Cam Newton says he holds no resentment toward ESPN for firing him and has started describing his run at the network as something closer to an internship than a career. He laid it out on his own podcast, “4th&1,” a day after ESPN cut him in a round of layoffs that also ended Ryan Clark’s eleven year run there.
Clark was informed Monday, reportedly while he was on air shooting NFL Live, a detail that drove most of the initial reaction online. Newton was cut Tuesday, and Outkick’s Bobby Burack reported he was the last big name on the list. The same round took Karl Ravech, who had been at the network since 1993, along with Tom Pelissero, Charles Davis, Bart Scott, David Lloyd, and Stephania Bell.
ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro sent an internal memo to staff that tied most of it to business rather than performance. He wrote that the company had made significant progress integrating the NFL assets it acquired and that difficult decisions about job impacts followed. Disney completed the NFL Network acquisition earlier this year in a deal that gave the league a 10 percent ownership stake in ESPN. The memo did not give individual reasons for anyone’s exit.
That framing matters for how Cam Newton is reading his own situation. He was not a marginal hire. He joined “First Take” in 2024 and inherited the Monday co-host chair opposite Stephen A. Smith last year after the network moved Shannon Sharpe out of it. ESPN announced a new multi-year deal with him in August. He said on the podcast that he did not see the cut coming, and that when the news came he reacted the way anyone would.
What he did not do was take shots at the building. He said he had been counseled that there is no other platform on linear television in his field like ESPN, and that nothing truer could have been said. He said the network cannot make him hate it, and that what he learned there amounted to an internship. He credited the talent in front of the camera and behind it, and said he was grateful for the relationships and connections he built.
The part of the message Cam Newton clearly wants to travel is the warning attached to it. His argument is that in the current media economy, anyone without their own platform is going to be overlooked, bypassed, and eventually extinct, and he used dinosaurs to make the point. The framing turns a layoff into a thesis about who actually controls a career in sports media, and it is the reason the clip spread faster than the layoff news itself did.
He applied that same logic to Clark. Newton said Clark is going to be fine and that The Pivot, the podcast Clark hosts with Fred Taylor and Channing Crowder, is not going anywhere. He said his own situation might look unfortunate from the outside, but that he is good, because 4th&1 is not going anywhere either. Both men walked out of ESPN with audiences that already existed independent of it, which is the entire distinction he is drawing.
Newton also pointed at a specific example rather than arguing in the abstract. He cited Emmanuel Acho, who was dropped by Fox Sports after years there and a Sports Emmy, and who rebuilt through his own show, Speakeasy. That is the proof point underneath the whole argument, and it is the piece most of the coverage has left out. Acho did not get another network chair handed to him. He owned the next thing.
Stephen A. Smith addressed the cuts publicly on his YouTube channel Tuesday and made clear the decisions were not his. He said he is going to miss Clark, that he is not happy about the decision, and that his bosses know it. He acknowledged that calls like these come down to fiscal circumstances above his level, and Yahoo Sports reported that he had advocated to keep Clark and was overruled.
