5 Biggest ESPN Personalities That Have Left Since Last Year - Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS)

Former baseball ace Curt Schilling's departure from

Walt Disney CoDIS

's ESPN segment has certainly been well publicized and full of controversy. However, Schilling isn't the only big name to have left the company in recent history.

Bill Simmons

Bill Simmons is a sports columnist that wrote for ESPN.com and hosted a podcast on ESPN.com titled The B.S. Report. He also conceived the idea of '30 for 30,' a series of documentaries that chronicles 30 stories from the "ESPN era." After 14 years with ESPN, Simmons was fired from the company. Simmons has been critical of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell following the Ray Rice scandal which created a sense of bad blood between himself and the network. According to

New York Mag,

the NFL was instrumental in Simmons' firing from ESPN and Simmons himself suggested that the NFL is "powerful enough" to fire him.

Colin Cowherd

Colin Cowherd hosted a radio show on the ESPN network. He was let go by ESPN back in July 2015 following remarks he said on his radio show. Cowherd

said that he doesn't believe baseball is a complex sport and a third of professional athletes come from the Dominican Republic, which had "not been known, in my lifetime, as having, you know, world-class academic abilities." The following day, ESPN said that it would cut ties with Cowherd immediately. Keith Olbermann Before hosting a political themed show on MSNBC, Olbermann spent 20 years in sports journalism, including ESPN's SportsCenter's co-host. Olbermann was suspended for 2 weeks by ESPN in 1997 after he made an unauthorized appearance on "The Daily Show." During the show, he referred to Bristol, Connecticut (home of ESPN's headquarters" as being a "Godforsaken place." Olbermann left ESPN later on that year which set in motion a long-lasting feud. In fact, Olbermann was not invited to be a guest on ESPN's 25th anniversary SportsCenter "Reunion Week" in 2004. He did however rejoin the network in 2013 and hosted a one-hour nightly show on ESPN2 - that is until he was suspended in early 2015 after calling Penn State supporters "pitiful" in a Tweet. ESPN cited a business decision and desire to move in a new direction when it said that July 2015 would be Olbermann's last month with the network. Mike Tirico, Skip Bayless Mike Tirico was a play-by-play announced on ESPN's "Monday Night Football" from 2006 to 2015. Tirico is leaving the network to accept a position that is believed to be the lead announcer on NBC's "Thursday Night Football" games. Finally, Skip Bayless was a host of a daily sports talk program on ESPN2 called "First Take." ESPN confirmed that Bayless has decided to leave the company when his contract expires at the end of August.

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