Familiar faces that resided on your television screen for years, talent like Ed Werder, Trent Dilfer and Andy Katz, all received pink slips from ESPN last week.
The most common explanation for why ESPN laid off as many as 100 employees, many of them well-respected in the journalism industry, is "cord-cutting" has taken a machete to ESPN's subscriber numbers, and most importantly, its profits.
Cord-cutting isn't a new concept -- the trend of consumers dropping their cable packages has been happening for years -- but Wednesday represented a watershed moment as a sports media behemoth had to shed talented, popular journalists to keep up with the changing times.