Ryan Clark did something nobody else with standing inside the ESPN ecosystem had been willing to do: defend Dan Orlovsky.
Orlovsky went on his soapbox earlier this week and proclaimed that Alabama’s Ty Simpson was the best quarterback in the 2026 NFL Draft, ahead of Indiana’s Fernando Mendoza, the Heisman Trophy winner, the national champion, the -10000 favorite to go first overall to the Las Vegas Raiders. What followed was one of the more remarkable self-sustaining news cycles ESPN has manufactured in recent memory.
As Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder detailed on Friday, “Ty Simpson” was mentioned 85 times on ESPN between Monday and Friday at noon — more than Tiger Woods, who actually competed in a live event on ESPN airwaves during that period, more than LeBron James, and more than double the mentions of Fernando Mendoza, the actual consensus top pick. The conflict-of-interest dimension — Orlovsky and Simpson share an agency at CAA while Mendoza is represented by Excel Sports Management — accelerated the pile-on considerably. Orlovsky appeared on The Pat McAfee Show to defend himself, got visibly rattled when McAfee pressed him on Mendoza’s biggest games, incorrectly stated that Indiana trailed in the Big Ten Championship game when they were actually leading, and then didn’t answer McAfee’s FaceTime call that evening.
Clark, who works alongside Orlovsky at ESPN and watches him prepare every week, had a different read on what the week actually revealed about the analyst at the center of it.
“Dan’s one of the best former quarterbacks to ever do TV,” Clark said on this week’s episode of his The Pivot podcast with Fred Taylor and Channing Crowder. “Dan’s one of the best — not just football analysts — but sports analysts in the world right now. No one dives into tape harder. No one cares more about having enough information to be correct than Dan.”
Clark acknowledged that part of what drives Orlovsky is ego — “he just likes to be right” — but argued that the ego in the service of correctness is what makes him valuable.
“Because that’s his goal, to be right, he puts in endless amounts of work,” the former Pittsburgh Steelers safety continued. “This dude sends over tapes Monday morning after Sunday games for the entire week. Like, that’s the person we’re talking about. We ain’t talking about a dude that just shows up to work and is winging it.”
Clark was clear that none of this means he agrees with where Orlovsky landed. He said he believes Mendoza should be the first quarterback taken and the first overall pick. But he argued the gap between Mendoza and Ty Simpson is closer than the consensus acknowledges, and that understanding Orlovsky’s skepticism requires understanding what the No. 1 overall pick means historically.
“When you’re drafted number one overall, you’re not just compared to your draft class,” Clark said. “You’re compared to Trevor Lawrence. You’re compared to Joe Burrow. You’re compared to Peyton Manning.”
By that standard, Clark said, Mendoza’s tape — the leadership, the big throw against Penn State, the way he ran a team that went 16-0 — is very good without being a certainty.
“Fernando Mendoza is a really good player,” Clark said. “He’s not a sure thing.”
But being a sure thing and being the consensus pick are two different arguments, and on the latter, NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah was pretty definitive in the fact that he talked to the Raiders and several other teams, and not one of them saw it the way Orlovsky did.
None of that changes what Clark is getting at here, which was never really about whether Orlovsky got the evaluation right. It was that the week’s worth of coverage treated the take as something it wasn’t when the person who made it is one of the few analysts in the business who actually does the work that would justify having the opinion in the first place. But whether a quarterback who hasn’t thrown a pass since New Year’s Day should dominate ESPN’s conversation for an entire week is a question nobody there seemed interested in asking.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.