Many current sports media discussions are about comments made by ESPN personalities such as Ryan Clark. There’s an incentive for aggregators to pass those around and draw reaction, especially with the current state of engagement monetization on X. But this gets particularly wild when old comments from those figures get passed off as new (and are sometimes even misquoted entirely along the way), something that happened twice this week with Clark’s past comments on Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson:
The latter post from “Kleiman” at least includes a full clip, but no indication of when it was from. That led to writeups like one from Devon POV Mason at The Shadow League, saying Clark’s comments from him “speaking on ESPN’s First Take this past week.”
But while Clark was speaking on First Take, it wasn’t this week. A TVEyes search reveals that Clark has used the key phrase “evolution of the position” (which appears at 0:10 in that clip) here at least four times, most recently on an NFL Countdown pregame show in January.
The specific comments Clark made here on Randall Cunningham, Michael Vick, Cam Newton, and more came on First Take on December 27, 2024. (A clue is Newton’s presence in the shot; Newton appeared on First Take this football season but hasn’t been there recently, although he’s continued with his own shows and has picked up an upcoming BET gig.) Clark also posted this clip to Instagram himself that day. And yet, Kleiman’s tweet of that clip more than six months later had racked up more than 360,000 views (as per X’s displayed statistics) and more than 1,800 likes as of Sunday afternoon.
The “first ‘authentic’ black quarterback” from @_MLFootball is perhaps even more egregious. That’s because that doesn’t appear to be something Clark has actually said. But the same aggregator account also claimed he said it last March:
Some searching around seems to tie the origins of this quote to the discussion around an OutKick piece from Bobby Burack one day before that @_MLFootball post on March 13, 2024. That piece, titled “Lamar Jackson Vs. Josh Allen Remains Least Honest Debate In Sports,” saw Burack write, “Allen and Jackson have already been cast by the media. Allen is a white boy from Wyoming who once used the N-word on Twitter as a teen. Jackson is the first ‘authentic’ black quarterback. At least according to Ryan Clark,” and then post this clip, which Clark himself posted to X on January 26, 2024, a clip of his appearance on First Take that day:
But Clark doesn’t actually say “authentic” there, and especially not “the first fully authentic Black QB.” In January 2025, he told Michele Tafoya he was referring to Jackson being “authentic to himself.” And OutKick’s Burack has since referenced that Clark’s comment in updates to both the March 2024 piece and a December 2024 piece on Clark, writing, “Update: Clark explained in an interview with Michele Tafoya that he was referring to Jackson being “authentic” to himself, not as a black quarterback” in the December piece. But this has led to aggregation, such as those @_MLFootball posts with “the first ‘authentic’ black quarterback,” and has been expanded to even a full quote (which Clark didn’t say) in some recent posts such as the Shadow League one Sunday promoting Mason’s piece:
In his written comments accompanying that clip, Clark certainly does talk about Jackson as “a different breed” relative to those other Black quarterbacks and says “his authenticity to who he is is unique.” And in the clip itself, which starts with Clark saying “Yes” to Molly Qerim’s question on if the 2023 NFL season would be “a failure” for Jackson if he didn’t win that Sunday’s AFC Championship Game (spoiler, he did not), the closest Clark comes to “authentic” is in his comments beginning at 0:40:
“Let’s be real: Lamar Jackson is playing for more than himself. And I know we’ve had Doug Williams win Super Bowls, Patrick Mahomes, we’ve had the Russell Wilsons. But Lamar Jackson is different than all of them.
“Lamar Jackson has gone against the status quo, against the familiar, since the moment he was drafted, by not choosing an agent, staying with his mother, allowing her to be part of his representation. By the hair he wears, by the way, he talks, by the way, he plays. This is bigger than Doug Williams.
“…He never switched up. He never became anything but Lamar Jackson. He never changed his style of play. He just improved. He never changed the way that he directed, or that he behaved, in press conferences, he just improved on it. And he never changed the way that he led a locker room, he just improved on it, but it stayed authentically Lamar Jackson.
“And for that reason, when he wins or when he loses, the conversation is about so much bigger than just who he is as a player. So this is imperative that Lamar Jackson wins not just this game, but he wins the Super Bowl. Because it’s an entire culture on the back of that jersey, not just the name Jackson.”
Clark’s arguments in both of these clips can certainly be debated. He may feel that Jackson represents an “evolution of the position” from past Black QBs, and that a Super Bowl win for Jackson would be “bigger than Doug Williams.” Others can, and do, disagree with those stances.
But disagreements with Clark’s takes should be over what he actually says and writes, not over incorrect versions of his comments relayed by aggregators. And that’s especially true when it comes to attaching polarizing lines like “authentic” to “Black quarterback” (which Clark does not say in the above clip: the closest he comes to that language is “it stayed authentically Lamar Jackson”), and to relaying old comments from Clark as if they’re fresh (a repeated tactic for some of these accounts).
Clark’s past comments can certainly be kept on file and used in reference to new discussions about his takes on Jackson, or even his other discussions of race. But they should be clearly presented with what he actually said and when he said it. When they’re not, you get a significant portion of sports social media arguing about comments made months to years ago as if they’re new. And that’s sometimes even with outright misrepresentation of those comments.