Former Pittsburgh Steelers safety Ryan Clark was in damage control mode after once again ruffling feathers for something he said on air.
Clark, who now works as an analyst for ESPN, went viral for the wrong reasons for a second day in a row, after he talked down to ESPN insider Peter Schrager during the Sept. 5 episode of “Get Up.”
In a segment about the “Thursday Night Football” opener between the Eagles and Cowboys, a panel of Clark, Schrager, Dan Orlovsky and Tedy Bruschi were debating CeeDee Lamb and A.J. Brown. After Schrager argued a point, Clark essentially stopped the debate and dismissed the reporter’s opinion, saying “that’s the non-player in you.”
Awful Announcing posted the clip and within 16 hours of posting, the tweet had more than 8 million views.
Additionally, the tweet, which had been quote-tweeted and reshared countless times, had nearly 2,500 replies by the next morning, almost all of them negative toward Clark.
It apparently didn’t end there. Clark, a former Super Bowl champion with the Steelers, tweeted a late-night apology in which he also noted there was some sort of “interaction” between the two off the air as well.
That tweet also went viral with nearly 4,000 replies in the eight hours after it was posted.
It was quite the week for Clark, who also took some heat for a far less personal albeit just as head-scratching take about Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees. The former Pro Bowler claimed the three legendary quarterbacks all fell short of being “generational talents,” whatever that means.
It’s kind of hard to believe, but Clark has been in the media for more than a decade now. He retired from pro football in 2015 and quickly landed his job at ESPN where he’s served as an analyst on just about all of the network’s NFL offerings. He also has a gig as an analyst on the weekly “Inside the NFL” show on The CW.
If Clark’s No. 1 objective as an ESPN analyst is to get people talking, then he’s a standout employee. His archives page on Awful Announcing is laughably long, and he certainly has sparked a lot of debate by what he’s said on and off the air over the last decade.
This Schrager run-in isn’t even the first time he’s had to apologize in the last few months. Clark really stepped in it in May of 2025 when he went after another ESPN colleague, former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III, for RG3’s take on the Caitlin Clark-Angel Reese rivalry. Clark apologized after insinuating that Griffin’s anti-Reese opinion was based on the fact his own wife was white.
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