sports forums on this one. I’ve personally come across articles accusing Cowherd of racism so a paltry 15,800 hits is a disappointment. Still, there’s plenty of articles that flat out label Cowherd as a racist so what he lacks in search results, he makes up for in relevant content.

Cowherd’s said some dumb things about John Wall that certainly seemed tinged with racist overtones and he has in turn been labelled an ardent racist because of them. Mainly on sites like Deadspin, who practically wet themselves when an opportunity to attack an ESPN personality arises. I actually like Deadspin, but I also don’t think Colin Cowherd is the living, breathing incarnation of D.W Griffith. He hosts a solo radio show for a couple of hours everyday, I’m sure he’s said lots of stupid things and some of them have probably been tinged with a degree of racism.

By the looks of it, Colin Cowherd is a conservative leaning libertarian who probably views people from poor, underprivileged backgrounds with a degree of skepticism. He deserves to be called out when he makes ignorant remarks about John Wall and others, but some of the sanctimonious articles written about him use the same rush-to-judgement and sensationalist tactics that they themselves scold him for.

No. 4 Skip Bayless – 63,000

Bayless seems to bring out the worst in people. People either think his daily ‘hot take’ offerings are the equivalent of Christ himself indulging in a live read of the bible, or they react to him like this

@RealSkipBayless ME STEPHEN A SMITH WILL ANAL UR HOE MOM AND JIZZ DOWN HER THROAT AND MAKE YOU DRINK THE JIZZ SHE PISSES ON FIRST TAKE BITCH
— Peyton Kershaw (@jimmyystewartt) February 16, 2015

Bayless irritates me but it’s usually a waste of time to get annoyed by people who specifically set out on their daily show to annoy you. As for Skip’s racism potential, again like Cowherd (and in comparison to our surprise run away winner) I expected more. Large swathes of the public detest him when he talks about anything, I would have assumed more people had branded him a racist. You constantly amaze and surprise me Internet.

As for the search results themselves, some guy has a youtube video labelled ‘Skip Bayless…the greatest racist of all time’ in which he actually defends Bayless from accusations of racism. Classic click bait headline ‘JerryNBATalkTV’, well done sir.

And then I found the only true bastion of truth on the Internet, Yahoo answers. Someone actually asked Yahoo answers ‘Is Skip Bayless racist’? which I guess is just one step removed from what I’m doing so who am I to criticize. One answer begins by saying ‘Bayless is not a racist!’ and, misunderstanding what the word ‘source’ means, they cite a story about O.J Simpson and Jimmy the Greek as their ‘source’. Moving on….

No. 3 Mike Greenberg – 118,000

This one was a shock. I put Greenberg in to add some balance. I was confident there were some names that would draw big numbers so Greenberg was there to prove that not all ESPN personalities had been accused of racism and then I find this.

It was an unfortunate slip of the tongue and the Internet went crazy, as is their wont. Poorly constructed articles were written, incendiary debates were had and nobody actually took it very seriously but in amongst all the online rage was one of the greatest uses of #your I’ve seen in a while

Bryan Alwyn Jones, I salute you.

No. 2 Bill Simmons – 445,000

Simmons is quite the polarizing figure and much of it stems from an obvious place, his huge success. And I mean that in two ways. Simmons started off as a voice of the ‘normal’ fan. He was funny and authentic and he was also trying hard to build a career for himself. Now he has a career that involves writing, podcasting, producing TV shows and much more. He’s hugely successful. You don’t need to go very far to find a Bill Simmons product and people hate him for it. They also dislike him because his product has become diluted, he’s moved outside of his comfort zone and he’s stretching himself too far instead of focusing on what he’s good at.

Similar to his friend Cowherd, Simmons (who Deadspin also dislike) has said some dumb things that people have used to label him a racist. There was his comment about Memphis that inspired a piece entitled ‘Your favorite basketball writer is probably a little bit racist’ and his misguided views on players with dreadlocks. These events do not show Simmons as a racist, they show Simmons doing what he always does, placing sporting events into certain ‘Bill Simmons type’ categories and discussing sports like he thinks you discuss sports with your friends. He’s not a racist but he’s probably made his fair share of questionable remarks from time to time that you give your friend a pass on and crucify the talking head on TV for.

No. 1 Stephen A Smith – 1,280,000

How about this for a runaway winner? I guess it was always obvious that a prominent black male would get the most hits from this type of search. Smith enjoys controversy and has gotten into some trouble with members of the black community for his use of the ‘n word’ on First Take. And the other side of it is, unfortunately, his success and loud mouth personality probably drive ardent racists to the message boards in droves.

Just like Greenberg, Stephen A. had a slip of the tongue live on air and he issued a half apology denying he had said anything. It was a lot of fuss over nothing. He then agreed with Mark Cuban when Cuban stated that we all have prejudices against some people, which is entirely true, and people jumped on him for it. What’s more interesting is that a Google search of ‘stephen a smith sexist’ generated only 389,000 results. Smith was suspended by ESPN for remarks he made about the Ray Rice case and I would have assumed it had left a bigger Google footprint than any race controversy. People are obviously more interested in discussing race relations than any issues that may relate to sexism.

So that's the top seven in this entirely scientific experiment. For reference I decided to type my own name + racist into Google and it got the largest result of all so you know, this may not have been the most accurate case study of all time. Or else, the Internet is not to be questioned, I’m a massive racist and this whole thing has blown up in my face.