James Miller, author of the excellent ESPN book, Those Guys Have All The Fun, along with oral histories of SNL and CAA (the latter of which was wayyyyy too inside baseball for me), was on Richard Deitsch’s sports media podcast today and said that ESPN plans to lay off 40-50 (!!!) on-air personalities, and that all but the most notable ones should be worried. Here’s a brief transcription from Awful Announcing:

“The way that I’ve heard it—and I’ve kind of run the numbers on it, I think we’re looking at between 40 and 50 people. The numbers that some people reported about $80-90 million were probably ridiculous by a factor of three, but if you think of it in terms of 40-50, I think that’s a safe range based on what I’ve been talking to people about.

And look, there’s a lot of uncertainty about who it’s gonna be and why. Remember, this is not quantum physics, so it’s not an exact equation.”

Miller went on to list folks like Neil Everett, Mike Greenberg, Stephen A. Smith (…), Scott Van Pelt, Bomani Jones, Jemele Hill and the Around The Horn and PTI guys as people who should be safe, based on their contracts.

If you’ve been paying attention, this shouldn’t be particularly surprising. ESPN is losing subscribers as people cut the cord or never connect it in the first place, thus costing the network the $7+ they’re getting from virtually every cable subscriber, and thus costing Disney money. Never mind the fact that massive rights deals are coming up and ESPN will need the cash to bid to maintain their ostensible must-have status.

ESPN for years had been working off a ludicrous inflow of cash stemming from the fact that almost every cable subscriber in America was paying them, despite many, many people having absolutely no interest in sports or watching ESPN. And though ESPN puts on many quality shows and certainly excellent live-game productions, the era of force-feeding personalities and topics down people’s throats, which is a way the network’s power manifested itself over the years, is over. There’s too much fragmentation for people to have to put up with, say, Stephen A. Smith or Skip Bayless.

Miller and Deitsch also discussed the possibility of certain personalities taking massive pay cuts.

Meanwhile, ESPN’s PR guy: