ESPN in the context of "Michigan Wolverines football"

Michael Dammann Eisner (/ˈaɪznər/ EYEZ-nər; born March 7, 1942) is an American businessman and media proprietor who served as chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of the Walt Disney Company from September 1984 to September 2005. Prior to Disney, Eisner was president of rival film studio Paramount Pictures from 1976 to 1984, and had brief stints at the major television networks NBC, CBS, and ABC.

Eisner's 21-year stint at Disney saw the revitalization of the company's poorly performing animation studios with successful films such as The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994), a period known as the Disney Renaissance. Eisner additionally broadened the company's media portfolio by leading the acquisitions of ABC, most of ESPN and The Muppets franchise. Eisner also led major investments and expansion of the company's theme parks both domestically and globally, including the openings of Disney-MGM Studios (now Disney's Hollywood Studios) in 1989, Euro Disney (now Disneyland Paris) in 1992, Disney's Animal Kingdom in 1998, Disney's California Adventure Park and Tokyo DisneySea in 2001, Walt Disney Studios Park in 2002 and Hong Kong Disneyland in 2005.

ESPN Inc. is one of the three major divisions of the Walt Disney Company. It is an American multinational sports media conglomerate majority-owned by the Walt Disney Company, with Hearst Communications as an equity stakeholder. It was founded by Bill Rasmussen.

It owns and operates the cable television, satellite television and streaming media channels ESPN, ESPN DTC, ESPN+, ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPNU, ESPNews, ESPN Deportes, ESPN Radio, ESPN.com, ACC Network, SEC Network and other related ventures, and the sports division of ABC, and is currently headed by executive James Pitaro.

Winter X Games XVI (re-titled Winter X Games Aspen'12; styled as Winter X Games Sixteen in the official logo) were held from January 26 to January 29, 2012, in Aspen, Colorado. They were the 11th consecutive Winter X Games to be held in Aspen. The events were broadcast on ESPN. The following year, the Winter X Games were held in two international cities: Aspen, Colorado and Tignes, France.

Lionel Messi is an Argentine professional footballer who plays as a forward for and captains both Major League Soccer club Inter Miami and the Argentina national team. His individual achievements include eight Ballon d'Or awards, the most for any footballer. Having won 46 team trophies, he is the most decorated player in the history of professional football. Messi is often hailed as a genius, with his prolific goalscoring ability and high level dribbling, passing and playmaking earning him recognition as one of the greatest and most iconic players in football history. In 2024, US-based sports company ESPN named Messi the greatest player of the 21st-century.

Messi's club career began with Barcelona, where he rose through the youth ranks, making his first-team debut in 2004. Over the next years, Messi became the club's all-time top scorer, amassing numerous domestic and international accolades. During his tenure, Barcelona secured ten La Liga titles, seven Copa del Reys, four UEFA Champions Leagues, seven Supercopa de Españas, three UEFA Super Cups, and three FIFA Club World Cups. In August 2021, due to financial constraints faced by Barcelona, Messi signed for Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). Joining forces with fellow superstars Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, he won two Ligue 1 titles and one Trophée des Champions. In July 2023, Messi joined Inter Miami, leading the team to win their first-ever trophies with the Leagues Cup and the Supporters' Shield.

The ESPY Awards (short for Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Awards, and often referred to as the ESPYs) is an annual American awards show produced by ESPN since 1993, recognizing individual and team athletic achievement and other sports-related performance during the calendar year preceding a given annual ceremony. From 2015 to 2019, and since 2021, the ceremony has aired live on sister broadcast television network ABC, while ESPN continues to air them in the form of replays. Because of the ceremony's rescheduling prior to the 2002 iteration thereof, awards presented in 2002 were for achievement and performances during the seventeen-plus previous months. As the similarly styled Grammy (for music), Emmy (for television), Academy Award (for film), and Tony (for theater), the ESPYs are hosted by a contemporary celebrity; the style, though, is lighter, more relaxed and self-referential than many other awards shows, with comedic sketches usually included.
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Robert Prime Beattie (/biːˈætiː/ bee-AT-ee; January 24, 1933 – April 1, 2018) was an American skiing coach, skiing promoter and commentator for ABC Sports and ESPN. He was head coach of the U.S. Ski Team from 1961 to 1969 and co-founded the Alpine Skiing World Cup in 1966. His work as a ski-racing commentator for ABC included four Winter Olympic Games, from 1976 through 1988.

The North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball program is a college basketball team of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels have won six NCAA championships (1957, 1982, 1993, 2005, 2009, and 2017) in addition to a 1924 Helms Athletic Foundation title (retroactive). North Carolina has won a record 134 NCAA tournament matchups while advancing to 31 Sweet Sixteen berths (since 1975), a record 21 Final Fours, and 12 title games. It is the only school to have an active streak of reaching the National Championship game for nine straight decades (no other school has done it in more than six straight) and at least two Final Fours for six straight decades, all while averaging more wins per season played (20.7) than any other program in college basketball. In 2012, ESPN ranked North Carolina No. 1 on its list of the 50 most successful programs of the past fifty years.

North Carolina's six national championships are tied with UConn for third-most all-time, behind UCLA (11) and Kentucky (8). UNC has also won eighteen Atlantic Coast Conference tournament (ACC) titles, and thirty-three ACC regular season titles. The program has produced many notable players who went on to play in the NBA, including four of ESPN's top 74 players of all-time: Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Vince Carter, and Bob McAdoo (tied for most with UCLA). Many Tar Heel assistant coaches and players have gone on to become head coaches elsewhere.

The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network that serves as the flagship property of the Disney Entertainment division of the Walt Disney Company. ABC is headquartered on Riverside Drive in Burbank, California, directly across the street from Walt Disney Studios and adjacent to the Team Disney – Roy E. Disney Animation Building. The network maintains secondary offices at 7 Hudson Square in New York City's Lower Manhattan neighborhood, which houses its broadcast center and the headquarters of its news division, ABC News. Until early 2025, the network's East Coast operations were based at 77 West 66th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Since 2007, when ABC Radio (also known as Cumulus Media Networks) was sold to Citadel Broadcasting, ABC has reduced its broadcasting operations almost exclusively to television. The youngest of the "Big Three" American television networks, the network is sometimes referred to as the Alphabet Network, as its initialism also represents the first three letters of the English alphabet in order.

ABC launched as a radio network in 1943, as the successor to the NBC Blue Network, which had been purchased by Edward J. Noble. It extended its operations to television in 1948, following in the footsteps of established broadcast networks CBS and NBC, as well as the lesser-known DuMont. In the mid-1950s, ABC merged with United Paramount Theatres (UPT), a chain of movie theaters that formerly operated as a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures. Leonard Goldenson, who had been the head of UPT, made the then-new television network profitable by helping to develop and green-light many successful television series. In the 1980s, after purchasing an 80 percent interest in cable sports channel ESPN, the network's corporate parent, American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., merged with Capital Cities Communications, owner of several television and radio stations and print publications, to form Capital Cities/ABC Inc., which in turn merged into Disney in 1996.

Sports journalism is a form of writing that reports on sporting topics and competitions.

The appetite for sports resulted in sports-only media such as Sports Illustrated and ESPN. There are many different forms of sports journalism, ranging from play-by-play and game recaps to analysis and investigative journalism on important developments in the sport. Technology and the internet age has massively changed the sports journalism space as it is struggling with the same problems that the broader category of print journalism is struggling with, mainly not being able to cover costs due to falling subscriptions. New forms of internet blogging and tweeting in the current millennium have pushed the boundaries of sports journalism.

The 2011 World Series was the championship series of Major League Baseball's (MLB) 2011 season. The 107th edition of the World Series, it was a best-of-seven playoff played between the American League (AL) champion Texas Rangers and the National League (NL) champion St. Louis Cardinals; the Cardinals defeated the Rangers in seven games to win their 11th World Series championship. They won their second in six seasons.

The Series was noted for its back-and-forth Game 6, in which the Cardinals erased a two-run deficit in the bottom of the 9th inning, then did it again in the 10th. In both innings, the Rangers were one strike away from their first World Series championship. The Cardinals won the game in the 11th inning on a walk-off home run by David Freese, who was named World Series MVP. The Series was also known for the blowout Game 3, in which Cardinals player Albert Pujols hit three home runs, a World Series feat previously accomplished only by Reggie Jackson and Babe Ruth, and subsequently by Pablo Sandoval in 2012. In 2020, ESPN named the 2011 World Series the fifth greatest of all time.

WrestleMania 41, also promoted as WrestleMania Vegas, was a 2025 professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) and livestreaming event produced by WWE. It was the 41st annual WrestleMania and took place as a two-night event on Saturday, April 19, and Sunday, April 20, 2025, at Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada, held for wrestlers from the promotion's Raw and SmackDown brand divisions. This was the second WrestleMania to take place in the Las Vegas Valley, after WrestleMania IX in 1993, which was held at Caesars Palace.

This was the first WrestleMania to livestream on Netflix in most international markets as the platform began a 10-year rights deal with WWE in January 2025 as well as the last WrestleMania to livestream on Peacock in the United States as ESPN's direct-to-consumer streaming service will begin a five-year rights deal with WWE, starting with Wrestlepalooza in September 2025. This was the first WrestleMania held during Easter weekend and the first WrestleMania to feature a match with CM Punk since WrestleMania 29 in 2013, which included the first WrestleMania main event of his career. The event also featured John Cena's final WrestleMania match due to his retirement from professional wrestling at the end of 2025, as well as his first WrestleMania main event match since WrestleMania 29. Its calendar date of April 19–20 is the latest that a WrestleMania has been held.

NBC Sunday Night Football (abbreviated as SNF) is an American weekly television broadcast of National Football League (NFL) games on NBC and Peacock in the United States. It began airing on August 6, 2006, with the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game, which opened that year's preseason. NBC took over the rights to the Sunday prime time game telecasts from ESPN, which carried the broadcasts from 1987 to 2005. At the same time, ESPN began broadcasting Monday Night Football when it was dropped from sister network ABC. Previously, NBC had aired American Football League (AFL), and later American Football Conference (AFC), games from 1965 until 1997, when CBS took over those rights.

During the 2011–12 season, Sunday Night Football became the first sports program to hold the position as Nielsen's most-watched program on American network television during the year, beating American Idol, which held that honor for eight consecutive seasons beginning in 2004; Sunday Night Football repeated this feat three years running, beginning with the 2013–14 season.

Disney Streaming (formerly known as BAMTech Media from 2015 to 2018, and Disney Streaming Services from 2018 to 2021) is a technology subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company located in Manhattan, New York City. It was established in 2015 as a spin-off of MLB Advanced Media—the digital media arm of Major League Baseball, focused on providing video on demand technology, particularly for over-the-top (OTT) media services. The company's major clients include ESPN (for its ESPN, ESPN+ and ESPN3 services), the National Hockey League, and Blaze Media.

It was majority owned by MLB Advanced Media (which is, in turn, a consortium of MLB's principal team owners), with minority stakes held by the NHL and other investors. Disney acquired a minority stake in the company in August 2016 for $1 billion, and the following year, announced its intent to increase its stake to a 75% controlling stake for $1.58 billion. The deal was approved by regulators in September 2017. With the acquisition of BAMTech by Disney, the company began to develop two subscription streaming services aligned with Disney properties: the sports-oriented service, ESPN+, and the global family entertainment service, Disney+; United States general entertainment service Hulu and Latin America general entertainment service Star+ were later transferred into the company in August 2021. Disney had acquired sole ownership by November 2022.

Lincoln Square is the name of both a square and the surrounding neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Lincoln Square is centered on the intersection of Broadway and Columbus Avenue, between West 65th and 66th streets. The neighborhood is bounded by Columbus and Amsterdam avenues to the east and west, and 66th and 63rd streets to the north and south, respectively. However, the term can be extended to refer to the neighborhood between 59th and 72nd streets. It is bounded by Hell's Kitchen, Riverside South, Central Park, and the Upper West Side proper. The Walt Disney Company’s New York City campus was located here, including ABC News, ESPN, Hulu, and studios for WABC-TV.

The area includes the 66th Street–Lincoln Center station served by the New York City Subway's 1 and ​2 trains, and is anchored by Lincoln Center, a growing collection of performing arts venues, and the Manhattan campus of Fordham University.

Sports channels are television speciality channels (usually available exclusively through cable and terrestrial and satellite) broadcast sporting events, usually live, and when not broadcasting events, sports news and other related programming.

The first sports channel was from the SportsChannel networks, which went on the air in 1977 with the original SportsChannel (now MSG Plus). ESPN began broadcasting in 1979. Since then, many channels have surfaced around the world, many focusing on one sport in particular, or one region of a country, showing only their local team's games. These networks have greatly improved the availability of sports broadcasts, generating opportunities such as the ability for one person to see every single game their team plays over the course of the season.

TV Everywhere (also known as authenticated streaming or authenticated video on-demand) refers to a type of American subscription business model wherein access to streaming video content from a television channel requires users to "authenticate" themselves as current subscribers to the channel, via an account provided by their participating pay television provider, in order to access the content.

Under the model, broadcasters offer their customers the ability to access content from their channels through internet-based services and mobile apps—either live or on-demand, as part of their subscription to the service. Time Warner Cable first proposed the concept in 2009; in 2010, many television providers and networks began to roll out TV Everywhere services for their subscribers, including major networks such as TBS and TNT (whose owner, Time Warner, was an early supporter of the concept), ESPN, and HBO among others. Broadcast television networks have also adopted TV Everywhere restrictions for their online content, albeit in a less broad-scale adoption than their cable counterparts.