Will Cain: ESPN’s talent decisions come down to ‘who moves the needle’

Will Cain doesn’t think ESPN’s layoffs require much explanation.

Discussing the cuts on his Fox News show, Will Cain Country, the former ESPN personality argued that the network rewards a small number of people who move the needle in ratings, YouTube views, and social engagement, and lets everyone else in the industry’s shrinking “middle class” fend for itself.

“I think business is business, and I think that ESPN has made the calculation that certain very few talent drive ratings, drive attention, and however they quantify that, whether it’s YouTube views, television ratings, social media, is a huge part of it,” Cain said. “Whatever is important to them and who moves the needle is who they’re going to reward, and they have metrics on it. That doesn’t mean television executives always know objectively and always make the right decisions objectively, because there’s a lot of subjectivity that goes in as well, like, ‘I like this person, I don’t like this person.’

“Headache and image, all these things also come in as well. But clearly that business has gravitated towards the things that you spend money on: rights for live sporting events, the production, what’s called shoulder programming around the production, and then a few big personalities. And if you’re in the ‘middle class,’ you’re going to have a hard time doing this for a long time.”

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Karl Ravech’s exit, after 33 years with the network, was the one that actually came as a surprise.

“I think what would happen to Karl in that situation is he is part of what you would call the shoulder programming of a rights deal, and the sports that he was invested in and good at and an expert in, they stopped investing in those sports,” Cain said. “He’s baseball, right? … They’re not doing much baseball anymore. They’re not doing studio shows. They’re not doing baseball shoulder programming.”

Cain compared the situation to Colin Kaepernick’s, though he was careful to note he wasn’t drawing a direct equivalence between anyone currently at ESPN and Kaepernick’s own circumstances, even as Fox-owned OutKick would almost certainly nominate Ryan Clark as the textbook embodiment of exactly the dynamic Cain was describing. The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand had reported that ESPN’s stated justification for cutting Clark traced back to “issues with his words,” including a documented on- and off-air clash with colleague Peter Schrager — which Clark dispustes — and a separate apology stemming from Clark’s retracted comments about Kyren Lacy, the LSU wide receiver who died by suicide days before a grand jury hearing on charges tied to a fatal car crash.

“It’s like the Kaepernick thing. I’m not comparing any of these people with Kaepernick, but just on the risk, or the headache versus reward part of it. If Kaepernick had been a top-five quarterback in the NFL, odds are it wouldn’t have gone that way for Kaepernick. But he wasn’t. He was a backup quarterback at that stage, and nobody wants a headache for a backup quarterback. The truth is, if he had been awesome, they probably would have put up with everything. Pat Mahomes could get away with all manner of sin because what he brings to the plus side outweighs a lot of the negative side.”

That entire risk-reward equation only applies to people ESPN actually puts on camera. It says nothing about the roughly 150 people the network let go with no on-air role, no leverage, and no public case to make for themselves, and Cain made clear those are the layoffs that actually bother him.

“ESPN laid off 150 people behind the scenes, and ESPN is in a transitional business where they are really having to reinvent themselves,” Cain said. “I know a lot of these people. I haven’t seen the list, but I guarantee I know a lot of the people that were laid off. Those are the people that I’m more concerned about, and that should get the attention, because that’s a harder thing to reinvent yourself.”

Cain has reinvented himself once already. He left ESPN for Fox News in early 2020, built a following as a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, and later landed his own Fox News show. You’d probably characterize him as one of the “middle-class” talent he’s describing here, a contributor rather than a headline name, and had he stayed at ESPN, it’s not hard to picture him being part of this exact round of cuts instead of commenting on it from a competing network. He’s said before that he never actually felt stifled at ESPN and left on his own terms to talk more politics, but the timing still worked out well for him either way.

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