Stephen A Smith and the ESPN show First Take got into some major hot water last Friday after some comments he made about the Ray Rice suspension and domestic violence, dropping the word provoke when talking about females and their role in the situation and naturally that caused a big uproar, so before taking about some stupid LeBron James jersey story, Smith took to the airwaves to apologize and that was about it.
ESPN has said they want to "embrace debate" and it has driven the intelligence of the network as a whole down to the lowest common denominator of sports fans and this is what happens when a network does that. Here is the video courtesy of Deadspin and while the apology is solid, it does not address the real issues and just as quickly as he finishes, the show delves into other topics and acts like this never happened.
From last week, more on the issues and why he is apologizing:
ESPN embraces debate and now the network is in a heap of hot water after Stephen A. Smith made some comments on video on the show "First Take" about the Ray Rice domestic violence situation and he appeared to say that women also bear some responsibility at provoking violence and he was roundly criticized, including on Twitter from ESPN's Michelle Beadle.
The whole situation is a mess for ESPN and this is what they get for stoking debate constantly and on top of that, this also sheds more light on what the NFL did. The NFL suspended Ray Rice for two games for domestic violence and many critiqued them for that as well. Either way, this situation is a bad mark for ESPN and Smith, who has said controversial things in the past but is not looked at as a "bad guy" and he tried to defend himself on Twitter after that.
Smith almost looks worse doing that after what he said and now ESPN and their PR army likely will tackle this hardcore.