Kevin Clark\u2019s first brush with Bill Simmons came and went without leaving a mark, at least for The Sports Guy.<\/p>\n
Clark was a teenager, trailing his family through a Super Bowl week near their place in St. Augustine, Florida, when he recognized Simmons across a restaurant and worked up the nerve to introduce himself. Simmons was gracious about it, the two bantered for a moment about who\u2019d win on Sunday, and then the encounter evaporated as quickly as it had materialized.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like seeing Michael Jordan for me,\u201d Clark recalls.<\/p>\n
What actually mattered happened years later and had nothing to do with that brief handshake. By then, Clark had spent years building a name for himself covering the NFL at the Wall Street Journal, and that body of work was what landed him in Simmons\u2019 orbit. The email that followed arrived without preamble or pleasantries.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that what you\u2019re doing would be a really good fit for what we\u2019re building,\u201d Simmons wrote. \u201cWhen can you talk?\u201d<\/p>\n
Clark\u2019s contract at WSJ\u00a0was running out, and he had at least three offers on the table, including one from Sports Illustrated. Clark turned all of it down for a company that didn\u2019t have a name yet, run by someone he\u2019d met exactly once, in passing, at a Super Bowl<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember my dad laughing and was just like, if you heard two years ago that Sports Illustrated would offer you a job,\u201d Clark recounted to host Brandon Contes on this week\u2019s Awful Announcing Podcast.<\/a> \u201cI love the concept of Sports Illustrated, all that stuff. I love Sports Illustrated, they still do great work. But my dad was like, if you\u2019d been told two years ago, three years ago, Sports Illustrated offers you a job, and the no-brainer was a startup podcast company \u2014 and again, that\u2019s nothing against Sports Illustrated, that\u2019s for what new media had become \u2014 you would\u2019ve been like, what the hell is going on, right?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Clark was traveling for the Journal at the time, so the two connected by phone once he was back in New York. Simmons laid out his vision, Clark talked to Sean Fennessy and a few others who were already on board, and that was enough.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just a home run,\u201d Clark said. \u201cThe Ringer was the no-brainer for me.\u201d<\/p>\n What made the decision feel obvious in the moment, Clark said, was advice he\u2019d gotten from Brian Rolapp, now the PGA Tour commissioner, who at the time was running NFL Media\u2019s digital and rights operations. Rolapp told him that the old hierarchy \u2014 where the best job in sports media meant Sports Illustrated, or the New York Times, or the Washington Post \u2014 no longer applied.<\/p>\n \u201cAny job can be the best job in America now,\u201d Clark said, recalling Rolapp\u2019s framing. \u201cIt used to be you had to go work at Sports Illustrated, you had to go work at the New York Times, you had to go work at the Washington Post in order to have the best job in the country. And the best job in the country was the most powerful beat at the place with the most reach. That was literally it for 100 years. And then after 2012, 2013, 2014, you could literally just become the most powerful person on your own. You could just start a YouTube page, you could just start a Substack, and make millions of dollars. When you think about people who actually have the best jobs, none of those people are what we thought the best job was 25 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n That same logic is part of why Clark didn\u2019t think twice about Simmons specifically.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve said this before \u2014 if Bill was like, \u2018Do you want to be a janitor? I\u2019m gonna start a math textbook company, and you\u2019re going to be my janitor,\u2019 I\u2019d be like, alright, I\u2019ll be it for a couple years,\u201d Clark said. \u201cIf you align yourself with really smart people, good things are going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Clark spent seven years at The Ringer before leaving for Omaha Productions and ESPN<\/a> in early 2024 to launch what became This Is Football. He said the exit was the kind he hopes to have for the rest of his career, with Simmons and the rest of The Ringer staff among the people he\u2019s still closest with.<\/p>\n \u201cI work my ass off for these companies,\u201d Clark said. \u201cI try to do everything the right way. I try to be upstanding. I\u2019m not a douchebag. I\u2019m not a jerk. And so my goal at any place for the next 50 years where I work is to have the kind of calls I had at the end of The Ringer, or frankly at the end of the Journal.\u201d<\/p>\n The bet on Omaha and ESPN has paid off about as well as it could have. This Is Football made its TV debut<\/a> on ESPN2 in September 2024 after building an audience on ESPN\u2019s digital platforms, and the show expanded from a half hour to a full hour<\/a> the following spring. Clark has also become a fixture on ESPN\u2019s debate and studio shows, including First Take,<\/a> and that range helped him land on Awful Announcing\u2019s 2026 Rising Stars list,<\/a> which singled him out for being as comfortable talking Xs and Os\u00a0with Mina Kimes<\/a> as he is chatting college football with Paul Finebaum<\/a>.<\/p>\n Contes also asked Clark whether Simmons had ever expressed any reservations about him leaving for ESPN, the network Simmons himself departed under famously contentious circumstances years earlier. Clark said it never really came up between them.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t really know much about his perspective on that right now,\u201d Clark said, noting that much of the ESPN leadership from Simmons\u2019 time at the network has since turned over.<\/p>\n Contes pushed the thought further, wondering aloud whether Pat McAfee\u2019s reported $60 million-a-year ESPN extension<\/a> could have ever been part of a world where ESPN found a way to bring Simmons or pieces of The Ringer back into the fold, especially before The Ringer\u2019s Netflix deal<\/a> and renewed Spotify partnership<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe,\u201d he said. \u201cAbove my pay grade, thankfully.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kevin Clark\u2019s first brush with Bill Simmons came and went without leaving a mark, at least for The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":917128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8713,11562,30216,12,7,15710,6,122605,2348,5766,32039],"class_list":["post-917127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-awful-announcing-podcast","tag-bill-simmons","tag-brian-rolapp","tag-espn","tag-football","tag-kevin-clark","tag-nfl","tag-omaha-productions","tag-sports-illustrated","tag-the-ringer","tag-this-is-football"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116738835332768950","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=917127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/917128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=917127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=917127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=917127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}