When sanctimonious Get Up co-host Michelle Beadle on Thursday grandstanded/virtue-signalled about no longer watching football in the aftermath of the Urban Meyer scandal, the NFL-centric ESPN obviously had already decided to send her back to Los Angeles (did she keep her apartment and put her furniture in a storage unit?) to increase her role in NBA coverage. She also supposedly leveraged a contract extension out of the schedule reshuffle.

New ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro seems to be trying undo the damage left behind by former “Worldwide Leader” boss John Skipper, who turned the sports network into a tedious, left-wing, social justice platform.

Bristol, Conn.-headquartered ESPN had already announced that it is bringing a roster of football analysts to the Get Up table.

The show, which premiered on April 2,  will see its hours cut back from three hours to two effective September 3. Beadle will be gone as of August 31.

In its expensive, new lower Manhattan studio, the much-hyped Get Up morning show, which is reportedly paying Beadle, Mike Greenberg, and Jalen Rose about $15 million combined in annual salary, has turned out to a ratings disaster.

The Big Lead first reported this development about the show that some ESPN critics derisively nicknamed WokeCenter 2.0.

“Michelle Beadle will leave ESPN’s morning show Get Up at the end of the month; she and NBA Countdown are returning to Los Angeles. She will be replaced on Get Up by a rotating cast of Maria Taylor, Laura Rutledge, Jen Lada, Mina Kimes, and Dianna Russini…Beadle will also be a part of a new NBA post-game show launching this fall….”

NBA analyst Rose will apparently spend less time on the Get Up set, while the avuncular “Greeny” will remain with the show as master of ceremonies.

Parenthetically, the original WokeCenter, as it were, was the now-cancelled SportsCenter 6, SC6 or The Six, with Jemele Hill and Michel Smith, another show nobody watched despite a big promotional push by Skipper and his team.

According to New York Post media columnist Andrew Marchand, who seems to be on the gullible side, Beadle never wanted the Get Up gig, but Skipper kept throwing cash at her.

Marchand adds the following:

“The pairing of Beadle with Greenberg was one of Skipper’s final gifts during his largely regrettable tenure at the network. But anyone who knows anything about Greenberg or Beadle knew it wouldn’t work. They are too different in so many ways. They did not look like they enjoyed being on set together — and it was even less enjoyable to most viewers. The bottom line, though, is that if Beadle and Greenberg had clicked, this would not be happening.”

Get Up is not the only show that is on the receiving end of shrunken airtime. High Noon, anchored by ESPN personalities Bomani Jones (who failed as an ESPN radio talk host) and Pablo Torre, will longer air at noon Eastern as of September 11, and the network is paring it down from 60 minutes to 30.

Effective August 24, ESPN is pulling the plug on the L.A.-based  SportsNation, one of Beadle’s former platforms, after nine years, and reassigned its regulars to other shows.

With no name change, High Noon will become part of the two-hour, very redundant talk-show programming block that starts at 4 p.m. Eastern  and continues with Highly Questionable, Around the Horn, and Pardon the Interruption. Another edition of SportsCenter will occupy the former High Noon slot.

Incidentally, as of September 3, First Take is moving to New York City, where Stephen A. Smith is based.

FS1 host Jason Whitlock raised an interesting rhetorical question on Speak for Yourself about the Michelle Beadle rant. With all the scandals coming out of Hollywood, will L.A.-based Beadle be similarly disavowing movie industry content?

Update: Marchand reports that ESPN is buying out Jemele Hill’s contract. After the failed SC6 gig, she moved over to The Undefeated, ESPN’s long-form journalism website, as a correspondent but that was likely just a public relations ploy. It’s similar to when a company “promotes” someone to “new product development,” which is just another way of signaling that that person is on the way out. Hill will probably resurface on MSNBC and/or CNN because those networks clearly have a shortage of anti-Trump commentators.