Sports media rushes to cast Ryan Clark as victim while portraying ESPN as the villain

OutKick reporter Dan Zaksheske joins Dan Dakich to highlight how Ryan Clark's end at ESPN went down.

Within hours of Ryan Clark’s dismissal, many of the biggest names in sports media had already reached the same conclusion: Clark was the victim and ESPN was the villain.

Stephen A. Smith said he confronted ESPN executives over the decision and called Clark "arguably the best NFL analyst in America." Emmanuel Acho accused the network of handling the situation in a "cowardly" and "wildly disrespectful" manner.

RYAN CLARK BECAME A HEADACHE FOR ESPN

Sarah Spain described Clark as "another incredibly smart, thoughtful, nuanced talent let go," while Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio declared that Clark took "the high road" after "ESPN took the low road."

Ryan Clark's ESPN dismissal sparked outrage from Stephen A. Smith and Jemele Hill, but his history of apologies and friction tells a different story. (Patrick McDermott/Getty Images)

Jemele Hill went even further.

Hill suggested Clark had "a hater," perhaps multiple haters, inside ESPN. She attacked OutKick as a "disgusting" right-wing "rag" and theorized that someone within the network intentionally leaked Clark’s dismissal to OutKick in order to create a conservative media narrative against him. She offered no evidence for that claim.

But the fact that Clark’s dismissal leaked so widely and so quickly raises a question that his defenders have mostly avoided: How many enemies had he made inside ESPN?

Much of the criticism centered on the fact that Clark was informed during a live edition of NFL Live. The assumption was that ESPN knowingly allowed a longtime employee to begin the show before abruptly firing him during a break.

I don’t think that’s what happened.

I think ESPN