Grant & Danny react to RG3 leaving ESPN - could he be a perfect fit for FS1 or NBC?

Even RG3 seemed to have a little fun with his reported departure from ESPN Thursday, tweeting a clip of the scene in “Friday” where Craig’s dad asks him, “How the hell you gonna get fired on your day off?”

Looks like Mr. Griffin did, though, and the timing is interesting given that he was outspoken on social media Wednesday about colleague Paul Finebaum’s thoughts on the Florida State football team on Tuesday’s talking head shows.

Now, RG3’s wife is a Seminoles alum, and he’s not shy to go after the media (just ask the ‘clout-chasing weasel’ on our afternoon show ), but has he gone a bridge too far after already burning many?

GP did take pride in playing that clip at the top of the segment he and Danny discussed it, probably just to chase some more clout, but Grant was the diplomatic one in breaking the news.

“He’s been there a few years, and he was on a rocket ship; he was very quickly on Monday Night Football and was one of their lead college football analysts, and I always thought he did a great job in the booth as a color commentator,” GP said.

But, still RG3 being RG3?

“He claims that he got fired, that's very different than budget cuts,” GP said. “Maybe it's semantics, you could tell me what you think, but I think that if you get fired with two years left on your deal, that tells me you're not getting paid. But it’s a stunner, because he was ubiquitous on that network for the first couple seasons of his deal.”

“Yeah, I think this is the polite thing to do – if someone's been let go multiple years in advance, if there's no sort of public spat that's taking place, you just sort of say budgetary reasons or name something general and you kind of move on,” Danny said. “But two years left is fascinating. If this was an expiring deal in six months, you'd go, ‘we're just gonna do this now, our new fiscal year starts at a certain point in time and we're not gonna bring you back,’ but with two years left on a deal, to just be let go something happened. There's no other way around that.”

The guys wouldn’t speculate whether that was from RG3’s side, ESPN’s side, or both, but ‘that’s one where we’re left with the polite explanation but something is unusual there.’

“He was very good at the desk, but I thought he was better in the booth broadcasting games,” GP said. “He was a little shtick and innuendo-heavy for my style, but I thought when he just talked ball, he was awesome and really could have become one of the great analysts, because he has energy and a passion for the game and a big personality.”

GP and RG3 go back over 10 years, recent turmoil aside, and Grant was gracious about hoping Griffin got all the money he is owed on his deal and lands on his feet – but GP doesn’t think the latter will be tough.

“There’s two prongs to this: it’s hard not to think about this from the same lens as football, where it was like he burst onto the scene as an unbelievable rocket ship rising star, and then within a couple of years, everything changed, and you wonder why,” GP said. “But the other side is that he’s a fascinating free agent from a sports media standpoint right now. His social media accounts are very, very popular and get tons of engagement, and he seems to be unbelievably plugged in with new media and what gets clicks, and kind of that generation. He is locked in on TikTok and all that, and a lot of the stuff he does online generates a lot of interest.”

So where does RG3 go? Does he want to be a great sports analyst somewhere else, or the face of a social media company, or something else? Time will tell, but whatever happened, ‘it didn’t work there’ at ESPN, whether it was due to his socials or something else, so we’ll see where he lands.

“This feels very FS1,” Danny said. “If you employ Skip Bayless and you have the television version of engagement farming, of screaming hot takes about how the Cowboys are gonna win the whole thing and LeBron is a choker, and you do that every day for hours and it's not even about the viewership but the engagement? They want eyeballs and they're good at getting eyeballs, and someone that's good at getting eyeballs is that guy. So that feels like a natural marriage.”