Whodunnit: The Mark Jackson Mystery

Who ousted MJax: Adam Silver, ESPN execs, or was it something else?

Mark Jackson is one of the main muses at this website, so we lose something in his exit from a lead broadcasting role at ESPN, as has been reported this week. There’s a temptation to reflect on Jackson’s long, strange run at ESPN, but then there is the confusing manner in which it happened. I can’t help but focus on the strangeness of that.

Yes, moving on from Mark wasn’t the most radical of choices. Some NBA fans would argue that it’s an obvious one. And yet, while the result is clear, and makes sense as a move, the forces behind it are more opaque. Jackson had a staunch ally in ESPN vice president of production Tim Corrigan — the lead NBA producer — and initially escaped the chopping block that first came for his broadcast partner Jeff Van Gundy on June 30th. The New York Post’s Andrew Marchand reported then:

{Jackson} could stay on and join play-by-player Mark Jones on the network’s second team. If he balks at that option, he could be headed out of ESPN.

And now he’s out. We know Mark is gone, but it’s hard, at the moment, to divine who exactly made the call and why.

So, for fun, I’m going to approach the causation question like a murder mystery. Right now there are multiple theories, some of which might not be entirely mutually exclusive. If I can’t totally divine what happened to Mark, I hope to at least explain some of the behind-the-scenes characters involved in such choices, and give some insights on how the Worldwide Leader actually works. Let’s get into it.