Rush has often made the point that sports broadcasters are the most radically left wing of all 'journalists'. With the added bonus in most cases of not being bright enough to be 'real' journalists. Talk about failing to meet a low bar!
You do have the option.
With very few exceptions, professional sports teams/leagues have become just as politically correct, multi-cultural and bass-ackwards as much of the rest of society and continue to distract average Americans from things that do, or will have, a much more profound effect on their lives than whether or not the Panthers still have a perfect won/lost record.
too many thugs and commercials, it’s obvious most owners and players don’t care at all about their team
ESPN and it’s siblings charge a very high freight per viewer to cable providers. Cable providers in return make tiers of channel offerings, with ESPNs in each tier driving the cost up. I got sick of paying a fortune just so I could have the tier with Boomerang, the most expensive tier. I only wanted Boomerang, yet I had to pay for tons of ESPNs and MTVs. Finally, I had enough and cut the cable and went to Netflix. I can order all the cartoons I want, and many are on streaming. The whole Pink Panther series was on a while back. You could say that me and others like me, (and there are many) cut the cable BECAUSE of ESPN.
1) It's tied to an obsolescent distribution model; cable television. Cable in general is losing viewers, primarily because in each region the cable provider is a heavy-handed monopoly. ESPN made the mistake of tying themselves to long-term contracts to buy up the broadcast rights based on projections that the number of cable viewers would increase. Instead, they have decreased. The sports leagues are doing an end-run around ESPN by marketing their own games through NFL Sunday Ticket, MLB At Bat and NHL Gamecenter. Fans find they are better options than paying for cable.
2) ESPN’s non-game PC commentary is not drawing viewers, it is repelling them. Viewers want to watch the game, they don't care for the politically correct talking head shows. While the technology is different, it's the same dynamic that caused me to drop my subscriptions to Sports Illustated in the early 1980s and then The Sporting News in the early 1990s. Obsolescent print media was going increasingly PC, with all of the op-eds and articles having the obligatory “sports as a means of advancing social justice” angle. That is most definitely LAST on the list of reasons to follow sports. In fact, its a reason not to.
So as the leagues bypass ESPN, and the communists there are dogmatically tied to their program of agitation/propaganda, viewers vote with their remotes and they are voting to leave the collective farm.