Great television immerses viewers into its world. Abbott Elementary takes them to 8 a.m. in a Philadelphia public school. Living Single allowed them to barge into a brownstone apartment as if they were Maxine Shaw: attorney at law. For more than 20 years, ESPN’s Around the Horn has taken its audience into a world of organized chaos five days a week.

The show works like a sports opinion video game. It has joysticks, sound effects, and, for the last seven years, augmented reality. Since 2002, Around the Horn has taken its viewers through the sports news of the day at a speed more fit for the autobahn than cable television, embracing a wild format that includes a rotating panel of four sports columnists and a host. 

However, from day one the show also embraced what has seemingly become a dirty word in America of late: diversity.

“I don't think that any show on the network demonstrated as much diversity on a consistent basis as Around the Horn did for 20 something years that it [has been] on,” Bomani Jones [first episode: 11/10/2010], host of the Right Time with Bomani Jones podcast, tells BET.

Sports media has long been accused of having a bias that highlights the perspectives on stories from the stretch of I-95 between Boston and Washington. ESPN headquarters itself is only about 100 miles from both Boston and New York. Around the Horn bucked that trend the moment it appeared on air, with the very first episode featuring columnists from each time zone in the United States: Bob Ryan in Boston, Jay Mariotti in Chicago, Woody Paige in Denver, and T.J. Simers in Los Angeles.

But beyond geography, the show more importantly did not hesitate to allow panelists to be their entire selves. Michael Holley [first episode 4/7/2003] is a studio host for NBC Sports Boston and a professor at Boston University. When Holley first appeared on Around the Horn, his hair was in dreadlocks. 

“I’d pull my dreads back into a ponytail,” Holley tells BET. “I remember one executive from ESPN, a Black woman, said ‘Hey, I’ve never seen your hair down. I don’t know if you feel like you can’t do that on the show or not. I’m not telling you what to do, but if you wear your hair like that off the show then do it on the show.’”

This was not long before Allen Iverson’s authentic style prompted an NBA dress code. In basketball, players were forced into (often hilariously 2000s-looking) suits. On Around the Horn, a dark-skinned Black man was encouraged to let his dreadlocks hang. 

That was in the producer Bill Wolff and host Max Kellerman era of the show. From there, producer Aaron Solomon and host Tony Reali took Around the Horn even further. When Jones made his first appearance on the show, he was living in Raleigh, N.C. However, he was not a sports columnist for the Raleigh News & Observer—he hosted a sports talk radio show for a company that was based in Canada.

Around the Horn continued to hire more non-white panelists, women, and personalities who were not featured on the back page of a major newspaper as a sports columnist. Kevin Blackistone [first episode 1/21/2003], currently a columnist for the Washington Post and professor at the University of Maryland, is still in the rotation of panelists. He got into sports writing after covering Nelson Mandela’s tour of the United States in the summer of 1990. In the 20-plus years since, there have been episodes with all Black panelists, and all women panelists. Blackistone said that Solomon understood the importance of diversity, and it can be traced back to his upbringing.

“His father is George Solomon, a longtime sports editor of the Washington Post who had groundbreaking hires during his time there,” Blackistone tells BET. “Having women cover the football team, or having women cover baseball, or having Mike Wilbon become the first Black columnist at the Washington Post, that’s the stock that Aaron Solomon comes from.”

“He’s not out to rock the boat like his father was, but that’s part of it.”

Solomon‘s feel for how to schedule panelists and structure a show has resulted in a program that in a fragmented 2025 television landscape has viewership numbers similar to ESPN’s First Take and Get Up.

Around the Horn has been on the air for so long that viewers whose lunch included recess in the aughts are now panelists. Harry Lyles Jr. [first episode 10/12/2021], an ESPN college football reporter, went viral on March 6 for taking time on the show to give Paige flowers for his day-one contributions.

Lyles Jr. was on a plane in 2021 when he was first informed that Around the Horn wanted him to be a panelist. He wept on that plane.

“I never viewed this as an if thing, I always viewed it as a when thing,” Lyles tells BET. “It’s still crazy to me to be on the show that I grew up watching every day after school.”

Part of the reason why Lyles felt that way is because he regularly saw Black faces on the panel when he was young. Around the Horn was a place where a young Black journalist could let his dreadlocks hang. In Jones’ case, he was a young radio personality who went on to host his own show on HBO–Game Theory–for two seasons. He credits Around the Horn for “changing his life.”

“It afforded me credibility,” Jones says. "The credibility of whether it be Woody [Paige], or Bob Ryan, or Bill Platschke, J.A. Adande, Kevin Blackistone, on and on and on, Jackie MacMullan, we can go on and on with the names, me standing side by side, or sitting side by side, with those people made me appear to be more credible. It bolstered whatever opinions I had. The idea that I was on that show meant that I was somebody that you were supposed to hear.”

The final episode will air on May 23 on ESPN. Yes, it will be remembered for its gamified format, graphics, and sound effects. But it will also be remembered as the place where many fans who didn’t see faces like theirs in sports media were first introduced to their favorite personalities. A place where diverse panelists could be themselves.