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Jay Williams speaks out about ESPN layoffs

profilephotocropby:Suzanne Halliburton•07/06/23•

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jay williams
Brian Ach/Getty Images for The Clio Awards

Jay Williams knows that the friends you make at work can be as close as family. And that’s why it was gutting for him to see an ESPN layoffs list with so many hosts and analysts.

Williams saw two of his radio partners — Keyshawn Johnson and Max Kellerman — get cut from the ESPN/Disney payroll. The week before ESPN announced the layoffs, the sports network confirmed it was phasing out its morning radio program. Williams’ assessment of it all? “It sucks.”

“We’ve all gone through things where friends have lost jobs. It stinks,” Williams said Wednesday on the reconfigured ESPN morning radio. “It sucks. We give a lot of sports analogies here … and it’s like sometimes the only way I know how to handle things is to play through. Things happen, we’re going to deal with it.”

It’s unclear whether Jay Williams will be on ESPN layoffs list later this summer

And Williams, as he played through, showed some love for Johnson and Kellerman. Johnson also worked as an NFL analyst.

“Key has been my boy since the first day that I met him two and a half, three years ago,” Williams said of Johnson. “I fell in love with a guy who is just unapologetically him all the time.”

Then there was Kellerman: “Max and I still laugh about a lot of random things and Max is my boy. I’m gonna miss his Jon B. lookalike self. My vocabulary is off the charts because of Uncle Max. I mean, Max has taught me so many different words.”

Williams joined ESPN as a college basketball analyst after he retired from the NBA in 2006. The former Duke star was the No. 2 player selected in the 2002 NBA Draft. But a motorcycle accident brought his playing career to an early end.

By 2019, Williams worked as one of ESPN’s NBA analysts. But it remains to be seen how much longer he’ll be working at the network. His name could go in the ESPN layoffs category later this summer when his contract ends.

A month ago, he expressed his frustration with corporate media during an appearance on the Pat Bev Podcast with Rone.

“You can never really be your f—— self,” Williams said. “I don’t care if you’re Stephen A. Smith; I don’t care if you’re my boy Alan Hahn or Max Kellerman. We can sit up here and do the tit-for-tat, play the innuendos, let me give you a tease. … I get how the media industry works and I get how those are cliffhangers, which social media feeds on and articles feed on. It feels like media cannibalizing media right now. And I get how that game is played, but sometimes that game gets boring to me, dog.”