ESPN Just Paid Stephen A Smith $100 Million and Then Did Something Unbelievable

May 19, 2026 Cat2, Politics
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ESPN handed one of its loudest personalities a $100 million contract last year.

Then it turned around and started firing the people who actually do the work.

And now even the athletes it covers are calling out what the rest of America already figured out.

The Network That Forgot What Sports Fans Actually Want

Last March, ESPN signed Stephen A. Smith to a five-year, $100 million deal – $20 million a year to sit in a chair and scream takes on First Take every morning.

To put that in perspective, that's more than Tom Brady makes to broadcast NFL games.

It's more than the entire payroll of multiple Major League Baseball teams.

And it's a number ESPN arrived at while simultaneously laying off Suzy Kolber after 27 years, cutting Jeff Van Gundy, firing Sam Ponder, and dumping Robert Griffin III – real broadcasters with real expertise who spent decades building the audience that Smith now cashes checks off of.

This spring, another 30 ESPN employees got their walking papers.

The network blamed a revenue shortfall from a 15-day blackout on YouTube TV that cost them $100 million – the exact amount they're paying one man to yell about basketball.

The Face of a Network That Lost the Plot

Stephen A. Smith doesn't break news.

He doesn't analyze film.

He doesn't cover games.

He manufactures outrage on a schedule, says something designed to trend before lunch, and moves on without ever being held accountable for any of it.

That's the $100 million business model at ESPN.

And the athletes who watch it from the inside are starting to say so out loud.

Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown called Smith "the face of clickbait media" this week during a livestream and told him to retire.

"You're not using your platform to do real journalism," Brown said. "You're using your platform to use clickbait."

He's right.

Smith had told Brown to "be quiet" after Brown criticized NBA officiating.

Brown's response – that he'd be quiet when Smith retired – is the kind of thing sports fans everywhere have been thinking for years.

What ESPN Used to Be

Your grandfather remembers when ESPN was something worth watching.

Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann doing SportsCenter in the '90s.

Chris Berman calling touchdowns on Sunday nights.

Chris McKendry giving you the scores without a lecture attached.

Sports was the one place you could go and not get a political opinion jammed down your throat.

ESPN killed that.

They gave Caitlyn Jenner the Arthur Ashe Courage Award in 2015.

They let Jemele Hill call Donald Trump a "white supremacist" on the network's platform in 2017 – and their initial response wasn't to fire her.

They turned coverage of the national anthem protests into a nightly editorial.

They fired Curt Schilling for expressing a conservative view on social media while protecting liberals who did the same thing on air.

And through all of it, they kept cutting the people who knew sports and paying the people who knew politics.

The $100 Million Question

Here's what fires me up most about this whole arrangement.

ESPN is bleeding subscribers.

Cord-cutting has cost the network millions of paying customers over the past decade.

The YouTube TV blackout alone cost them $100 million in a single month.

Another 30 employees are losing their jobs right now because the math stopped working.

And ESPN's answer to all of that is to write a $100 million check to a man who drives away the exact audience they need to survive – the sports fan who just wants the scores.

Jaylen Brown called it clickbait.

That's the polite word for it.

What ESPN actually built with that $100 million is a machine designed to make you angry about something that has nothing to do with the game – and then charge you a cable fee for the privilege.

The audience has been figuring that out for years.

They're just glad someone inside the building is finally saying it too.

Sources:

  • Andrew Marchand, "Stephen A. Smith Signs Five-Year, $100 Million ESPN Contract," The Athletic, March 6, 2025.
  • John Ourand, "ESPN Layoffs Expected Following Revenue Decline," Puck, April 2026.
  • Ryan Gaydos, "Celtics Star Jaylen Brown Tears Into ESPN's Stephen A. Smith," Fox News, May 18, 2026.
  • Staff, "ESPN Lays Off On-Air Talent Including Suzy Kolber and Jeff Van Gundy," Deadline, July 2023.
  • Staff, "ESPN Parts Ways With Robert Griffin III and Sam Ponder," Deadline, August 2024.