This originally appeared in Thursday morning’s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here and be the first to know everything going on in the sports media world.

ESPN’s summer layoffs opened up real estate across nearly every NFL show the network runs, from its morning programming down through its flagship debate show, and the list of people positioned to fill that space says a lot about where the Worldwide Leader’s football coverage is actually headed.

The clearest opening sits on the morning and daytime shows. Kyle Brandt is expected to join several ESPN studio programs this fall as Good Morning Football gets folded further into ESPN’s ecosystem, with a recurring weekly slot on Get Up already floated. Brandt has been publicly angling for a bigger seat at ESPN’s table since reuniting with Peter Schrager at this year’s NFL Draft, where he admitted he’d reached out to anyone at the network who would take his call, offering to help in any capacity just to get on the air. Schrager himself made the jump from Good Morning Football to ESPN back in March 2025, and he’s already carved out a presence on NFL Live, a role that only stands to get bigger with Ryan Clark gone from that show.

Jason McCourty is the other name worth watching closely, as he signed a new multi-year, exclusive deal with ESPN in June, locking him into the network across NFL Live, Get Up, First Take, and SportsCenter heading into his third season there. ESPN’s own announcement framed him as a “key contributor” to its “year-round NFL coverage” as it builds toward its first Super Bowl broadcast in February 2027. Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder noted at the time that given ESPN’s ownership of NFL Network, there’s a real chance McCourty gets used across both platforms the way Ian Rapoport and Rich Eisen already have. With Clark’s seat freed up and Cam Newton gone as well, McCourty is already positioned, contractually and otherwise, to absorb a meaningfully larger share of ESPN’s daily NFL programming than he had a month ago.

Monday Night Countdown is the bigger prize, and also the murkier one. ESPN has already spent a considerable amount of money building the show into more of a star vehicle, adding Jason Kelce last year, and the network’s own history suggests it wants recognizable playing names in that chair rather than pure analysts. That likely rules out someone like Dan Orlovsky, who’s better suited to First Take-style debate than a studio panel, even as his stock has risen across ESPN’s NFL coverage generally.

Gerald McCoy could be a possibility, given he already works Sunday mornings for NFL Network and could plausibly be built into a Monday night role on top of it. Alex Smith carries a similar profile, since he’s already spent parts of five seasons cycling through nearly every version of ESPN’s NFL Countdown ecosystem. Smith joined ESPN in 2021 as a part-time analyst making select Monday Night Countdown appearances, moved into a full-time Sunday NFL Countdown role in 2023, and signed a new deal in August 2025 that expanded him into weekday appearances on Get Up and First Take as well. Harry Douglas, a longtime ESPN NFL analyst in his own right, already sits somewhere in that same crowded rotation, name-checked alongside Smith, Damien Woody, and Domonique Foxworth as one of the network’s deep bench of weekday contributors. Neither has Countdown‘s chair locked down, but both are already deep enough inside the building that expanding their role wouldn’t require ESPN to negotiate anything from scratch.

Stephen A. Smith remains the wild card, and arguably the most interesting name on this entire list given how the last year has actually gone for him. ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro said last year the network was “very open” to Smith taking on more NFL work. When Smith signed his five-year, $100 million extension in March 2025, reports at the time specifically flagged Countdown as one of the likely landing spots for that expanded role. Instead, Smith made only a handful of NFL appearances over the following season and was pulled off NBA Countdown as part of that same deal.

Smith has also been notably careful not to burn any bridges while all of this has played out. When ESPN laid off Ryan Clark this week, Smith went on his own YouTube show to say he was hurt by the decision, calling Clark “arguably the best NFL analyst in America” and admitting “the bosses know I’m not happy about this decision.” But he stopped well short of criticizing ESPN itself, adding, “I can disagree with my employers; what you’re not going to get me to do is insult my employers. Business is business.” That’s the posture Smith has held throughout this stretch, publicly loyal to the company even while losing real estate on the network’s biggest basketball show and watching his closest colleagues get cut loose. With Smith having played the good soldier through all of it, and with gaps now open across ESPN’s NFL programming, it’s a reasonable moment for the network to make good on the football expansion it promised him.

First Take has its own hole to fill, one Awful Announcing’s Brandon Contes already dug into after Clark and Newton were both cut loose in this round of layoffs. Contes floated Michael Irvin, who’s been easing back into guest appearances since his 2023 exit, Chad Johnson, whose chemistry with Shannon Sharpe on Nightcap makes him an obvious target if ESPN wants some of that energy without actually bringing Sharpe back, Kurt Warner, who’s already on ESPN’s payroll via the NFL Network integration but isn’t exactly built for a screaming match, Richard Sherman, who’s already sparred with Skip Bayless in the show’s history, and Bayless himself, fresh off a one-day reunion earlier this year that made clear there’s still an audience for it even if ESPN isn’t ready to pay him like a headliner again.

All of this is unfolding while ESPN is separately negotiating one of the biggest contracts in sports media history. Andrew Marchand reported in June that ESPN and Pat McAfee’s camp are discussing an extension worth $60 to $65 million a year, one that would come with an expanded role at the network, including potentially more NFL coverage. If that deal actually lands McAfee a bigger seat somewhere in ESPN’s NFL rotation, it muddies the water on every name above him, since there’s only so much airtime and budget to go around once one of the network’s biggest personalities is also angling for a bigger slice of the same programming.

Nobody outside ESPN’s building knows exactly how these decisions get made, and the network hasn’t laid out a public plan for any of these shows beyond confirming the layoffs themselves. But between the morning shows, NFL Live, Countdown, and First Take, there’s more open NFL real estate at ESPN right now than there’s been in years, and the list of people angling for it is a lot longer than the list of seats available.

Subscribe to Awful Announcing’s “The A Block” newsletter here.