Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd accused ESPN of burying Inside the NBA to please Adam Silver and the league, and Charles Barkley didn’t take long to push back.
Last week, Barkley joined The Dan Le Batard Show, where he said Inside the NBA’s transition from TNT to ESPN “has been great.” However, he did complain about having too light a workload in the new arrangement, after spending more than a year warning ESPN not to work him too hard.
On Friday, Cowherd pulled out his “jump to conclusions” mat and surmised that this was no accident (and not, say, ESPN back-loading the show to avoid competing directly with the NFL).
“ESPN buried that show,” Cowherd said on his FS1 and Fox Sports Radio show. “ESPN has a great relationship with the NBA, and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll bring that show over. You won’t see it as much.’ Put it on the shelf a little bit. Because Adam Silver…”
“It felt very, very big at one time, and now it’s invisible,” Cowherd continued. “I know there were people upstairs in the NBA office that didn’t like how they lampooned the league and some of the players. People upstairs didn’t love – they would say, ‘NFL shows don’t make fun of the players, why are we making fun of the players?’
“Charles is complaining; it feels obvious to me. You have these new deals, and there’s a lot of understandings that don’t have to be contractual. David Stern didn’t like when people were critical of the NBA either. They’re very sensitive in the NBA.”
Inside the NBA just so happened to return to ESPN airwaves on Saturday, and Barkley indirectly called out Cowherd over how he felt like his comments were miscontrued.
“And then you got fools on television…saying that we were talking bad about the players so they made us work less, shut the fu.. hell up!” Charles Barkley appears to respond to Colin Cowherd https://t.co/wAd6yttWWV pic.twitter.com/eL5qdFeZkl
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) January 24, 2026
“Can I look at this camera right here? Yes. Okay,” said Barkley. “There’s some fools at home. Well, on the internet. They’re at home now. Saying that we were talking bad about the players, so they made us work less. Shut the hell up. Shut the hell up. This is already scheduled.
“These guys are like, ‘Well, these guys, they’re going to put them on the shelf because they don’t want them on TV.’ Man, you all need to shut the hell up. This was already planned months and months ago. All I said was I would like to work more.”
Few people in sports media speak as freely as Charles Barkley, and because of that, he often shares his opinions in ways that are given far more weight than they probably deserve. The odds are, when it comes to his comments about workload and relationships with the NBA and ESPN, he’s just blowing off steam.