The ESPYs aired live from Lincoln Center on July 15, and it took almost no time for the Barstool crew to turn on it. This is supposed to be the one night a year sports and entertainment collide in a fun, low-stakes way. Instead, it played out on Twitter like a broadcast in freefall, with everyone from Dave Portnoy to Pat piling on in real time.
Dave Portnoy erupted mid-show, demanding whatever he was watching get off his screen.
Portnoy's reaction came during a stage performance segment, and whatever set him off, the exasperation was the headline, not the specifics. That's basically been the vibe of ESPYs Twitter for years now, but this year it felt like the dam broke all at once.
Pat led the charge with the most damning review of the night, flatly asking whether the show is simply unwatchable at this point.
Are the ESPY's unwatchable? I keep waiting for it to get good and it's just not happening
Cons backed him up almost immediately, admitting he didn't even know the ESPYs were on until someone texted him. That's not a great sign for a show that used to be appointment viewing for anyone who cared about sports culture. Once the biggest names in the game showed up to accept trophies in front of a packed house, the ESPYs carried real cachet. Now the complaint isn't that it's boring, it's that it's actively forgettable.
@BarstoolPAT I didn’t even know they were on tonight until @Return_Of_RB texted me about it It’s a shame how far off they’ve fallen
Then there was Will Compton, who had one very specific question: how did Oz the Mentalist get a spot on this show? It's the kind of tweet that sums up the whole broadcast's problem in one line — nobody can explain why certain acts get stage time on the biggest night in sports television.
Tommy Smokes took a different angle, pointing out the recurring absurdity of athletes delivering tearful, heartfelt speeches for what is, by design, a fan-voted popularity trophy with no real stakes. It's a fair point and one that's been made about the ESPYs before, but it hit different this year given how much of the broadcast was getting torched in real time.
Not everything from the night was pure roast material. Marty Mush couldn't stop rewatching the moment Mike Tyson, Jake Paul and DJ Khaled presented the Best Single Game Performance award, which went to Shohei Ohtani for his monster outing against the Brewers in the NLCS. Tyson's genuine, off-mic confusion over whether Ohtani was even a guy — thinking they'd gone off air — turned into the one clip from the whole show that actually went viral for the right reasons.
Tyson's baffled reaction to Ohtani during the awards presentation became the night's most-replayed moment.
So that's the split screen from ESPYs night: one genuinely funny, unscripted moment involving Tyson and Ohtani, surrounded by two-plus hours that Barstool's own personalities couldn't sit through without complaining. The ESPYs have survived worse reviews before and will be back next July regardless. But when the loudest voices in sports media spend the whole broadcast asking what they're watching and why, that's a rough temperature check for a show that used to sell itself as must-see TV.