The sudden departure of longtime host Molly Qerim from ESPN’s First Take was one of the more surprising sports media stories of 2025, but weekly guest host Chris “Mad Dog” Russo recently provided an educated guess about Qerim’s exit that would help explain the move.
News broke the evening of Sept. 15 that Qerim could leave the show by year’s end, and by the following morning, she had formally departed. Qerim served as the anchor of the popular ESPN morning debate show since 2015.
In an appearance on the SI Media podcast this week, Russo confirmed recent comments from an ESPN executive that the network was planning to take Qerim off of First Take and that she likely felt “embarrassed” by the potential demotion. Once the news got out, Russo said, Qerim pulled the plug rather than ride the year out as a “lame duck.”
“I think they probably wanted to move her around a little bit and try something different,” Russo said.
“Not that the ratings were bad, it’s just the nature of the beast. You’re on air forever, they like to make a change for making a change’s sake. I think they wanted to keep Molly with the network, and I don’t know if Molly wanted to do that. Because I think Molly probably looked at as, ‘If I’m not going to do First Take, I don’t want to do SportsCenter.’ So she probably felt that that would be a demotion, I would assume.”
Russo said he got a heads-up from Stephen A. Smith that Qerim would be leaving, and later spoke with Qerim about her exit.
The longtime radio host understands why Qerim would have had hard feelings returning to air after the news was out.
“I think she precipitated it. … I think, probably, she felt embarrassed,” Russo explained. “I didn’t talk to her about the specifics of why she decided as soon as it was in the Sports Business Journal, but that’s what I’m thinking. That she probably would have felt embarrassed if the world would have thought she was a lame duck and she was still doing the show.”
As for his experience working alongside Qerim, Russo was extremely complimentary.
Russo said that Qerim was “very important” to First Take‘s success and that her familial relationship with Smith went a long way toward the show achieving success.
“Molly was great to me. We had a great relationship,” he said. “She was a very important ingredient to what they were trying to do. Her and Steve had a great relationship. I would say big brother and sister would be the way I would pinpoint it. They knew each other well, and she listened to Stevie when Stevie gave her advice. She always listened to him, she spoke to him a lot.”
Qerim has already found her first post-First Take gig, hosting a Q&A forum with UConn head men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley. But we now know that Qerim likely would have been looking for a new job in the upcoming months even if she had stayed at ESPN.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.