Early this year, ESPN announced major changes to its staff and shows. Around 10 on-air personalities were laid off in the process, including well-known names such as Ryan Clark, Karl Ravech, Tom Pelissero, and Cam Newton. After the move, most of them expressed gratitude for their time at the channel. Clark, however, voiced frustration over what he described as an abrupt, on-air “firing.”
The former panelist on NFL Live and Monday Night Countdown teared up on his podcast, The Pivot, revealing, “Let me put this to bed — I wasn’t laid off, I was fired.” However, Bomani Jones, who hosted The Right Time on ESPN for eight years and worked alongside Clark at the network, believes Clark and others in his position should let bygones be bygones. In Jones’s view, continuing to revisit the issue only serves to keep milking the cow.
“If I decided to pivot what I’m doing to doing like an ESPN watchdog show, or even just popped up when there was some sort of ESPN-related controversy, it would be kind of like they say at radio, if you really want to make money, just play Christmas music all the time,” Jones told Andrew Marchand on the Marchand Sports Media Podcasts.
“People will always listen to Christmas music. Like, I don’t know what it is, but people enjoy media criticism in part because they enjoy mess, but they seem to enjoy that more than they enjoy talking about sports.”
Clark was one of the highest-paid NFL analysts at ESPN. The Sports Emmy winner was earning around $2 million per year and had been with the network for more than a decade after signing in March 2015. But during an appearance on NFL Live in July, Clark was allegedly told mid-show that he was being let go.
ESPN, however, described the high-stakes cuts as a strategic move to optimize resources for the future.
“Over the past several months, we’ve made significant progress integrating the NFL assets that we acquired into ESPN,” ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro said in July. “Throughout this process, we have taken the time to carefully evaluate our collective teams, resources, and organizational structure to best position us for the future. As a result, we had to make some difficult decisions about job impacts that we will be communicating today.”
There has been a lot of change in how media operates in recent times, with digital and social media presence growing rapidly. Almost every channel now runs a YouTube or social media arm to reach its audience. The same goes for athletes building their presence beyond the field. So, for ESPN to make changes after its acquisition of NFL Network was not entirely unexpected.
That is why, according to Jones, Clark should move on and not talk about the network in a negative light to attract attention. However, as per Clark, the network is staging everything as a layoff when it was actually a firing.
“They’re using layoffs as a cover and a camouflage for what they already intended on doing,” Clark said in July. “But there was no cause for it. So because there was no cause for it, you couldn’t just fire me; you had to wait ’til the layoffs so you could camouflage it and veil it.”
Since his exit, Clark has focused on growing his own podcast, The Pivot, alongside Channing Crowder and Fred Taylor. The channel has 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube and landed a major deal with Netflix in August.
