ESPN Announcer Mark Adams Slithers Into Sex Lives Of Snakes During Ohio State Game

ESPN basketball analyst Mark Adams made hiss-tory Wednesday when he veered into a lecture on the sex lives of snakes during the Ohio State-Towson game in Columbus, Ohio.

The website Awful Announcing tweeted a portion of the segment, writing that the broadcaster was “giving Bill Walton a run for weirdest dude calling college basketball games for ESPN.”

Holding a fake snake, Adams told play-by-play colleague Mike Corey with a few minutes left in the first half: “They become sexually active, Mike, at about 5 years old, and as a matter of fact right now is at the end of their mating season. You’ve got to think that 7 the snake is probably pretty happy right now that mating season is basically close to being over.”

Adams was merely elaborating on Buckeyes center Zed Key’s pet ball python named 7, which was mentioned during the ESPNU broadcast, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

The sportscaster went all in, preparing a fun lecture about the snakes.

“Ball pythons are really interesting,” he said, per the Dispatch. “They’re a constrictor. These little snakes, they can wrap around you and they squeeze the life out of you. So if you’re a rat in say Central Africa, good luck against the ball python. It’s probably not going to work out very well.”

The Buckeyes won, 85-74, but Adams may have bobbled at least one factoid: According to PetHelpful, male ball pythons reach sexual maturity at 16 to 18 months, and females at 27 to 31 months, well short of the five years he claimed.

Still, though, well played.