The partnership between ESPN and the NFL is a historic moment in the sports media industry. But with billions of dollars and equity stakes changing hands between the country’s biggest sports league and its biggest media outlet, there are still many questions hovering over the proposed deal.

Arguably the biggest question for ESPN and the NFL is how the network will be able to cover the league fairly and equitably now that the NFL has an ownership stake in Bristol. ESPN felt like they needed to make a bold move to continue to thrive in the streaming era, and the NFL partnership will be worth its weight in gold from a dollars and cents point of view. In fact, it’s already paying dividends with extra NFL games and content for the network and its new DTC platform.

But along with that deal comes questions about ESPN’s editorial independence as the WorldWide Leader in Sports that will forever hang over this business relationship. And in a special piece for Sportico, former ESPN executive vice president and chief marketing officer Laura Gentile shared some of those concerns herself.

In fact, she goes as far as to say that ESPN has “sold itself to the NFL, once and for all.”

Now ESPN has sold itself to the NFL, once and for all. The NFL enabled ESPN to emerge as the Worldwide Leader in Sports with the advent of Sunday Night Football in the 1980s, long before Faith Hill and Cris Collinsworth on NBC. The original SNF put NFL games on cable TV for the first time, breaking the stranglehold of the broadcast networks, adding a new and prosperous rightsholder to the mix, driving up player salaries and ultimately enabling the NFL to become the dominant sports league in America.

To show the stakes involved here, both NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro have made statements that they don’t expect the network’s journalism towards the NFL to change. But we’ve already seen a planned Colin Kaepernick documentary fall by the wayside that certainly wouldn’t have been flattering for the league.

Pitaro, Goodell, and anyone else at ESPN or the NFL can offer as many assurances as they want, but it won’t make the skepticism go away until the proof is evident that things have been unchanged and the network can still cover the league in an unflinching way.

But Gentile is concerned not just with the NFL dynamic, but with other sports as well. With the NFL owning an equity stake, how much more will ESPN invest in the league as far as coverage and airtime goes? And how much will other sports be pushed to the side, particularly women’s sports. Gentile was the founder of ESPN’s women’s sports vertical espnW.

Are we to believe, with the NFL on the cap table, that ESPN can remain objective? If concussions continue to threaten the lives of star players, will ESPN foster an honest dialogue about it? If a quarterback decides to kneel during the national anthem again, will ESPN dig deep and ask why? If off-the-field misdemeanors, or worse offenses, further damage our belief in sports heroes, will ESPN care?

Can ESPN still cover the full spectrum of sports like it once did? What about the company’s other partners? If the NBA and college football are vying for second place in the coverage game, my bet is that college football—the perfect minor league system for the NFL—knocks the NBA down a peg, and casts a long shadow over the NHL and MLB. 

And what about women’s sports? There are simply not enough minutes in the day or pixels on your phone for adequate, let alone equal, coverage—particularly from August (preseason NFL) through February (the mighty Super Bowl). How can any media company claim to care about growing women’s sports when that network is literally owned by football?  

Gentile closes her piece by echoing a refrain that has been common in recent months, that the ESPN that sports fans once knew and loved is dead and gone – replaced by a mix of bombastic hot takes and serving corporate interests. She gives voice to the belief that ESPN is no longer the independent sports network from the northeast with the mission of serving sports fans, but is instead serving its bottom line.

Now ESPN is in the increasingly untenable position of serving two mightier masters: the NFL and The Walt Disney Company. It will become ever more difficult to remain objective—never mind critical, irreverent or funny. I, for one, am losing sleep over ESPN’s eroding position and loss of identity. 

Those of us who grew up with ESPN as our easy companion will miss the days of independence, honesty and hilarity. It was glorious. For the next generation of fans, we’re sorry you missed it. ESPN was the best friend a sports fan could have.

It’s one thing for an outsider to have this viewpoint and skepticism. But it is stunning to see from someone who was at the executive level with decades of experience at ESPN. Gentile’s words show that any concerns about ESPN’s journalistic integrity under its new partnership with the NFL isn’t just outside noise, it’s something that may just be reflected deep within Bristol as well.

And the only thing that ESPN can do to prove that these concerns aren’t valid is by doing its due diligence and putting the interests of fans and others before their new part-owners of the NFL week after week after week.