Jemele Hill, co-anchor of ESPN’s “The Six,” and the network itself both clumsily created needless controversy this week.

Whereas both sides might have dealt with the problem quickly and efficiently, they instead made it worse.

Hill issued a series of Tweets critical of President Donald Trump:

All of this, and more invective, is still on Hill’s Twitter feed. Her incendiary name-calling was the first of several mistakes that would become part of this story’s sad narrative.

Yes, Hill has every right to her opinion. Speech is still free, you bet. Looking at her decision to issue these Tweets objectively, though, that choice was misguided to an extreme degree.

As chronicled by a Bryan Curtis long-form on The Ringer, Hill and her co-host, Michael Smith, first faced significant opposition to their placement on “The Six” to begin with. Calls were then made for the show to be killed shortly after it began airing:

Hill and Smith expected a certain blowback when they got SC6. “We knew when we moved into this neighborhood that there were going to be people that wanted us to turn our music down,” Smith said. They didn’t expect the blowback to be this loud.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Hill took Smith’s metaphor and doubled down:

“There’s a certain crop of people who’s not trying to see ESPN get more ethnic, more gender-balanced …” Hill said. “As a discredit to all of us, they use words like too ‘liberal’ or too ‘politically correct.’ As if there’s ever been this widespread movement in television to just give black people and women shows. No, it’s been the exact opposite.”

She continued: “That term is funny: ‘social justice warriors.’ What are they talking about? … Whenever I hear that, I’m like, I know what you really want to call me.”

You don’t need to be a social scientist to read those quotes, compare them to her Trump Tweets, and draw parallels.

The bigger question for Hill has to be: Why?

Why work so hard, suffer so many indignities, wait patiently for your big chance, and then risk tossing it away over hackneyed Trump criticism? Did she really think her opinion was going to invoke civil discourse or change anyone’s mind?

Hill messed up. Fortunately, yet unfortunately for her, ESPN had its own “hold my beer” moment the next morning:

Oh no.

Having hired Hill and given her this platform, this Tweet was rightly seen by Deadspin and other outlets as shoving Hill directly into traffic. Had ESPN simply said something like “Jemele’s opinions are her own,” or even said nothing, that would have been far better. This was classic ass-covering by the Worldwide Leader. In doing so, they bailed on a talent they had previously stuck with despite the difficult start for SC6.

Even now, “The Six” isn’t lighting the world on fire. When the best ESPN can say about the show’s ratings is to explain that “the show’s audience is now younger and more diverse,” well, that’s not exactly claiming “we’re number one!”

So did Hill, the tough talker, the pot-stirrer, the firebrand who wanted the world to know what she thought of this president and this administration, stand her ground?

Did she fire back?

Sigh…

This statement is about the worst thing Hill could have done. She either needed to apologize, or she needed to dig in and say, “no, you’re not getting an apology from me, this is my stance and I’m entitled to it.” Instead, she gave everyone a version of a spouse’s typical insincere “apology,” i.e., “so sorry you’re unhappy, I didn’t mean to upset you even if I should have known there’d be trouble.”

Is this where it ends? Probably not, especially if reports are true that the network tried to pull Hill off the air before Wednesday night’s show.

Just because ESPN is working hard to give an expanded voice to diverse talent doesn’t mean the company knows what to do if those voices use tones and words that customers might find uncomfortable or objectionable. ESPN proved that conclusively this week.

As for Hill, if she really values the chance that ESPN gives her, five nights a week, to speak her mind on “The Six,” she had a strange way of showing it on Monday.

Whichever side of this issue you take, though, it’s impossible to find a winner. Hill and ESPN each made mistake after mistake and turned this story into something that the network really despises, which is a narrative that it doesn’t control.