ESPN has been under fire this week by some of its former employees. First, Linda Cohn and Dan Patrick took issue with the way the network handled layoffs affecting several employees. And now, Patrick has ripped ESPN for what he called “holding” the Kyle Shanahan car crash story until the San Francisco 49ers made it public.
While the incident occurred during the coach’s summer break in mid-July, the public is only now becoming aware of the crash because Kyle Shanahan will be limited during training camp because of the injuries he sustained in the accident.
“It happened on July 14, so the Niners kept it quiet for 11 days. I don’t know how they did this, or why they did this,” Dan Patrick said on show. “The Niners posted a statement regarding the accident at midnight Eastern on Saturday. Adam Schefter posted his first tweet on the situation one minute later. The ESPN article about the accident published at one minute after that.
“So, did you release this to everybody, this information? Why is ESPN holding the information? Why are the Niners? Now, I guess if the Niners can hold the information, I understand it, but if you’re in the news-gathering business, or at least you used to be, the NFL now owns 10% of ESPN, but did ESPN have the information and chose to sit on it for 11 days? Did ESPN say to the Niners, ‘We won’t release it until you tell us to release it?’ Hmm. Okay.”
Dan Patrick added that some people may have known that something happened, but didn’t say anything, which proved to be true on Monday when ProFootballTalk’s Chris Simms admitted that he knew about Kyle Shanahan’s car crash almost two weeks before it became public.
“I was sitting there every day after it happened going, ‘Is the news going to break today? Is the news going to break today? Is the news going to break today?’” Simms said on Monday’s episode of PFT Live. “I certainly looked at my wife a few times in the last 12-13 days, and we looked at each other, ‘Huh, this is pretty amazing it still hasn’t come out.’”
Simms also added that Shanahan, his college teammate at the University of Texas, nearly lost an eye as a result of the crash.
“This isn’t journalism,” Dan Patrick continued. “Not really reporting. They’re giving you the information and the acknowledgement of, ‘Okay, now you can tell everybody.’
“Do we wait for other NFL news? Situations, embargoes? Like, that’s the odd thing with this. Why did you wait 11 days? Nobody knew anything?”
In related news, Sports Illustrated discovered public records that indicdated Kyle Shanahan was using his cell phone at the time of the head-on collision. The 49ers coach was not ruled to be at fault for the crash, and interestingly, he wasn’t cited for the violation.