Perhaps it was inevitable that I’d become my father. When I was a kid he’d shut off lights in unoccupied rooms, always with the grumbling rhetorical question, “Ya think I work for Con Ed?”

Now, I walk around shutting off lights in unoccupied rooms. Why shouldn’t I? It’s a waste of energy and money to have rooms lighted for the enlightenment of no one.

Naturally, that brings us to ESPN’s continuing mandate to cut costs through layoffs. In the past three years, ESPN has terminated 300 employees, with another 40-60 expected to be 86’d after Thanksgiving.

ESPN jobs are being sacrificed to declining subscribership and billions of dollars spent for rights to televise games. I get that.

But they’re also being sacrificed to telecasts regularly and needlessly destroyed by too much of everything, especially the expensive but worthless over-promotion of ESPN.

Imagine being one of these jettisoned employees who Monday night tuned to ESPN’s Dolphins-Panthers pregame to see five panelists shipped to Charlotte, N.C., to be seen standing on the field in the cold as they spoke hype and nonsense followed by TV-requisite forced laughter.

Or do ESPN shot-callers and people-firers genuinely think that such costly, vacant come-ons determine whether we watch the games that follow?

Tuesday, some of these ex-employees likely caught the pregame to the Duke-Michigan State basketball game in Chicago. If so, they saw five ESPN basketball-talkers seated at a large, near-court desk banging ESPN’s drums for this game.

During the game, to which ESPN attached three courtside announcers, an ESPN sideline reporter interviewed ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit, whom ESPN foolishly regard as a reason to watch its college football telecasts.

Herbstreit and other ESPN college football analysts also had been shipped to Chicago’s United Center to conduct an ESPN college football promo show after the basketball game.

ESPN’s enormously expensive, needlessly crowded and tough-to-take productions — larded in transparent promotion for whatever’s next — is a steady factor in making ESPN a paradise self-destroyed, a “nothing recedes like excess” farce.

And more layoffs appear imminent — jobs and careers ended or interrupted — so ESPN can save money.

What ESPN needs, even if he or she didn’t work for Con Ed, is someone like my old man, someone who can save money, and in ESPN’s case, jobs, by not wasting money.

Who cares about cracked ribs if first down at stake?!

Gee, it’s stupid out there.

Monday night, before the second play from scrimmage in Dolphins-Panthers, ESPN’s Jon Gruden: “Keep an eye on [Miami QB] Jay Cutler’s ribs — two cracked ribs, couple of weeks ago.”

OK, thanks. Got it.

Four plays later, on a third-and-5, Cutler threw an incomplete pass. Gruden: “Cutler’s gotta run, there. Put the ball down and run for the first down.”

Must’ve been spare ribs.

Thursday night on NBC/NFLN, as per Roger Goodell’s “spontaneous fun” invite to further encourage pros to act like jerks, RB Le’Veon Bell and two other Steelers performed a rehearsed TD skit after Bell, with the ball, crossed the goal line.

Four-plus minutes later, back from commercials, Mike Tirico informed us that the “instant” replay review of what previously — as in the previous 90 years — had inarguably been a TD, determined it wasn’t a TD. In yet another never-intended use of replay and despite Cris Collinsworth’s tout that there was no compelling evidence to reverse the call, Bell’s knee was ruled down an inch or two short.

Pittsburgh scored on the next play then kicked the extra point. Then off, again, to more commercials. Unlike the patrons in Pittsburgh, we could suffer this latest, unneeded, unwanted, systemic game-killer, indoors.

And TV’s simple-mindedness continues to present football as baseball. Monday, ESPN noted Panthers QB Cam Newton is 4-1 on Monday nights, as if his cut fastball baffles opponents when he pitches on ESPN.

Though TV is stuffed with well-paid football experts, few seem to know that its’ played by 11 men acting against 11 men at the same time.

At least one of those three UCLA freshman basketball players — “student-athletes” according to UCLA and Pac-12 — arrested in China for theft, must be too good at basketball to have been expelled, thus their punishment is an undetermined suspension. Tender mercy.

After all, in 2010, three UCLA freshmen football players — including Paul Richardson, now a receiver with Seattle — were thrown out of school when arrested for on-campus theft.

But NCAA student-athletics proceed, a national, adult-supervised, TV-enabled con.

Thursday on the Big Ten Network, Texas Southern’s basketball team went to 0-3, losing at Ohio State, the third of its just-pay-us, continent-hopping, 13 consecutive road games schedule.

Saturday, Texas Southern was scheduled to lose at Syracuse.

Rutgers continues to apply tax dollars and student subsidies to its top priority: trying to win ballgames.

RU’s men basketball roster includes recruits from Portugal, Holland, Canada, Mali, Senegal and France. Rutgers, “New Jersey’s State University,” has three players from New Jersey.

RU’s football-only weights-training coach is paid $260,000 a year, far more than RU’s tenured professors.

ESPN ‘confirms’ instead of reports

Reader Dan Stevens asks if ESPN thinks it’s still fooling viewers by repeatedly reporting that a breaking story has been “confirmed” by ESPN, “as if its confirmation is what’s significant.”

Does ESPN not yet understand that those smart enough to read its crawl know ESPN’s taking some credit for others’ work, that these are dishonest, see-through self-promotions? “Why,” Stevens concludes, “do they think we don’t realize how disingenuous they are?”

Well, in the military that’s called “stolen honor” or “stolen valor,” for which one faces court martial. On ESPN, it’s called journalism.

After pitching an extraordinary two complete games, Max Scherzer was a lock to win the NL Cy Young.

As for Jose Altuve’s AL MVP, add that to the pile of Mike Francesa’s Lost Tapes expert MLB analysis. Last season, well after Altuve was recognized as a star, Francesa claimed he’s nothing special.

In taking a call about Altuve, Francesa spoke in such generalities — the Francesa Tap Dance — it seemed he’d never heard of him.

Previously, Sitting Bull, among other sage but colossally wrong claims, said Daniel Murphy will never hit big league pitching, future AL MVP Dustin Pedroia “is a nothing,” and Brett Gardner is just “a fourth outfielder,” not an everyday player.

When is 0-9 pretty good? Last Sunday, during CBS’ Browns-Lions, play-by-play man Spero Dedes said this of the Browns coach: “I don’t know that another coach could’ve done more with this roster than Hue Jackson.”

That confused reader Chris Dellecese of Cleveland: “They’re 0-9, thus couldn’t it be argued that any coach could’ve done more?” Or at least as much!