Courtesy USA Today

(March 12, 2010) ESPN/ABC will Friday announce a sort of 21st-century update of a 20-century concept: Saturday afternoon network sports shows, that do not include big events, in the old time slot of ABC's Wide World of Sports.

But don't expect cliff-diving.

ESPN Sports Saturday and Winners Bracket, debuting April 3 on ABC and anchored by Hannah Storm, will air 4-6 p.m. ET. The first hour will sometimes be a launch pad for ESPN shows, such as ESPN's Guru of Go documentary on Hank Gathers that debuts in the first Saturday, as well as ESPN's E:60 and Homecoming with Rick Reilly. And the Saturday show on ABC will also be a recycling center for such shows after they've aired on ESPN.

The second hour will consist of Winners Bracket, a sports week-in-review — the week's top stories will be in a bracket to determine who's No. 1 — hosted by Michelle Beadle and Marcellus Wiley, who appear on ESPN2's weekday SportsNation.

John Skipper, ESPN executive vice president/content, says Bracket will "be near-live, which is sometimes how I think my life is going" and won't be a news show, although it will use ESPN's Bottom Line onscreen news graphic. "But if we were to have a hit show here, given our DNA, we'd look to incorporate more news."

Weekend sports anthology and studio shows, back in the days of pay phones and typewriters, popped up on broadcast networks. But broadcast networks today, when they're not showing big weekend events, generally hand over the time to their local stations or sell so-called time buys to events buying their way onto TV.

So while Saturday is a throwback, it didn't spring from any sweeping theories about TV. ABC affiliate stations, says Skipper, asked in January what ESPN could put on ABC on Saturday afternoons without college football.

"Sometimes you wish you could say it was more long-term and strategic and based on research," says Skipper. "This was just responding to a request."

blog comments powered by Disqus