ESPN executive: Sugar Bowl National Anthem debacle was 'enormous mistake'

ESPN and Rich Clark, the director of the CFP, worked overtime to arrange a new date and time for the Sugar Bowl after an unexpected terrorist attack in New Orleans the morning of the scheduled Jan. 1 game.

All things considered, playing the game on Jan. 2 with no security incidents counts as a win. After an armed gunman plowed through a crowd on Bourbon Street, leaving 14 dead and dozens injured, the game between Notre Dame and Georgia was an afterthought.

Still, the brodcast did not go off without a hiccup. ESPN did not air the National Anthem live before the game, an unspoken faux pas in the Sports Broadcasting 101 playbook.

ESPN aired the playing of the anthem on a later edition of SportsCenter, but the incident was still weighing on network executive Burke Magnus when he spoke to the Sports Media Podcast with Sports Business Journal's Mollie Callihane and Austin Karp.

“There’s a group of people in Bristol who just made an enormous mistake," said Magnus, ESPN's President of Content. "It was a human error. It happens. I don’t want to minimize it by any stretch, but … nothing was normal about that day, including our programming lineup, where we normally would have had College GameDay and that crew leading into the game.

"It wasn’t that, it was SportsCenter, which is done out of Bristol instead of on-site. I could give you a whole host of reasons why it was not the normal circumstance, but at the end of the day, that was just a horrible error that was made by a group of really well-intentioned people who feel terrible about it.”

Home/Sports Media