LOS ANGELES, CA – JULY 17: (L-R) Katie Nolan, Dianna Russini and Cassidy Hubbarth attend HEROES at The ESPYS at City Market Social House on July 17, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by John Sciulli/Getty Images for )

Katie Nolan hasn’t been employed at ESPN for the better part of four years now, but she’s still in amazement at the direction the company has gone in since her departure.

Like many in the current sports landscape, ESPN has mad a hard push into the betting space — which made for quite the awkward moment when the network very obviously removed an ESPN BET banner in the middle of a “Get Up” segment talking about the recent string of FBI arrests pertaining to the NBA’s gambling scandal.

The Worldwide Leader got into bed with Penn Entertainment on a betting service back in 2023 to the tune of $1.5 billion over 10 years, which Nolan is still in disbelief about since leaving the company two years prior.

ESPN personality Katie Nolan.

Katie Nolan: ESPN’s sportsbook ‘blows my mind’

“ESPN having a sportsbook blows my mind,” Nolan said on her SiriusXM podcast. “I get it. I’m out of touch with the industry and where it’s going and where it’s been. I understand that. You can yell that to me all you want to, it still is like you can’t be the reporting arm of sports and also the gambling [arm]… I don’t understand how they get away with it, but it is what it is.”

“I don’t know if you saw the clip of them talking about — I think it was on ‘Get Up’ — and they tried to quietly remove the bug that said ESPN BET from the corner of the screen. Which is like almost worse,” Nolan told her listeners. “It’s almost like deleting the tweet. You’re like, ‘Well, now we have screenshots of you doing the tweet, so it’s like a bigger deal…’ We know what’s behind that. We know what’s going on.”

ESPN vows betting service won’t dictate NBA coverage

After the “Get Up” moment went viral, ESPN execs came out and assured the public that it’s betting business won’t get in the way of its journalistic coverage of the NBA-related FBI arrests.

“The bottom line is … We’re not going to hold back in any way on doing what is journalistically responsible and aggressive in how we cover this story,” ESPN EVP David Roberts told Front Office Sports. “We have a responsibility to make sure we do the job. We maintain those journalistic standards. Because that’s what the fans expect when there’s a big story.”

“Times change,” Roberts said of the network’s shift to a betting service. “The industry evolves. My position is: You have to evolve with the times.”

Fans had similar concerns when ESPN made the move to acquire the NFL Network in exchange for the league getting a 10% equity stake in the media company. However, this seems to be the new ESPN way and we’ll have to see where it goes from here.