ESPN began showing more Olympics highlights on-air and online beginning with the 2006 Winter Olympics, with the network obtaining these extended rights from NBC as part of the 2006 deal that saw ABC release Al Michaels from his contract, in order to join John Madden and key production personnel for the new NBC Sunday Night Football (this same deal also reverted rights to the Walt Disney-produced Oswald The Lucky Rabbit cartoons from Universal Pictures, which originally distributed the shorts).

[9] The program was originally anchored by Chris Berman, George Grande, Greg Gumbel, Lee Leonard, Bob Ley, Sal Marchiano and Tom Mees.

Grande introduced the country to ESPN when he co-anchored the premiere episode of SportsCenter on September 7, 1979, with Leonard, a longtime New York City sports broadcaster.

[11] The program's title sequence during its early years included various kinds of sports balls flying outward, set to a rapid-fire electronic music version of "Pulstar" by Vangelis.

[13] In 1994, ESPN launched the This is SportsCenter advertising campaign, a series of humorous, tongue-in-cheek spots featuring anchors and crew, based on the show's opening tagline.

"[14] The team of Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann—who anchored the 11:00 p.m. (Eastern) edition of the program—achieved great popularity during the late 1980s and the 1990s, a period interrupted by Olbermann's brief move to spin-off channel ESPN2 upon that network's launch in 1993.

[citation needed] In 2001, Toronto-based Bell Globemedia and ESPN (which received a minority stake) jointly acquired The Sports Network (TSN).

As part of its shift to ESPN-influenced branding, the specialty channel rebranded its existing sports news program SportsDesk and changed its name to SportsCentre, using the same introductions and theme music as the ESPN version, except with its title rendered using Canadian spelling.

[15] On September 11, 2001, ESPN interrupted regular programming at 11:05 a.m. Eastern to cover the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks through a simulcast of ABC News coverage.

The special milestone edition was anchored by Steve Levy and Stuart Scott; Bob Ley, Chris Berman and Dan Patrick made guest appearances to recap events as well as bloopers from the first 10,000 shows (all three men individually counted down each set of 10,000 clips).

Four months later on May 6, another major change to SportsCenter was introduced on that night's 11:00 p.m. (Eastern) edition, with the debut of a "rundown" graphic that appears on the right-side third of the screen.

During that broadcast, ESPN aired live coverage of Roger Clemens's second start for the New York Yankees' minor league affiliate in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The original plan was to start the live block three hours earlier at 6:00 a.m. Eastern; however, the network decided to scale back the length of the daytime broadcast before the expansion occurred.

Steve Braband, an International Programmer for the network, won, and was featured in ads shown about every half-hour (excluding from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time) on ESPN.

The set is virtually identical to the setup at the main facilities in Bristol, and the late-night West Coast broadcast would be produced as simply another edition of the program.

On August 30, 2010, ESPN expanded SportsCenter to ESPNEWS, airing an additional seven hours of the program in separate blocks from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 to 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time, canceling the channel's self-named rolling coverage.

By mid-2011, shortly after ESPN and ESPN2 both converted to a 16:9 letterbox format (in compliance with the #10 AFD code) on their primary standard definition feeds, SportsCenter began showing all high-definition and standard-definition footage in the appropriate aspect ratio on the SD feed (with stylized pillarboxes adorned with the ESPN logo used on footage presented in standard definition).

The move required the letterboxed image to be shrunk in order to be displayed in that manner, with the "rundown" graphic continuing to be placed on the left side of the screen.

In August 2011, John Anderson – who previously served as the 11:00 p.m. (Eastern) anchor – was moved to the early-evening 6:00 p.m. broadcast, replacing Brian Kenny (who departed ESPN to become a program host for the MLB Network).

It was reportedly only the fifth of six times that an outside news event not involving an athlete was reported on the ticker, alongside the news of the September 11 attacks, the death of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks in 2005, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States in 2008, the Killing of Osama bin Laden, and the later death of former South African president Nelson Mandela on December 5, 2013.

On February 8 and 9, 2013, the 11:00 p.m. editions of SportsCenter on both nights were broadcast from Los Angeles, due to a massive snowstorm in the Northeastern United States that prevented some staff from conducting the program out of ESPN's Bristol headquarters.

In late March 2013, David Lloyd and Sage Steele, both of whom were previously co-anchored the weekend morning editions – moved to the weekday early-afternoon block (from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Eastern).

On June 22, 2014, SportsCenter began broadcasting from Studio X of ESPN's new Digital Center 2 facility, which concurrently resulted in a major overhaul to the program's production and on-air appearance.

The new studio incorporates over 114 displays – including two touchscreens, large vertical screens, and a "multidimensional" video wall consisting of 56 monitors of varying sizes and positions that can be used to create pseudo-3D effects.

To coincide with the redesign of SportsCenter, a revised variant of ESPN's BottomLine ticker was introduced to complement the new graphical design, using a dark grey color scheme.

ESPN FC correspondent Jonathan Johnson, as well as then French president François Hollande, were attending the game in the Stade de France, around which the three explosions occurred.

In another notable change, the "rundown" graphic has been permanently removed after a decade and (with the exception of the midnight ET edition with Scott Van Pelt) it has now been replaced by a bug on the lower-left portion of the 16:9 screen.

On September 6, 2019, in honor of the 40th anniversary of ESPN's launch, Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick made a surprise on-air reunion as guest hosts for the late-night edition, which featured tributes to their time at the network.

SportsCenter Right Now, a bulletin version of the program, was launched earlier on November 24, during the Group B rounds of the 2019 FIBA World Cup Qualifiers.

[45] In March 2018, it was nominated for a Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Social TV Experience and gets 2 million unique visitors each day.