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SportsCenter Reaches Its Nadir

For every sports-centered SportsCenter story about the U.S. women’s soccer team, there were two general interest stories about them that had absolutely nothing to do with sports. This isn’t necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. It just is.

But today, when a five-minute discussion was had about Russian Dancing With the Stars pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy wanting Hope Solo as a partner, we thought a line was crossed. Not a journalistic line, mind you, but one of taste and common decency.

True, there are currently two lockouts in effect, and with baseball now entering the dog days of summer we understand that hard-hitting, newsy content is hard to come by. And we also know that ESPN and ABC (which airs DWTS) are both owned by The Walt Disney Company, so Chmerkovskiy’s appearance on SportsCenter isn’t totally unfathomable.

And while we’re not sure if this was a result of summer being notoriously dry for the sports news cycle, or if this was just another instance of ESPN-ABC cross-synergizing all over an unsuspecting public, or a little bit of both, we do know is that the next time we see someone “On the phone” during SportsCenter, his name better be Adam Schefter, and he better be telling us that Roger Goodell and DeMaurice Smith are in front of a New York City office building, holding hands and announcing the return of football.

[Reddit]