After spending the better part of the last five months taking a fine-tooth comb to the entire league, ESPN NFL analyst Ryan Clark now has to adjust to a football landscape that includes just four teams. With this weekend’s conference championship games upon us—pitting the Denver Broncos and New England Patriots against each other on one side of the bracket, and the division rival Seattle Seahawks and Los Angeles Rams on the other—Clark has zeroed in on all the minute details that will make Sunday’s games so juicy.
Games of this magnitude often come down to things like special teams mishaps or anonymous players fumbling at the worst possible moment. Clark, who played safety in the NFL for 13 years and won a Super Bowl with the Steelers, is well aware of the balletic havoc that defines January football. A man who took the field for eight postseason games during his playing career, and has now been talking ball on ESPN for over a decade, Clark essentially has a PhD in football. Crucially to this conversation, he also has a plan for how the Broncos can make the Super Bowl with their backup quarterback, a healthy appreciation for Rams head coach Sean McVay, and firsthand experience dealing with Seattle’s vaunted 12th Man during the playoffs.
GQ: I imagine this is a pretty fun time of year for you, just high-stakes football all the time?
Ryan Clark: Oh, I think this is the hardest part of the season, actually. You’re tired by now. You have to generate so much energy for such a long period of time. It’s akin to [playing] football. It’s the most exciting time, because it’s the most important time, and you’re also trying to muster up enough energy to make sure you can accomplish the job in a way that reflects what’s going on on the field. I have to have the energy that the fans of the Rams, Seahawks, Broncos, and Patriots have, because this is the time they’ve been waiting for the entire year.
How do you watch football? Paint the picture for me. Are you in the studio with a bunch of screens, or are you just watching on the couch like the rest of us?
This year was a little different for me because my son [New York Jets cornerback Jordan Clark] played. What was really hard for me this year was that on Sundays, especially once he became a starter, I was at the game. So, I’m at the Jets game—luckily, the Jets were never playing in prime time—so it was 1 o’clock every week. I try to follow as much as I can on RedZone or whatever. But, normally I’ll try to have an iPad on, a TV, and then I’ll have RedZone on my phone. That’s usually how I’ll watch during the day. And then, let’s say Monday for NFL Live, we’re going to talk about six games specifically. I go back and re-watch all of those games first.
You have football homework!
You’re watching them on the NFL app, you’re watching the all-22. If I need to see the big picture on certain plays, I go watch the all-22 to try to make sure I’m seeing the coverage, seeing the rush, seeing the adjustments, stuff like that. I just have a rule. I’ll get on my production call and they’ll ask me about a game and I’ll tell them, “I can’t talk about that, at least not yet, because I haven’t rewatched it.” Just because, man, these dudes work so hard at their job. There’s already a disconnect between media and athletes. I don’t want to be that guy that’s misrepresenting what’s happening on the field. I want to be able to, if I say something, be able to point to the play, point to the moment, and recap exactly what I’ve seen that makes me have the opinion.
I can be honest about this part. If it’s late in the season and the Tennessee Titans are playing the Las Vegas Raiders, I’m probably not going back and watching that, just because I know we won’t really cover it on any of the main shows. That normally starts to happen once teams get eliminated. But, the problem comes when the Las Vegas Raiders play the Seattle Seahawks, who will be a playoff team. You still have to watch that game. But, you do your best to alleviate some of the work as it gets later on in the season, to try to get some rest to be as fresh as you could possibly be. This [past] weekend, for instance, we were in Foxborough on Sunday for the Patriots game, but I also had First Take at 10 a.m. in Miami.
It’s like, if you sleep, you sleep. If you don’t, you don’t. But then the problem is, how do I bring the energy on the show as if I have slept, as if I am rested? It’s kind of just all a vicious cycle of psychosis.