{"id":957561,"date":"2026-07-25T03:38:30","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T03:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/957561\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T03:38:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T03:38:30","slug":"who-benefits-from-espns-layoffs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/957561\/","title":{"rendered":"Who benefits from ESPN’s layoffs?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This originally appeared in Thursday morning\u2019s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing\u2019s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0and be the first to know everything going on in the sports media world.<\/p>\n

ESPN\u2019s summer layoffs<\/a> opened up real estate across nearly every NFL show the network runs, from its morning programming down through its flagship debate show, and the list of people positioned to fill that space says a lot about where the Worldwide Leader\u2019s football coverage is actually headed.<\/p>\n

The clearest opening sits on the morning and daytime shows. Kyle Brandt is expected to join several ESPN studio programs this fall as Good Morning Football gets folded further into ESPN\u2019s ecosystem, with a recurring weekly slot<\/a> on Get Up already floated. Brandt has been publicly angling for a bigger seat at ESPN\u2019s table since reuniting with Peter Schrager at this year\u2019s NFL Draft<\/a>, where he admitted he\u2019d reached out to anyone at the network who would take his call, offering to help in any capacity just to get on the air. Schrager himself made the jump from Good Morning Football to ESPN back in March 2025, and he\u2019s already carved out a presence on NFL Live, a role that only stands to get bigger with Ryan Clark gone from that show.<\/p>\n

Jason McCourty is the other name worth watching closely, as he signed a new multi-year, exclusive deal with ESPN<\/a> in June, locking him into the network across NFL Live, Get Up, First Take, and SportsCenter heading into his third season there. ESPN\u2019s own announcement framed him as a \u201ckey contributor\u201d to its \u201cyear-round NFL coverage\u201d as it builds toward its first Super Bowl broadcast in February 2027. Awful Announcing\u2019s Matt Yoder noted at the time that given ESPN\u2019s ownership of NFL Network, there\u2019s a real chance McCourty gets used across both platforms the way Ian Rapoport and Rich Eisen already have. With Clark\u2019s seat freed up<\/a> and Cam Newton gone as well,<\/a> McCourty is already positioned, contractually and otherwise, to absorb a meaningfully larger share of ESPN\u2019s daily NFL programming than he had a month ago.<\/p>\n

Monday Night Countdown is the bigger prize, and also the murkier one. ESPN has already spent a considerable amount of money<\/a> building the show into more of a star vehicle, adding Jason Kelce last year, and the network\u2019s own history suggests it wants recognizable playing names in that chair rather than pure analysts. That likely rules out someone like Dan Orlovsky, who\u2019s better suited to First Take-style debate than a studio panel, even as his stock has risen across ESPN\u2019s NFL coverage generally.<\/p>\n

Gerald McCoy could be a possibility, given he already works Sunday mornings for NFL Network and could plausibly be built into a Monday night role on top of it. Alex Smith carries a similar profile, since he\u2019s already spent parts of five seasons cycling through nearly every version of ESPN\u2019s NFL Countdown ecosystem. Smith joined ESPN in 2021<\/a> as a part-time analyst making select Monday Night Countdown appearances, moved into a full-time Sunday NFL Countdown role in 2023, and signed a new deal in August 2025<\/a> that expanded him into weekday appearances on Get Up and First Take as well. Harry Douglas, a longtime ESPN NFL analyst in his own right, already sits somewhere in that same crowded rotation, name-checked alongside Smith, Damien Woody, and Domonique Foxworth as one of the network\u2019s deep bench of weekday contributors. Neither has Countdown\u2018s chair locked down, but both are already deep enough inside the building that expanding their role wouldn\u2019t require ESPN to negotiate anything from scratch.<\/p>\n

Stephen A. Smith remains the wild card, and arguably the most interesting name on this entire list given how the last year has actually gone for him. ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro said last year the network was \u201cvery open\u201d to Smith taking on more NFL work<\/a>. When\u00a0Smith signed his five-year, $100 million extension in March 2025, reports at the time specifically flagged Countdown<\/a> as one of the likely landing spots for that expanded role. Instead, Smith made only a handful of NFL appearances over the following season and was pulled off NBA Countdown<\/a> as part of that same deal.<\/p>\n

Smith has also been notably careful not to burn any bridges while all of this has played out. When ESPN laid off Ryan Clark this week, Smith went on his own YouTube show to say he was hurt by the decision<\/a>, calling Clark \u201carguably the best NFL analyst in America\u201d and admitting \u201cthe bosses know I\u2019m not happy about this decision.\u201d But he stopped well short of criticizing ESPN itself, adding, \u201cI can disagree with my employers; what you\u2019re not going to get me to do is insult my employers. Business is business.\u201d That\u2019s the posture Smith has held throughout this stretch, publicly loyal to the company even while losing real estate on the network\u2019s biggest basketball show and watching his closest colleagues get cut loose. With Smith having played the good soldier through all of it, and with gaps now open across ESPN\u2019s NFL programming, it\u2019s a reasonable moment for the network to make good on the football expansion it promised him.<\/p>\n

First Take has its own hole to fill, one Awful Announcing\u2019s Brandon Contes already dug into after Clark and Newton were both cut loose<\/a> in this round of layoffs. Contes floated Michael Irvin, who\u2019s been easing back into guest appearances since his 2023 exit, Chad Johnson, whose chemistry with Shannon Sharpe on Nightcap makes him an obvious target if ESPN wants some of that energy without actually bringing Sharpe back, Kurt Warner, who\u2019s already on ESPN\u2019s payroll via the NFL Network integration but isn\u2019t exactly built for a screaming match, Richard Sherman, who\u2019s already sparred with Skip Bayless in the show\u2019s history, and Bayless himself, fresh off a one-day reunion earlier this year<\/a> that made clear there\u2019s still an audience for it<\/a> even if ESPN isn\u2019t ready to pay him like a headliner again.<\/p>\n

All of this is unfolding while ESPN is separately negotiating one of the biggest contracts in sports media history. Andrew Marchand reported in June<\/a> that ESPN and Pat McAfee\u2019s camp are discussing an extension worth $60 to $65 million a year<\/a>, one that would come with an expanded role at the network, including potentially more NFL coverage. If that deal actually lands McAfee a bigger seat somewhere in ESPN\u2019s NFL rotation, it muddies the water on every name above him, since there\u2019s only so much airtime and budget to go around once one of the network\u2019s biggest personalities is also angling for a bigger slice of the same programming.<\/p>\n

Nobody outside ESPN\u2019s building knows exactly how these decisions get made, and the network hasn\u2019t laid out a public plan for any of these shows beyond confirming the layoffs themselves. But between the morning shows, NFL Live, Countdown, and First Take, there\u2019s more open NFL real estate at ESPN right now than there\u2019s been in years, and the list of people angling for it is a lot longer than the list of seats available.<\/p>\n

Subscribe to Awful Announcing\u2019s \u201cThe A Block\u201d newsletter here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This originally appeared in Thursday morning\u2019s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing\u2019s daily newsletter with the latest…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":957562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[43],"tags":[58345,295718,2230,1318,250329,73355,382577,385202,1317,1315,1316,62,2233,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-957561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-alex-smith","tag-espn-layoffs","tag-first-take","tag-football","tag-gerald-mccoy","tag-jason-mccourty","tag-kyle-brandt","tag-monday-night-countdown","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports","tag-stephen-a-smith","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116978536293813571","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=957561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/957562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=957561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=957561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=957561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}