Dan Zaksheske with Outkick Joins

**Hammer** (0:07)
You're listening to The Hammer and Nigel Show. Oh, my name is Nigel Jason Hammer, right over there with a very special guest on the hotline.

**Nigel** (0:15)
Dan Zaksheske of Outkick, fantastic writer. He usually jumps on, when I go on Outkick on Fridays, on our Shot Clock Violation segment.
Man, he had a big scoop yesterday along with a colleague over at Outkick, Bobby Burak, about ESPN and their new round of firings. Dan, I believe it was you and Bobby that broke the story that Ryan Clark is out. Walk me through that.

**Dan Zaksheske** (0:43)
Yeah, I mean, I think the keys for Clark specifically, guys, I think this mostly dates back to 2024 when he was in contract negotiations. Last time, Clark made the negotiations very contentious, very public. He complained that he wasn't being valued, suggested that Rice might play an issue, kind of held ESPN's feet to the fire a bit.
I don't know if you know much about big companies, but they typically don't like when they are made a fool of in the public eye. So I think that already put them in a position where this was almost certainly going to be Ryan Clark's last go around at the network. And I also believe, guys, that two years ago the climate was a little bit different. Letting Ryan Clark go after he just said he wasn't being valued, they knew he would spin that into a racial narrative and they couldn't afford it. 2026 times have shifted a little bit, so it was a little safer this time around. And I think that coupled mostly with what he said when the Kyron Lacey stuff came out, when he basically accused the entire Louisiana State Police Department of being racist, and then he was proven extremely wrong by video like less than 12 hours later.
He's had to issue multiple apologies for things he said on air. At a certain point, you just become too much of a headache. And even though Ryan Clark was, as you guys say, a woke star who won a sports Emmy, whatever the hell that is, and however the hell you get one of those, I think it just became a... Guys, I think it's a lot like sports, right? Like, they'll put up with your behavior as long as you're producing. And at the end of the day, Ryan Clark stopped producing to be worth the headache.

**Hammer** (2:15)
Yeah. Well, the thing is, Dan, he wasn't an NFL NFL player anymore. He was a commentator. And like you said at the beginning of the segment, making things public when you're going through contract negotiations with companies like ESPN. I mean, is that generally how that works? I mean, you were...

**Nigel** (2:31)
It doesn't work in this company. It's a little inside joke for our audience.

**Hammer** (2:36)
But so ESPN obviously maybe possibly held a grudge there two years later.

**Dan Zaksheske** (2:44)
Yeah, I mean, if you're Stephen A. Smith or Pat McAfee, you can go out there and say whatever you want, because the company wants to keep you. If you're Ryan Clark, I might play that a little closer to the vest.

**Nigel** (2:55)
Now, when you and Bobby Burak broke this story yesterday, what does that mean? Like, what kind of hoops do you guys have to go through before you officially put it out there at Outkick and out there on the Twitter sphere and all that?

**Dan Zaksheske** (3:12)
Yeah, so this is actually a really interesting story. It's a little bit how the sausage is made inside baseball. So I don't know if your audience is going to care, but I'm going to act like they're going to care. So here we go.
I brought it to the group that I had gotten a tip that morning that Ryan Clark was going to be let go.
And Bobby Burak, my colleague, said, hey, I actually heard that, too, from a different source. He had a couple of sources. I had a couple of sources. And we were like, well, since we're both hearing it from multiple different sources, like we're pretty comfortable that this is happening and we can report this. Now, there was, I will take you guys behind the curtain. There was a lively debate about whether or not we should reach out to EFPN and give them time to comment on our report. Typically, journalistic practice is you give the subject of a story at least an hour to comment on said story. Now, why we even considered not doing that is because we were concerned that EFPN would take that information and use it against us. Now, I cannot prove this, but the timeline sure makes it seem like that's exactly what happened. Because Andrew Marchand of the Athletic, New York Times, former EFPN guy, very friendly, never criticized EFPN. He comes out with this two paragraph story. Literally at the exact same time we told EFPN, we were going to publish our story. It had a typo in it. It had about 58 words. I mean, it was the most bare bones report you could ever imagine. What it looked to me, guys, was that he rushed it up because EFPN said, look, Outkick is putting this up at five o'clock. You got to get this up at five o'clock because we don't want them getting credit as the outlet that broke this story, so you need to get this up.