ESPN personality and former NFL defeneseman Ryan Clark, pictured in a September 2025 file photo, was fired by the network on Monday. (G Fiume / Getty Images)
By Michael Schwarz July 21, 2026 at 9:27am
On Monday, ESPN pulled NFL analyst Ryan Clark off the air after news of his imminent firing leaked to the media.
The circumstances of Clark’s reported dismissal from the troubled network involve some irony, albeit not for reasons Clark himself would recognize.
Clark often exhibited a victim’s mentality by grounding his analysis in hackneyed half-truths and outright lies about skin color. The irony is that he, like many other race-baiters, actually is a victim of sorts. More on that in a moment.
As for the firing itself, reporter Bobby Burack of Outkick gave an account of how it unfolded on Monday evening.
“By the way, here’s how unethical @jksports group at @ESPNPR is. @OutKick told them an hour before we had the news, and would give them time to comment/tell Ryan Clark. In that hour, they pulled Clark off the show but ran and told another reporter to try to beat us,” Burack wrote on the social media platform X.
By the way, here’s how unethical @jksports group at @ESPNPR is. @OutKick told them an hour before we had the news, and would give them time to comment/tell Ryan Clark.
In that hour, they pulled Clark off the show but ran and told another reporter to try to beat us. https://t.co/NzIJ5gI5Ym
— Bobby Burack (@burackbobby_) July 20, 2026
In other words, Outkick had the news of Clark’s dismissal ready to publish. But it gave ESPN time to inform Clark and do things the right way.
According to Awful Announcing, however, the woke network then scrambled to pull Clark off of “NFL Live” before the show finished airing. In the meantime, Andrew Marchand of The Athletic broke the story. Hence, Burack’s accusation that ESPN undercut its adversary Outkick by handing the scoop to Marchand.
Media-related drama aside, most conservatives undoubtedly agree that Clark’s wokeness helped make ESPN unwatchable.
On X, Christian influencer Jon Root provided a lengthy list of Clark’s woke transgressions over the years.
ESPN will be much better off without Ryan Clark.
He’s one of the biggest race-baiters in sports media.
Here are some of the dumbest things he said/insinuated while at ESPN:
– Shedeur Sanders fell in the draft because of racism
– Black coaches won’t get hired because former… pic.twitter.com/0uTLNR80g3— Jon Root (@JonnyRoot_) July 20, 2026
As a colleague, Clark also apparently rubbed some people the wrong way.
For instance, according to Marchand’s report in The Atlantic, ESPN had grown tired of Clark’s abrasiveness, both on air and off. In one incident on the “Get Up” program in September, when Clark — a former NFL defenseman — tried to refute fellow analyst Peter Schrager’s argument by pointing to the fact that Schrager, unlike the other panelists on set that day, had never played in the NFL.
apparently this factored into the Ryan Clark firing
Clark: “That’s the non-player in you”
Schrager: “Don’t belittle me like that, I can come & say as 3 ex-players are saying one thing & give an alternative perspective”
Clark: “What I need for you to do is not get mad & let me… https://t.co/P4vxNbf0lA pic.twitter.com/NDJib96324
— Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) July 21, 2026
So, did ESPN fire Clark because of his wokeness or because colleagues thought him a jerk? The former, of course, would reflect a broader cultural shift away from unhinged leftist race-baiting. But we cannot know for sure.
Either way, ESPN botched his firing the same way the network botched the NFL Draft in April.
A 13-year NFL veteran, Clark won a Super Bowl with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2008-09 and made one Pro Bowl.
Fans of the Steelers — this writer included — remember Clark as an aggressive and fearless tackler on an elite defense. In fact, his hit on Baltimore Ravens running back Willis McGahee in the waning moments of the 2008-09 AFC Championship Game remains one of the most violent collisions in NFL history. See Clark’s highlight reel in the following YouTube video. The hit on McGahee appears at the beginning of the video.
All of this serves as a relevant reminder that Clark rose to prominence as a star football player. Then, when his playing career ended, he entered sports journalism.
And there the irony in Clark’s race-obsessed victim mentality begins.
Unfortunately, modern sports journalism often involves the uneasy imposition of politics on entertainment. Networks, for instance, hire NFL analysts for their experience with professional football, not for their political views. Those analysts, of course, may harbor whatever political views they like. But no one employs them to share those views.
Thus, when someone like Clark feels either inspired or compelled to infuse his sports analysis with political commentary, he falls back on what he has heard and what has helped him advance in sports journalism: The mindless race-baiting he undoubtedly absorbed in school and Heaven knows where else.
To illustrate, I once sat in a graduate seminar with a female M.A. student who insisted on working the word “Eurocentrism” into seemingly every comment and every answer to a professor’s question. At the time, of course, it annoyed me. But later I realized that she behaved that way because other teachers and professors had rewarded her for it. When in doubt, reflexively blame or denigrate white Europeans in history, and you will advance in academia.
A similar phenomenon probably helped make Clark the insufferable race-baiter he became. In that sense, he is a victim — a victim of an early-21st-century intellectual and professional environment that rewarded race-baiters for reducing everything to “systemic racism” or whatever the leftist jargon du jour happened to be.
That explains, for instance, why Clark could say, as he did on a 2025 podcast, that former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III cannot have an opinion on the WNBA rivalry between Caitlin Clark (no relation), a white woman, and Angel Reese, a black woman, because Griffin III married a white woman, notwithstanding the fact that Clark himself has a child with a white woman.
In other words, truth and consistency make no difference. What matters in too many cases is saying the right thing from a woke perspective. That approach carried Clark a long way in his post-NFL sports journalism career. But it also makes him a victim of sorts, for he will never fully understand why so many colleagues and viewers found him so abrasive.
After all, like the woman in my graduate seminar who shouted “Eurocentrism” at every turn, he merely said what others had long rewarded him for saying.
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Michael Schwarz holds a Ph.D. in History and has taught at multiple colleges and universities. He has published one book and numerous essays on Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Early U.S. Republic. He loves dogs, baseball, and freedom. After meandering spiritually through most of early adulthood, he has rediscovered his faith in midlife and is eager to continue learning about it from the great Christian thinkers.
Michael Schwarz holds a Ph.D. in History and has taught at multiple colleges and universities. He has published one book and numerous essays on Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Early U.S. Republic. He loves dogs, baseball, and freedom. After meandering spiritually through most of early adulthood, he has rediscovered his faith in midlife and is eager to continue learning about it from the great Christian thinkers.
