Before calling the Toledo-Duke game Dec. 29, ESPN analyst Len Elmore and producer Scott Gustafson discussed themes that they planned to address during the telecast.
Elmore wanted to talk about Duke’s star freshman, Jahlil Okafor, who at the time was being talked about as a Player of the Year candidate. Elmore wanted to use the telecast to point out some areas where Okafor needed to improve.
{podcast}
SBJ Podcast:
Writer John Ourand and Executive Editor Abraham Madkour discuss Len Elmore's career and impact within sports and outside of sports.
Elmore also wanted to discuss Virginia, the team he considered the best in the ACC. Just a week earlier, Virginia beat Harvard by 49 points, limiting the Crimson to just one first-half field goal.
Neither topic was welcomed by Duke fans, who view Elmore, a former University of Maryland star, as a typical Duke-hating Terp fan.
When Elmore broached both topics during the telecast, Duke fans took to social media to express their outrage, putting Elmore as a trending topic in the U.S. In two of the printable tweets, @Lukeduke1987 called the opinion “clueless,” while @CPark_1985 dismissed Elmore as a “hater.”
Duke fans see Elmore as biased against their team. Elmore starred for Maryland, one of Duke’s rivals, in the early 1970s. Judging from the venom in their tweets, they feel that Elmore goes out of his way to bash Duke.
Jay Levy, ESPN senior coordinating producer, dismissed those complaints of bias. He said ESPN is conscious about having specific analysts cover their former teams. As an example, Levy said former UConn coach Jim Calhoun is not assigned Huskies games.
But Elmore played against Duke four decades earlier, and Levy said he’s heard nothing on Elmore’s Duke telecasts to make him consider keeping Elmore away from Blue Devils games.
Elmore said the complaints come from largely anonymous social media accounts. The Duke fans who interacted with him at Cameron Indoor Stadium after the Toledo game all praised the announcer for how he calls games.
“Everybody thinks I have an anti-Duke bias,” Elmore said. “It’s the students and the radical idiots. All they hear is what they hear. Go back and listen to any Duke game. There’s no bias. I’m even-handed.”
