The Curious Case of Broadcaster Jeff Marek and His Split With Sportsnet

Marek confirmed on Friday he was no longer with Sportsnet, but we still don't know when or why the breakup occurred.

As the sports director of two Rogers radio stations in Ottawa for eight years and the morning host on a Bell Media sports talk radio station for 19, I've probably seen more rounds of Canadian broadcast layoffs than most.

For a while in the 90s and early 2000s, it was about redundancy. A media behemoth buys up a smaller radio company that has, for example, its own general manager. Well, we don't need two of those. But here's a lovely parting gift.

Redundancy isn't an issue anymore. Behemoths have begun selling stations back to smaller companies for pennies on the dollar or just closing them outright as we saw with a number of TSN radio stations.

The ones still standing keep getting pounded with layoff after layoff. With the industry shrinking and consumers heading online for everything they used to get from radio and TV, revenues are in freefall. To make the numbers look pretty to shareholders, employee salaries are eliminated like victims in a slasher film.

In more thoughtful times, the chosen few would get the bad news in a private meeting. These days, it's often in a group – even worse, sometimes, a group ZOOM call. Who has time to spend all day doing something that will probably happen again next week? Let's clip these folks en masse and get on with our day. Oh, and be sure to turn on your camera to show them you care.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I've seen more than my share of Canadian broadcast job carnage.

But the recent departure of Sportsnet's Jeff Marek is a curious one.

At this year's NHL Draft in Las Vegas, the well-known, well-respected broadcaster worked day one on the draft floor, interviewing all the first-rounders moments after they were selected, including Ottawa Senators first-rounder Carter Yakemchuk. 

He then took the red-eye home that night, leaving Elliott Friedman to go solo on the post-draft episode of the 32 Thoughts Podcast. All of that was pre-planned.* 

But Friedman had also said on the podcast they would do their final episode of the season after the July 1st free agent frenzy. That episode never happened, and Marek went silent on social media for over four weeks.

The next time we heard from Marek was on Friday, when he addressed the news that broke this week that he was no longer with Sportsnet.

His podcast partner, Elliotte Friedman, also chimed in.

For the reasons I mentioned above, the first thought is a cost-cutting move. But when layoffs do happen, the company usually reports them as such. And it's rarely a case of just one employee heading out the door. There are usually others.

Even now, after everyone has confirmed his departure, no one is saying exactly what led to this. Maybe it was a layoff, maybe it was a new opportunity, maybe something happened. 

Jonah Siegel at @yyzsportsmedia was first on the story and suggested the split was due to "draft reasons," leading to speculation that something specific may have happened on June 28th that led to the split.

If something happened in Vegas, it stayed in Vegas. For now, anyway.

^{*This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Marek's flight home on a red-eye after day one of the draft was planned. So the split didn't necessarily occur during the draft.}