Paul Finebaum was almost fired before SEC Network launch

Paul Finebaum almost got fired before the SEC Network ever aired a single show.

Finebaum recounted the episode on That SEC Podcast, taped recently at SEC Media Days in Tampa. ESPN hired him in 2013 to anchor its forthcoming SEC Network, but the channel itself wasn’t scheduled to debut until August 2014, leaving executives with more than a year to figure out what, exactly, to do with a marquee hire who had nowhere yet to broadcast. That gap nearly proved fatal to his employment before it properly began.

“The network had not started yet, and they were thinking about firing me,” Finebaum said.

ESPN’s improvised solution was to relocate Finebaum to Charlotte, install him on radio to generate anticipation for the still-dormant network, and scatter him across whatever existing ESPN programming could absorb him in the meantime, including an improbable stint on College GameDay.

“I actually did College GameDay that year,” Finebaum said. “You normally don’t start your career doing College GameDay to get some reps for SEC Nation.”

He’s since revealed just how close that arrangement came to becoming permanent, telling Sports Illustrated‘s Jimmy Traina in a separate interview that then-producer Lee Fitting, who has since left the network, genuinely wanted him installed as a full-time panelist, only for the not-yet-launched SEC Network to intervene and block the move.

The specific incident that actually jeopardized his employment traced back to Jadeveon Clowney. Finebaum was appearing on The Insider, an ESPNU program that aired for hours at a stretch, alongside Ryan McGee and Dari Nowkhah, when the conversation turned to Clowney, then South Carolina’s star defensive end who’d been conspicuously missing practices. The information Finebaum introduced into that segment hadn’t originated with a scout or an anonymous source close to the program. It had come directly from Spurrier himself, who’d personally telephoned Finebaum to unload his frustrations about his own star player.

“He called me and said, ‘This guy is one of the worst players I’ve ever had. He doesn’t come to practice. He doesn’t do anything right. Doesn’t listen to anything,’” Finebaum recalled. “‘He’s driving me crazy. I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be on the team.’”

Clowney went on to become the No. 1 overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft. On air the following day, relaying exactly what Spurrier had told him, Finebaum branded Clowney “the biggest joke in college football” and “a disgrace.”

The blowback arrived within a day, and from a source Finebaum hadn’t seen coming at all: not Spurrier, who’d fed him the information, but South Carolina’s own athletic department.

He was broadcasting live from College GameDay‘s set at the University of Washington, during the same week Lane Kiffin appeared as a featured guest fresh off his firing from USC, when word reached South Carolina’s athletic department that Finebaum had claimed Clowney faced imminent suspension, a detail Finebaum insists he never actually stated. Athletic director Ray Tanner responded by appearing on South Carolina’s own pregame broadcast and eviscerating him publicly.

“He comes on the pregame show and rips me and said, ‘This guy is a disgrace. He shouldn’t be on the SEC Network,’” Finebaum said.

Spurrier, confronted with the same allegations during a separate GameDay segment, flatly denied ever making such comments, instead praising Clowney as “one of the finest players we’ve ever had,” despite having been the original source of Finebaum’s information in the first place.

The fallout escalated all the way to SEC commissioner Mike Slive by that Monday, surfacing during a conference call among the league’s university presidents.

“The president of South Carolina complains about me, and Slive doesn’t have any idea,” Finebaum said. “He said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘That’s outrageous.’ So Slive just calls me and starts chewing me out, and you can’t explain your way out of that. You can’t blame it all on Steve Spurrier, who called his own player a joke.”

With his wife having already resigned from her job and the family having uprooted their entire lives for Charlotte ahead of a network that hadn’t even aired a single broadcast, Finebaum genuinely feared his career there was finished before it started.

“This might be the shortest run ever,” he said. “This might be a worse gig than Urban Meyer with the Jaguars.”

It wasn’t, obviously. Finebaum has since constructed one of the longest and most consistently prominent runs in college sports broadcasting history, signing a multi-year extension with ESPN and the SEC Network in 2024 that continues to anchor his daily radio show alongside regular appearances on Get Up, First Take, SportsCenter, and College Football Live. ESPN president of content Burke Magnus called him “one of the leading voices across college football” upon that renewal.

Finebaum has entertained walking away on his own terms far more recently than that, too, coming remarkably close to launching a U.S. Senate campaign in Alabama last year before ultimately deciding, at 70, that he’d rather retain the SEC Nation chair he’s occupied since the network’s actual 2014 debut than trade it for a seat in elected office.

Part of what talked him out of it, by his own account, was Disney itself. He’s said the political operatives urging him to run had advised him that his clearest path through a Republican primary was campaigning against “woke Disney,” ESPN’s parent company, and Finebaum decided he couldn’t turn around and attack the same corporation that had employed him for 13 years — and nearly fired him — to win a Senate seat.