ESPN is involved in yet another scandal, but this one is particularly bizarre.
The sports entertainment company has returned 37 Emmys it has won over the past several years after evidence surfaced that they had won them illegally. According to Forbes, ESPN created fake names for the producers of one of its weekly shows - “College GameDay” - in order to boost the number of awards it earned each year. Until last year, The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS, the organization that hands out Emmys) prevented individuals within a specific program from winning an individual award if their program also won an award.
ESPN hosts “College GameDay” on a weekly basis in the fall and winter, during which a panel of analysts discusses that week’s games in college football.
The program won the “Outstanding Weekly Studio Show” award eight times from 2008-2018, meaning people like Desmond Howard, Lee Corso, and Chris Fowler were not eligible to win individual awards for their contributions on GameDay. These men (and others) could win individual awards for other work, but not if it was associated with “GameDay.”
That seems fair. If you make certain individuals eligible for two awards for the same work, that leaves an uneven playing field for everyone else. It would be like using the same paper for two different assignments in a college class.
However, ESPN circumvented this rule through an unusual method. The network would submit fake names for individuals involved with “GameDay” to make it seem like these individuals weren’t being awarded twice for the same thing. ESPN submitted aliases that were quite similar to the real employee’s names - “Dirk Howard” for Desmond Howard, “Lee Clark” for Lee Corso, and “Chris Fulton” for Chris Fowler.
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They would claim these individuals were associate producers, and then usually win whatever awards they wanted. After “earning” the trophies, the network would re-engrave them with the real names of the individuals involved.
That whole scheme is so laughably brazen and simple, it’s a shock it succeeded for over two decades. How did NATAS not vet these submissions enough to find out they were bogus? It has since tightened up its restrictions for submissions, but it's laughable their previous protocols couldn’t stop something as simple as this.
But more than that, it reeks of insecurity on ESPN’s part. That company gets all the exposure it could possibly want, and wins legitimate Emmys fairly regularly. Why would you need to create fake identities to win illegitimate awards? Is it that doubtful of its product as a network?
Fortunately, the employees themselves were unaware of the network’s plan and were not involved in breaking the rules. But some employees were still naturally disappointed by the news.
“This is all news to me and kind of unfortunate because you’ve got people who believe they rightfully had (won),” Wendy Nickson, who won an Emmy for her work with ESPN, told The Athletic. “There are rules for a reason…it’s unfortunate (those were) abused for so many years, too.”
Fortunately, ESPN apologized for the scheme:
“Some members of our team were clearly wrong in submitting certain names that may go back to 1997 in Emmy categories where they were not eligible for recognition or statuettes. This was a misguided attempt to recognize on-air individuals who were important members of our production team. Once current leadership was made aware, we apologized to NATAS for violating guidelines and worked closely with them to completely overhaul our submission process to safeguard against anything like this happening again.”
The company doesn’t need to “overhaul its submission process.” It needs to stop cheating and be confident in its own work to speak for itself.
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