ESPN Classic

SportsCentury is an ESPN biography program that reviews the people and athletic events that defined sports in North America throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. In 1999, ESPN counted down the Top 50 Athletes of the 20th Century, selected from North American athletes and voted on by a panel of sports journalists and observers, premiering a new biography highlighting each top athlete every week throughout the year. The episodes for the top two athletes, Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth, appeared on a special combined edition broadcast on Christmas Day on ABC. The top two names were announced in no particular order, and the final positioning was announced at the conclusion of the two episodes. An additional list of numbers 51-100 were announced on the ESPN SportsCentury website. Themed specials such as Greatest Games, Greatest Coaches, Greatest Dynasties, and Most Influential Individuals were premiered throughout the year, as well as six SportsCenter of the Decade programs. After the initial run was complete, the episodes were rerun at various times on ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN Classic. The original plan for the series was to expand to include #51-#100. Ultimately, the series featured nearly every athlete from #51-#100, and numerous other personalities, especially those who were recently deceased, or notable for more recent accomplishments.

Cheap Seats without Ron Parker, commonly shortened to Cheap Seats, is a television program broadcast on ESPN Classic hosted by brothers Randy and Jason Sklar. The brothers appear as fictional ESPN tape librarians who amuse themselves by watching old, campy sports broadcasts and wisecracking about them. Cheap Seats debuted on February 4, 2004, with an episode that showed ESPN sportscaster "Ron Parker" getting buried under a shelf full of tapes, forcing the Sklars to fill in, as they were behind Parker on the "hosting depth chart". The founding production team behind "Cheap Seats" included Mark Shapiro, Showrunner, Todd Pellegrino, James Cohen and Joseph Maar. Cheap Seats was originally an hour-long program. There were about 10 one hour-long episodes in the first season, all of which were subsequently cut down to fit a 30 minute time slot.

Some of the greatest legends of the Premier League are profiled.

Stump the Schwab is an American game show that aired on ESPN Classic. The show ran from July 8, 2004 to September 29, 2006 and featured three contestants trying to stump Howie Schwab, who was the first statistician ESPN ever had. Stuart Scott was the show's host. The show also appeared on Canada's The Score Television Network. Each episode of the show had three rounds, "Leading Off", a second round that featured a different game each time, and "The Schwab Showdown." After each of the first two rounds, the contestant with the lowest score was eliminated.

Missing Link was a retrospective sports program that aired on the American network ESPN Classic. It debuted on March 7, 2007 and aired every Wednesday night at 10 p.m. Eastern time and was hosted by the host of ESPN Radio's The Herd, Colin Cowherd. Missing Link is best described as a version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon involving famous athletes, coaches, and other sports figures. Each end of the chain is seemingly the exact opposite of the other in some way, but are somehow connected. The length of each chain varies between five and seven names. In a television-worthy twist, one end is connected, then the other, with a middle link revealed only at the end, following a commercial break. Missing Link was pre-empted on April 25 for a replay of the heavyweight boxing championship match between Lennox Lewis and Frank Bruno, but the show returned the following week, amidst a blog report that indicated that ESPN Classic would halt all original programs. It was then quietly dropped again two weeks later and did not return. ESPN Classic now fills the hour once taken up by Missing Link with various programs like Who's No. 1?.