Listen to Yogi

Most of the music world is over the whole Elvis thing. But still, diehard fans run around in sideburns and white jumpsuits acting as if their idol is the most important person in this world — or the next. Fans are like that, thus their name. They do stupid things. They obsess. They spend gobs of money on their idols' product and likeness and other memorabilia. Sports fans are the most avid — some say rabid — of all. So you can't blame the folks at ESPN for thinking said fans would lay their cash at the altar of the sports information superstation by buying its mobile service: Mobile ESPN.

You might criticize ESPN's decision to pull the plug so quickly as it did last week — after all, it's a sports fan's nature to second-guess the coach or the GM — but you might be wrong. Granted, the company didn't even give the business model “the old college try.” It appeared to do a minor-league hatchet job on the marketing campaign. It didn't do a health check on its star player (the mobile device itself) to see if it could perform as advertised. And it didn't even attempt to make it through the industry's version of the All-Star break: the holiday season.

But for every expert — the equivalent in this case of a caller into a local sports hotline — who says ESPN quit too soon, there should be another who praises the company for knowing when to say when (a characteristic not found in the average sports fan). It is unclear when the leaders of ESPN made this decision, but they probably followed the advice of baseball great Yogi Berra. They came to a fork in the road, and they took it. And despite having invested millions of dollars in the launch of Mobile ESPN, the company no doubt saved itself millions more by not going all in with an unsure hand (yes, poker is a sport now, too).

It may seem like a failure, but only because we, the industry, wanted so bad to see it work. We were looking for growth, looking for something innovative. We forgot for a moment that half the MVNOs that launch will never make the cut. It took guts for ESPN to admit they made a mistake with their original plan, and someone's head may roll for it, but a new manager will be put in place and help the team execute on its new strategy.

And like sports fans everywhere, we will forget about last year's losers and watch from our armchairs as ESPN tries its hand at content delivery instead. We, too, can take Berra's advice. We can observe a lot by watching.