Ryan Clark accuses Robert Griffin III of trying to spark potential firing at ESPN

ESPN analyst and The Pivot Podcast host Ryan Clark released a 30-minute response video Friday afternoon in an apparent attempt to squash what devolved into a personal war-of-words between himself and former ESPN and NFL teammate Robert Griffin III. Clark’s response video came after several days of personal reflection following a back-and-forth over social media between the two former NFL players that stemmed out of a hot take Griffin III made about this week’s Caitlin Clark–Angel Reese debate.

Griffin, who was recently hired by FOX Sports as a college football analyst nearly a year after his departure from ESPN, declared unequivocally that Reese “hates” Caitlin Clark following an on-court dust-up between the two WNBA superstars in last Sunday’s Indiana Fever-Chicago Sky season-opener.

Ryan Clark took exception and chastised his former Washington Redskins — now the Commanders — teammate in a Pivot video he posted to X/Twitter Monday. Within his overall point about not denigrating or villainizing Reese, Clark cited Griffin’s interracial marriage to wife Grete, who is white, while opining about why he might have a negative opinion about the former LSU superstar.

Griffin, who has his own podcast with his wife, fired back in kind, calling out Clark for attacking his family and his marriage rather than addressing what he described as a pure “sports opinion” about Reese.

“Disagree with me all you want. Challenge my take. But keep my family and wife out of it. That’s a boundary that should always be respected,” Griffin wrote. “Ryan Clark personally attacking me and my family personally over a sports opinion is cowardly, spineless, and weak. Ryan Clark personally attacking me and my family personally over a sports opinion is a bad look for ESPN and for him as a man.”

It was that last point that Clark addressed in the closing minutes of his response video Friday, suggesting Griffin was intentionally calling for ESPN to fire him after a decade with the network. It even gained some traction on X/Twitter.

“Robert’s reaction to what I said wasn’t to engage me in conversation, it was to call for me to be fired,” Clark said over the final few minutes of the 28-minute video. “I don’t know what those next steps are. I do know that I’ve known (Griffin III) for 12 years. I’ve worked with him on two separate occasions, and I supported him in both of those. Whether it was just a letter to be yourself, whether it was speaking to the locker room about getting behind him. No matter what our personal thing was, I knew he needed someone to have his back when he wasn’t around. I allowed some of the things that happened between us to seep into my thought on what at least he thought was a sports take, to take this entire thing to a place where it shouldn’t have been.”

Their personal issues aside, Clark closed Friday’s video by admitting his own fault in the feud, and called for civility while ending with a bit of life advice for his listeners and viewers.

“Love who you love. You can’t control that. You can only control how you love them. Say what you want to say. You can’t control how people comprehend it. You can only control the thought that you put into it,” Clark concluded. “Work as hard as you possibly can. Because you can’t control how that work is received, but you can control the effort in which you work with. And be kind. You don’t get to control how people feel about you, but you do control how you treat them. … And to everybody that supported me, I am so, so grateful.”