Stephen A.Smith said he confronted ESPN executives over the decision and called Clark "arguably the best NFL analyst in America." Emmanuel Acho accused the network of handling the situation in a "cowardly" and "wildly disrespectful" manner.RYAN CLARK BECAME A HEADACHE FOR ESPNSarah Spain described Clark as "another incredibly smart, thoughtful, nuanced talent let go," while Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio declared that Clark took "the high road" after "ESPN took the low road."Ryan Clark's ESPN dismissal sparked outrage from Stephen A.
Smith and Jemele Hill, but his history of apologies and friction tells a different story.(Patrick McDermott/Getty Images)Jemele Hill went even further.Hill suggested Clark had "a hater," perhaps multiple haters, inside ESPN.
She attacked OutKick as a "disgusting" right-wing "rag" and theorized that someone within the network intentionally leaked Clark’s dismissal to OutKick in order to create a conservative media narrative against him.She offered no evidence for that claim.But the fact that Clark’s dismissal leaked so widely and so quickly raises a question that his defenders have mostly avoided: How many enemies had he made inside ESPN?Much of the criticism centered on the fact that Clark was informed during a live edition of NFL Live.
The assumption was that ESPN knowingly allowed a longtime employee to begin the show before abruptly firing him during a break.I don’t think that’s what happened.I think ESPN planned to inform Clark later and simply failed to anticipate that news of his dismissal would leak first.Once OutKick contacted the network with a confirmed story, ESPN realized it had lost control of the timeline and had to tell Clark before he learned about it publicly.That’s not cruelty.
It’s poor planning.My colleague Bobby Burack and I developed separate lines of reporting that the network was preparing to part ways with Clark.Four sources confirmed the information.
Despite concerns that alerting ESPN could...