Linda Cohn is not pleased with ESPN’s “buffoonery” in its handling of recent layoffs.
Cohn, who was the longest-tenured “SportsCenter” anchor before departing the company last month, watched this week as former colleagues Ryan Clark, Karl Ravech, David Lloyd were among those axed.
Clark was let go during a commercial break of “NFL Live” as word leaked of his fate, while Ravech – who spent 33 years at the network – didn’t know he was being laid off until a reporter requested comment.
And while Cohn received a planned farewell on air and allowed to announce her retirement, she sharply criticized how the company’s most recent round of layoffs went down.
“The ESPN layoffs were awful. You hate to see anybody lose their job,” Cohn said on her YouTube show, per Awful Announcing.
“It’s all bad. When you’re laid off, when you’re fired, when your salary is cut, when you have to think, ‘What do I do now?’ Well, the ESPN layoffs, that was awful. What made it even worse, if that could be possible, was the way ESPN PR handled it, or mishandled it, because they treated everyone on this latest firing list with zero respect. Zero. Beginning with Ryan Clark.”
“That whole PR nightmare could have been avoided if Ryan Clark was alerted, how about the night before?,” she continued. “And how about before he took the set for ‘NFL Live’?” If you knew there were media outlets going to break the news and you were concerned about Ryan finding out by looking at his phone during the show, then why didn’t you just tell him before the show? That is bumbling and fumbling. That buffoonery electrified this story in a negative way even more.”
Cohn was not the first ESPN alum to criticize the company’s handling of the layoffs, as Dan Patrick was also left extremely unimpressed by the company’s lack of “dignity.”
“The only thing that I would say is show dignity to those people in how you let them go,” he said on his eponymous podcast. “That’s all. It can’t happen that Karl Ravech is contacted by somebody wanting a comment. Thirty-three years and that’s how it ends? Show dignity. Give them that dignity.”
Ravech, according to his longtime colleague Buster Olney, had “no idea” he was about to be let go, while Clark was brought to tears discussing his exit.
Other big names to be fired include Cam Newton, NFL insider Tom Pelissero, football injury expert Stephania Bell, Charles Davis and combat sports reporter Andreas Hale.
Former Jets star Bart Scott was also let go from the network, where he had appeared on Get Up” and co-hosted an ESPN New York radio show with Chris Carlin.
