A couple of things that are misleading here: 1) Most of the high profile ESPN personalities departing had little to do with finances. Some of it was internal f

A couple of things that are misleading here: 1) Most of the high profile ESPN personalities departing had little to do with finances. Some of it was internal feuding (ie, the Bill Simmons departure), some of it was firing loose cannons for boorish statements that don't fly in our hyper-PC culture, and some of it was people leaving for more money from competitors. As others have noted, for a company the size of ESPN the salaries of a few high profile personalities are mostly negligible. 2) Same thing with the Grantland shutdown -- the site was never realistically expected to be a money maker, it was essentially shut down because the departure of Simmons made the site's future unclear, and ESPN decided to get out of the pop culture business and fold the sports writing back into their main site. 3) A lot of ESPN's cutbacks are because they (foolishly) forecast their finances on the assumption that subscriptions would continue to grow. That doesn't mean the well has dried up, it just means that they've been a bit reckless the past few years. 4) I think this is excluding that a lot of sports are consumed on the free broadcast stations (CBS, NBC, FOX, etc.). Even with cable folding, those networks are still going to be paying billions for TV rights. That said I agree with the overall gist of the argument that valuations are going to drop when the cable money starts drying out. I just don't think it's going to be a catastrophic crash or something; I doubt the average consumer will even notice.