Jim Rome: Talking Head Joins Exodus From ESPN, Headed to CBS

It's official: Jim Rome is leaving ESPN and heading to CBS on a multi-year deal for a new show on the CBS Sports Network and an interview show on CBS-owned Showtime starting next fall.

This reminds me of an age-old philosophical debate. If Jim Rome spouts off an opinion on CBS Sports Network and nobody is tuned into the channel to watch it, did he actually make a sound?

Rome is the latest to depart ESPN in what has become a long line of writers and personalities leaving the Worldwide Leader.

Peter Gammons, Josh Elliott, Brian Kenny, Bruce Feldman, Pat Ford, Chris Sheridan, Mary Carillo, Rob Neyer, Amy K. Nelson, Jason Smith, Erik Kuselias and Matt Mosley have all departed ESPN in the past few years, most of them in the past year.

There are a lot of reasons for that—expanding competition from Versus, Yahoo! and all of the league-owned networks, for one—though as we've seen, ESPN departures seem to be especially juicy.

And Rome might be departing ESPN for a similar reason. Deadspin reported that, acccording to a source, Rome "wanted out at least in part because of comments made by an ESPN executive in Those Guys Have All The Fun, the oral history published last year."

John Lack—ESPN's executive vice president of marketing and programming at the time of Rome's hiring—described his debate with ESPN's vice president, John Walsh, who didn't want to bring Rome in. Lack thought the young Rome would come cheap and get ratings. The following excerpt comes from pages 250-51 of Those Guys Have All The Fun (via Deadspin):

"

All he cared about was, 'This guy is too controversial and I don't think that he's smart enough.' And I said, 'Look, he's definitely smart enough.' We went back and forth, I auditioned Rome, then sent him a contract, and all the time John is just boiling. One day, I got a call from Steve [Bornstein, the chairman of ESPN at the time]. He said, 'You better get in here because John's going nuts and he says if you hire Rome, he's going to quit.' Okay, whatever.

We schedule a meeting for the next morning. John comes, looks at me, and says, 'You're going to ruin the journalistic integrity of this network, which we've built up all these years. We're finally getting to a point where we are the real deal in sports journalism, and this guy's going to blow it all in a week on the air.'

"

Man, John Walsh must be fuming over all of the conflicting interests ESPN has in college football these days.

Hit me up on the Twitter—it's the best way to spend the last year of existence.