The Gentlemen's Wrestling Podcast
Aug 28, 2026 · 1 hr 39 min · 12 segments
On the latest episode of the Gentlemen's Wrestling Podcast, Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics joins the show to talk about WWE's relationship a year into its deal with ESPN as the host of PLEs, WWE's…
Brandon ThurstonGuestAnd I don't know how you can ever quantify whether that has been a success or not.
But it is interesting, I think, when you look at some of these segments and how fans react to them, whether or not people, how many people are saying, seeing those segments and being like, oh, cool, they're talking about wrestling on ESPN.
And how many versus how many of those people are like, what are they talking about this fake wrestling bullshit? Because I see a lot of the latter when I see those things.
yeah i mean so espn is not a complete stranger to wrestling but but it's in you know a bygone era last time they had wrestling on their
reared i think like there was global championship wrestling on after the awa was on espn i think that's probably right i don't know
um but yeah awa i think they've aired like on espn classics they've aired some some awa or some other stuff but yeah this is this is a fake sport and you're putting it on this is this is the further bastardization of espn that you're just putting you're putting banana ball on and now this um i can see a lot of people feeling that way
well espn is in a, it has been in kind of a identity crisis in terms of what to do with their non-sports programming blocks, non-live sports programming blocks, right? Growing up for me- That's what Pat McAfee's for.
Growing up for me, ESPN was SportsCenter, you know or or sports are like shows like nfl live and nba coast to coast or whatever shows where they're showing highlights and they're analyzing the games and they're like these studio shows and things like that a lot of the sports center
yeah yeah and a lot of them were you know showing highlight most of them were highlight focused and the idea was like you know that was on during the day and then at night time you know their live programming would kick in whether it was the nba or the nfl or baseball or hockey or whatever they you know they were programming at the time what was on espn when i would
come up close with was it chris meyer interviewing oj simpson and stuff like that um nfl films with steve sable
like outside the lines yeah um we could use outside the lines today um But essentially, media consumption changed.
The idea of sports highlights has been pretty much entirely taken over by social media or YouTube.
If you want to watch highlights of last night's Yankees game, you can find them on YouTube.
And I don't know how you can ever quantify whether that has been a success or not.
But it is interesting, I think, when you look at some of these segments and how fans react to them, whether or not people, how many people are saying, seeing those segments and being like, oh, cool, they're talking about wrestling on ESPN.
And how many versus how many of those people are like, what are they talking about this fake wrestling bullshit? Because I see a lot of the latter when I see those things.
yeah i mean so espn is not a complete stranger to wrestling but but it's in you know a bygone era last time they had wrestling on their
reared i think like there was global championship wrestling on after the awa was on espn i think that's probably right i don't know
um but yeah awa i think they've aired like on espn classics they've aired some some awa or some other stuff but yeah this is this is a fake sport and you're putting it on this is this is the further bastardization of espn that you're just putting you're putting banana ball on and now this um i can see a lot of people feeling that way
well espn is in a, it has been in kind of a identity crisis in terms of what to do with their non-sports programming blocks, non-live sports programming blocks, right? Growing up for me- That's what Pat McAfee's for.
Growing up for me, ESPN was SportsCenter, you know or or sports are like shows like nfl live and nba coast to coast or whatever shows where they're showing highlights and they're analyzing the games and they're like these studio shows and things like that a lot of the sports center
yeah yeah and a lot of them were you know showing highlight most of them were highlight focused and the idea was like you know that was on during the day and then at night time you know their live programming would kick in whether it was the nba or the nfl or baseball or hockey or whatever they you know they were programming at the time what was on espn when i would
come up close with was it chris meyer interviewing oj simpson and stuff like that um nfl films with steve sable
like outside the lines yeah um we could use outside the lines today um But essentially, media consumption changed.
The idea of sports highlights has been pretty much entirely taken over by social media or YouTube.
If you want to watch highlights of last night's Yankees game, you can find them on YouTube.
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