| Runtime: | 30 minutes |
| Starring: | Colin Cowherd |
| Country: | United States |
| Network: | ESPN Classic (2007) |
| Num Seasons: | 1 |
| Num Episodes: | 13 |
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 (it aired in a two-episode block) with various programs like Who's No. 1?.
The first chain on the premiere episode was Lou Gehrig to Mike Tyson, as follows:
On episodes on which this was applicable, the National Football League was represented by still photography, while other sports were represented by videotape. There has been no official information explaining the omission, but NFL Network debuted NFL Top 10, a new Wednesday-night countdown-style documentary series, several weeks after this show's first episode, so the network may have demanded exclusivity. The omission is similar to the snub the league gave to ESPN25 in 2004 in the aftermath of the Playmakers series. Similarly, despite the recent return of NASCAR to ESPN, only pre-2001 footage of Dale Earnhardt Jr. was shown on the episode on which he was linked to Carl Lewis. 2001 was the year NASCAR began to centralize its TV contracts.
Below is the list of episodes from season one of Missing Link.