Paul Finebaum almost got fired before the SEC Network ever aired a single show.<\/p>\n
Finebaum recounted the episode<\/a> on That SEC Podcast, taped recently at SEC Media Days<\/a> in Tampa. ESPN hired him in 2013 to anchor its forthcoming SEC Network, but the channel itself wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe network had not started yet, and they were thinking about firing me,\u201d Finebaum said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n ESPN\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI actually did College GameDay that year,\u201d Finebaum said. \u201cYou normally don\u2019t start your career doing College GameDay to get some reps for SEC Nation.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s since revealed just how close that arrangement came to becoming permanent, telling Sports Illustrated\u2018s Jimmy Traina in a separate interview<\/a> that then-producer Lee Fitting, who has since left the network<\/a>, genuinely wanted him installed as a full-time panelist, only for the not-yet-launched SEC Network to intervene and block the move.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s star defensive end who\u2019d been conspicuously missing practices. The information Finebaum introduced into that segment hadn\u2019t originated with a scout or an anonymous source close to the program. It had come directly from Spurrier himself, who\u2019d personally telephoned Finebaum to unload his frustrations about his own star player.<\/p>\n \u201cHe called me and said, \u2018This guy is one of the worst players I\u2019ve ever had. He doesn\u2019t come to practice. He doesn\u2019t do anything right. Doesn\u2019t listen to anything,’\u201d Finebaum recalled. \u201c\u2018He\u2019s driving me crazy. I don\u2019t know how much longer he\u2019s going to be on the team.’\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cthe biggest joke in college football<\/a>\u201d and \u201ca disgrace.\u201d<\/p>\n The blowback arrived within a day, and from a source Finebaum hadn\u2019t seen coming at all: not Spurrier, who\u2019d fed him the information, but South Carolina\u2019s own athletic department.<\/p>\n He was broadcasting live from College GameDay\u2018s set at the University of Washington, during the same week Lane Kiffin appeared as a featured guest fresh off his firing from USC<\/a>, when word reached South Carolina\u2019s 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\u2019s own pregame broadcast and eviscerating him<\/a> publicly.<\/p>\n \u201cHe comes on the pregame show and rips me and said, \u2018This guy is a disgrace. He shouldn\u2019t be on the SEC Network,’\u201d Finebaum said.<\/p>\n Spurrier, confronted with the same allegations during a separate GameDay segment, flatly denied ever making such comments, instead praising Clowney as \u201cone of the finest players we\u2019ve ever had,\u201d despite having been the original source of Finebaum\u2019s information in the first place.<\/p>\n The fallout escalated all the way to SEC commissioner Mike Slive by that Monday, surfacing during a conference call among the league\u2019s university presidents.<\/p>\n \u201cThe president of South Carolina complains about me, and Slive doesn\u2019t have any idea,\u201d Finebaum said. \u201cHe said, \u2018What?\u2019 He said, \u2018That\u2019s outrageous.\u2019 So Slive just calls me and starts chewing me out, and you can\u2019t explain your way out of that. You can\u2019t blame it all on Steve Spurrier, who called his own player a joke.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019t even aired a single broadcast, Finebaum genuinely feared his career there was finished before it started.<\/p>\n \u201cThis might be the shortest run ever,\u201d he said. \u201cThis might be a worse gig than Urban Meyer with the Jaguars.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t, 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<\/a> 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 \u201cone of the leading voices across college football\u201d upon that renewal.<\/p>\n Finebaum has entertained walking away on his own terms far more recently than that, too, coming remarkably close<\/a> to launching a U.S. Senate campaign in Alabama last year before ultimately deciding, at 70, that he\u2019d rather retain the SEC Nation chair he\u2019s occupied since the network\u2019s actual 2014 debut than trade it for a seat in elected office.<\/p>\n Part of what talked him out of it, by his own account, was Disney itself. He\u2019s said the political operatives urging him to run had advised him that his clearest path through a Republican primary was campaigning against \u201cwoke Disney,\u201d ESPN\u2019s parent company, and Finebaum decided he couldn\u2019t turn around and attack the same corporation that had employed him for 13 year<\/a>s \u2014 and nearly fired him \u2014 to win a Senate seat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paul Finebaum almost got fired before the SEC Network ever aired a single show. Finebaum recounted the episode…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":962916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[43],"tags":[22239,1318,118736,55437,1317,1315,1316,20975,387111,73964,24116,62,23615,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-962915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-college-gameday","tag-football","tag-jadeveon-clowney","tag-mike-slive","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-paul-finebaum","tag-ray-tanner","tag-sec-network","tag-south-carolina-gamecocks","tag-sports","tag-steve-spurrier","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116993265773442138","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962915","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=962915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/962915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/962916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=962915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=962915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=962915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}