Ryan Clark details phone call that ended ESPN career

When ESPN went through another round of layoffs this summer, Ryan Clark’s name stood out. But it wasn’t just because of his star power at the network as arguably the most influential name ESPN decided to let go. It was because of the incredibly messy and damaging way it was handled.

Clark infamously learned ESPN was letting him go while NFL Live was still on the air in July, and he never finished the show. ESPN had planned to notify him the following day as part of a broader wave of cuts across the network and NFL Network, but moved up the conversation once OutKick, a conservative outlet and longtime critic of Clark’s, was preparing to report his exit, which Clark believes came from a leak. OutKick’s Bobby Burack later said the outlet gave ESPN’s PR team an hour’s notice before publishing so the network could tell Clark itself. It was the last time Clark appeared on ESPN.

The way the network handled the situation has led Clark to say that it was intentional. And ESPN was heavily criticized for the inhumane way in which it all went down, where it looked like someone at the network was looking to embarrass the former Pittsburgh Steelers star on the way out.

In an interview with Today anchor Craig Melvin on his Glass Half Full podcast, Ryan Clark went inside the events of that day in detail. He said he suspected his job at ESPN may have been in jeopardy because of whispers around the company, calling it the “best-kept internal secret.” But on the day he was let go, ESPN vice president of production Seth Markman called and told him that “they” were going to let him go.

“We’re doing NFL Live and showrunner Lydelle King texts me, very nonchalantly, ‘RC, hit my immediate boss, hit Seth up on a commercial break.’ I was like, ‘That’s weird. If anybody knows I’m on TV right now, he knows I’m on TV.’ So I knew it couldn’t have been good,” Clark said.

“First thing he says is, ‘This is a very hard conversation,’ he’s always stood up on the table for me, always had my back. And he goes, ‘They are going to let you go.’ Well, you work here too? You’re actually my boss. So that said something to me. Then he goes, ‘Our friends at OutKick, not my friend, clearly, have the story, and they’re going to leak it. And I don’t want that to happen to you while you’re on air.”

These details are fascinating because they suggest someone above Seth Markman made the call about Ryan Clark. Given the fact that Markman oversees all college football and NFL studio shows at the network, that list of people must be very small. Clark then complimented Markman for standing up for him inside the network. He also said that he was willing to finish that episode of NFL Live, but Markman advised him to not return to the airwaves as the story broke.

“He was really doing me a solid. And if anyone was going to call me that was an executive, I wanted it to be him. Because there’s so many times that other people in that building, because of things I believe, because of things I care about, have approached me certain ways, and he didn’t even make me say no, stop, this is going on. He would say it for me. So I appreciated that it was him. And then I asked him, ‘Well, should I go back on air? Should I go back on TV? I don’t want to leave them hanging and not do the last block.’ And he’s like, ‘No, I don’t think you should go back,'” Clark relayed.

Since his layoff at ESPN, Ryan Clark has taken several major steps forward with his production company, The Pivot. The show has a deal with Netflix, a partnership with NFL Films, and now an investment from billionaire Howard Schultz. That’s not bad for a guy who lost his national television gig just a few weeks ago.

But Clark also saw the silver lining through the darkness of his dismissal. He said that his ESPN firing allowed the world to see the trouble behind the scenes that he was experiencing at the network. And even though he believes that it was orchestrated to humiliate him, the circumstances also brought him the support he needed to transition to the next stage of his career at The Pivot.

“If I’m being honest, good for me. Because I felt so much ugly coming, there’s some beauty there too, some great relationships. But I felt so much ugly coming from different places. If they’re patient and they’re evil, it never comes to light. If you’re smart enough to say, ‘ We have these massive layoffs on Tuesday; if we’re doing this for the right reasons, if it’s about budget, if it’s about merging two companies, Ryan gets to find out that he’s laid off the day everybody else is. But the evil, the want, and the will to try to humiliate me, to try to garner favor for doing something you know is foul, backfired,” Clark said.

“Because you give it to me, an evil and hateful people, who you learn, a snake gonna do snake sh*t. And you may think while you have it in this cage, and you feeding it rats, it loves you. But it’ll eat you too. So now they see me on TV; they start getting antsy. And because you leaked it to them so they can write a great article about it, they can be so damn happy that Ryan Clark is gone. They’re about to out you. That’s how it happened. So now these things that were happening to me behind the scenes for an extended period of time, the world got to see it. And because the world got to see it, now I’m not so stupid. Now, I’m not so whatever you want to make me. These things were really happening. And I believe it allowed me to get support. It allowed people to be able to give me my flowers, and essentially has helped me in the transition to what we have now with The Pivot Sports show.”

Ryan Clark certainly had moments at ESPN that did not go well, whether it was his on-air takedown of colleague Peter Schrager or his comments about Kyren Lacy. But even Clark’s critics should admit that his layoff lacked any shred of empathy or decency. Yes, this is one side of the story, but it offers a fascinating look at the divides that seem to exist within ESPN. And it shows that perhaps leaving that world behind and embracing his independent career could be the best thing that happened to his career.

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