At one point in the podcast, Simmons asserts "In 2013, [ESPN management] had no idea that cord-cutting was coming." The implication is that they were asleep at the switch.

Disney reports its annual subscriber numbers at the beginning of its 10-K filing with the SEC in November. Those figures are based on the Nielsen numbers from the preceding September.

The highest subscriber number on record for the main ESPN channel was 99 million in September 2012. By the next year, the main ESPN channel was down to 95 million.

The numbers continued to decline each year after that. But nobody on Wall Street or anywhere else seemed to be worried -- media stocks had performed incredibly well coming out of the 2008 financial crisis. Disney's stock had gone almost straight up from less than $16 in 2009 to $120 on July 31, 2015.

I raised the issues of how the declining subs were going to threaten Disney's stock in July 2015 in this article called "Short ESPN" (which was published a few weeks earlier in my Tech & Media Email).

A couple of weeks later, Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed on his quarterly earnings call that ESPN had experienced "some subscriber losses." The stock immediately fell 9%, taking down other media stocks as well. Disney's stock price is still 13% below that all-time high 2 years later.

So ESPN may have been slow, but so was almost everybody else.

What about Simmons himself? Did he bang the drum about subscriber losses back in 2013? No. He admitted that when he gave an interview with Peter Kafka of Recode in March 2015, he had no idea that cord-cutting was such a serious issue.