A sudden fall for a TV debate mastermind
Now, a week after Horowitz announced a radical restructuring of the Fox Sports digital arm, he is out of work.
Horowitz’s career began at NBC, where he spent eight years, rising from an Olympics researcher to creating and producing the National Heads-Up Poker Championship. In 2006 ESPN hired him to run its World Series of Poker coverage.
Early on, when Horowitz was based in an ESPN content development group in New York City, his colleagues included Connor Schell, Kevin Wildes and David Jacoby, all of whom went on to create shows for ESPN.
His big break came in 2009, when he created SportsNation, alongside Wildes and Jacoby. Colin Cowherd, an ESPN radio star, was paired with the relative newcomer Michelle Beadle, who was hired after nearly 80 candidates were interviewed and a dozen were tested.
SportsNation was never a ratings juggernaut, but it became a staple of ESPN2’s afternoon programming. More important, it persuaded Horowitz’s bosses to give him a shot at reinventing the moribund First Take.
First Take has had a transformative effect on sports media, and wider sports culture, often in service (so its detractors say) of dumbing everything down. With “Embrace Debate” as the tagline, the arguments between Bayless and his partner Stephen A. Smith were the purest distillation of a trend toward sports shout shows.
Horowitz was promoted based on the success of First Take, but nothing else he created came close to matching its success. Though SportsNation is still on TV, it fizzled after Beadle and then Cowherd left it (Beadle returned to the show in 2014), and his creations Numbers Never Lie and Colin’s New Football Show never found significant audiences.
Horowitz’s next stop was a disaster. He left ESPN in May 2014 to take over Today, NBC’s marquee morning show. Compared with the more placid waters of Bristol, Conn., where ESPN is based, the morning show world proved less receptive to Horowitz’s attempts at radical disruption.
Just 10 weeks into the job, Horowitz was fired.
His ability to command sports fans’ attention was not forgotten. He was soon hired to reinvent Fox Sports, and its FS1 and FS2 channels, as the company tried to build a viable rival to ESPN.
By this point, Horowitz’s playbook was hardly a secret. They decided that Fox Sports needed to get out of the news and highlight business, and go all-in on earsplitting opinion programming to accompany its live rights.
Reporters were laid off or allowed to leave when their contracts expired, and Fox Sports Live, FS1’s answer to ESPN’s SportsCenter, was canceled.
Horowitz’s first big hire was an old friend, Cowherd.
The bigger coup came last year, when ESPN announced that Bayless was leaving the network. After his contract expired in the summer, he quickly joined Fox Sports.
Along with a fellow ESPN defector, Jason Whitlock, Horowitz executed a more concentrated version of the strategy he had pioneered at ESPN.
Before Horowitz was fired on Monday, his next big play was going to be a new morning TV show featuring a provocateur (Nick Wright) and a former NFL player (Cris Carter).
Horowitz, the prince of “Embrace Debate” who caught lightning in a bottle with Bayless and Smith, will not be around to see if the formula still works.