Brandon Marshall nearly quit ‘First Things First’ over Nick Wright argument about Kawhi Leonard

Nick Wright has made a career out of arguments he refuses to lose. Brandon Marshall, it turns out, had one ready for him.

In an upcoming episode of Front Office Sports’ Portfolio Players, Marshall revealed that a post-segment argument about Kawhi Leonard with Wright got bad enough that he tried to walk off First Things First for good. The disagreement over Leonard missing a team flight and subsequently being late started on air and continued after the cameras stopped, eventually reaching the point where then-Fox Sports content head Charlie Dixon — the same executive who had helped build FS1’s daily programming around Wright — was called in to intervene.

The argument was about punctuality, specifically, the gap between what Nick Wright was willing to say on TV and what Brandon Marshall had been watching him do every morning off of it.

“I said, ‘I don’t respect you, because you just went on live television and said this and that because he was late,'” Marshall recalled. “I said, ‘Every day at 5 a.m. on our team calls, you’re late, we’re always waiting for you. There’s 30 people on this call and every day, 5:05, 5:06, you’re getting on this call. So you can say that publicly, but how are you showing up privately?'”

He had a name for it — take integrity — the principle that what comes out of your mouth on camera ought to match the person you are when nobody’s watching. By the time they got done trading verbal blows, Marshall had mentally quit the show, and Fox’s top content executive had been routed to someone’s representation over Kawhi Leonard missing a flight.

“We got over it,” the former Chicago Bears and New York Jets wide receiver added. “And I love Nick to this day. He’s one of the greatest. He taught me a lot.”

Nick Wright himself has essentially told the same story from the other side, not about Brandon Marshall specifically, but about why the rotating cast of former athletes Fox kept putting alongside him never quite worked. Marshall had come aboard in August 2020, the third significant co-host pairing after Cris Carter launched the show with Wright in 2017, before that partnership dissolved after two years.

Marshall, a six-time Pro Bowler who had been building toward a sports media career since joining Showtime’s Inside the NFL in 2014 and had spent time at CBS Sports before landing at FS1, was Fox’s next attempt to find someone who could stand next to Wright and make the daily argument format feel like a real conversation rather than a one-sided lecture. When Marshall’s contract expired in the summer of 2021 and wasn’t renewed, Wright pushed hard for Chris Broussard — a former ESPN NBA insider who Wright knew from his radio work could hold his own on any sport, not just basketball — as his replacement. That, Wright later said, was what separated Broussard from everyone who came before him.

“I am such an annoying person to argue with,” Wright recently, “that there is something in my experience for former athletes, particularly former football players, that if every single day they gotta argue with me, something in their brain activates a few months in and they’re like, ‘Man I used to put guys like him in the damn locker… shut up.'”

The show Wright, Broussard, and Kevin Wildes built together has since become the most-watched program in FS1’s daily lineup — outperforming both its lead-in and lead-out — earned a Sports Emmy nomination for best daily studio show, expanded to a third hour last summer with the addition of Danny Parkins, and secured Wright a long-term extension that made him the unambiguous center of FS1’s programming going forward. Marshall, for his part, after leaving the show in August 2021, co-founded I Am Athlete, and launched The White House — a Netflix podcast with Michael Irvin — in January.