Just speaking for myself, I do not agree it was a potential problem. It is not reasonable to treat trivialities as problems.
Things online can take on a life of their own and something that seems trivial can grow much larger than the one would expect. With stuff like Cecil the lion, Harambe, Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi Ad, Pepe the frog - I can certainly understand a network/person trying to avoid being an easy target for the online meme machine. It's hard to predict what will blow up on twitter, but swapping announcers no one knows for a game no one cares about probably seemed like a pretty low risk proposition to avoid that happening. It's not like they fired the guy or anything, he's just calling a different game.
I wouldn't be surprised if they leaked it themselves.
Someone working at ESPN supposedly leaked it so yes, in a sense that's true.
They drew attention to it by making such a stupid decision.
A competitor drew attention to it to stir up 'outrage' (this thread and the many others like it) and get himself ratings\clicks\ad revenue. I'm sure ESPN makes plenty of stupid decisions that get nowhere near this much attention.
They should know how to spin something by now. Instead a poor decision has turned them into a bad joke, offended a lot of people and potentially gotten them in legal trouble with an employee.
I think at this point everyone, even the people who made the decision, probably recognizes it would have been better for them to leave assignment alone.
