Paul Finebaum is no longer going along with ESPN’s account of his absence last fall.

On the Awful Announcing Podcast, Finebaum said ESPN pulled him from its programming after he told OutKick’s Clay Travis in September 2025 that he was considering a run for Tommy Tuberville’s U.S. Senate seat as a Republican, a year after ESPN publicly insisted otherwise.

“Of course, I was sidelined,” Finebaum said. “I’d done the same shows every day for 13 years, and the next thing you know, I’m not on there after a college football weekend.”

Travis broke the news of that absence on Oct. 6, 2025, citing sources who said the Disney-owned network had canceled all of Finebaum’s “network appearances on all shows, including some that have occurred for a decade plus” in the wake of his interview with Travis expressing his potential political ambitions. On3’s Pete Nakos confirmed Travis’ report, which ESPN vice president of communications Bill Hofheimer vehemently denied in a post on X.

“This is not true at all. The below is TOTALLY FALSE,” Hofheimer wrote while quote-tweeting Travis’ initial report.

Per sources: Disney/ESPN has removed @finebaum from appearing on @ESPN since his @outkick interview expressing interest in running as a Republican for senate in Alabama. ESPN has canceled all network appearances on all shows, including some that have occurred for a decade plus.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 6, 2025

Travis responded to Hofheimer’s post by asking him to cite all of Finebaum’s ESPN appearances since their sit-down. To that end, a review of Finebaum’s appearances showed he appeared on the network the day after his interview with Travis, but not on Get Up on Thursday or SportsCenter on Sunday, as he had the previous week.

Finebaum did, however, appear on the ESPN-owned SEC Network that Saturday, as well as SportsCenter anchor Matt Barrie’s weekly video podcast that Sunday. But on ESPN’s flagship channel, it’s hard to argue that Finebaum’s presence hadn’t lessened in the week following his interview with Travis, in which he also publicly revealed his support for President Donald Trump for the first time. ESPN stands by its original position that Finebaum was not sidelined, with an ESPN spokesperson reiterating, “As we stated last year, Finebaum was never banned.”

Beyond Hofheimer’s post, ESPN left the job of explaining Finebaum’s missing appearances to anonymous sources, whose accounts reached the public through a local Birmingham television station and a national trade publication. Finebaum, for his part, didn’t want to discuss it at the time and hung up on a caller who raised the subject on his SEC Network show.

What he did discuss, however, in his conversation with Contes was how the Senate run materialized in the first place.

Shortly after moving back to Birmingham, Finebaum hosted an event with Tuberville and joked to the crowd that, unlike the senator, he had legal residency in Alabama. The next day, a prominent figure in Washington texted him to ask whether he wanted to run for Senate, and Finebaum said yes.

“This is usually where you kind of say that’s really funny, you give an emoji. I said yes. For the life of me, I don’t know why,” Finebaum said.

Within two weeks, a top political consultant from Washington, D.C. was at Finebaum’s house mapping out a campaign built on his 95% name recognition in Alabama and what Finebaum called a fairly underwhelming field. The consultant recommended he go public through Travis, and Finebaum said he gave his agent, Matt Kramer, and ESPN’s Burke Magnus a heads-up beforehand, with Magnus telling him the network would do whatever it could.

In the OutKick interview, Finebaum said he voted for Donald Trump in 2024, cited the assassination of Charlie Kirk as his reason for considering a run, and said it would be impossible to tell Trump no. He believes a passing mention that ESPN had blocked him from interviewing Trump during LSU-Alabama week in 2019 cost him airtime.

“That triggered a reaction,” Finebaum said. “And the next week, Clay wrote that I had been banned, and then ESPN’s PR people said that was a total lie.”

Finebaum said he never spoke with anyone at ESPN about his absence, communicating only through Kramer, and that he still doesn’t know exactly what transpired internally. He does know he wasn’t on the Sunday morning show he had appeared on every week since joining the network, and that later that morning he received a text inviting him onto Get Up and First Take the following day. By then, Finebaum said, he faced a choice: whether to make an issue of it, especially with a campaign still on the table, or let it go.

“Listen, I know what happened. They know what happened. Do I want to ameliorate this situation? And at the time, I was still probably running,” Finebaum said. “I thought the best thing to do is just go back and do my job, whether I ran for the Senate or not.”

Between eight and 10 senators were calling Finebaum that fall, urging him to leave ESPN and announce before his window to enter the race closed.

“I would have said at that moment in time that the chance of me running for the Senate was extremely high and the chance of me continuing at ESPN was close to zero,” Finebaum said. “The relationship at that moment was off the rails.”

Finebaum’s interest in the race faded as the season went on. He still hadn’t formally announced, and public reaction was rarely encouraging, with fans stopping him in airports, on the street, and on campuses to ask why he would leave sports for politics. During a trip to Austin for a game, a stadium worker asked whether he was really running for Senate, and when Finebaum said yes, the man told him all politicians are crooks.

Ultimately, though, Finebaum said the people pushing him to run talked him out of it.

“The real reason I didn’t run is that the politicos in D.C. were telling me what I had to say, and that’s something that I was not comfortable with,” Finebaum said. “They were saying you have to trash Disney, your employer.”

Finebaum worked through the end of the regular season, as he had said he would, before announcing in December 2025 that he would not run, thanking his ESPN bosses for letting him explore the opportunity and saying it was time to devote his full attention to college football. In an interview with CBS News’ Major Garrett, he said political operatives, including two sitting senators, told him his best path to victory was to campaign against “woke Disney,” which he said he would not do to the company that had employed him for 13 years. Finebaum also told AL.com’s Kyle Whitmire that consultants flagged past comments as potential problems, including his praise of Nick Saban for promoting masks during the pandemic and his decision to march in a Black Lives Matter demonstration after George Floyd’s death.

Magnus called Finebaum after the announcement and was welcoming when the two crossed paths days later at the SEC Championship Game in Atlanta, but Finebaum never asked him about the week he spent off ESPN’s air.

“I knew what happened. I have friends, as everybody has friends within the company, and I was told by people that somebody put the word out,” Finebaum said. “Now, they deny that to this day, and I’m probably not helping my cause, but I’m just telling the truth. There’s no way that on one of the bigger football weekends of the year, the guy who is always on at 7:15 on Sunday morning suddenly is told that we don’t need you today.”

Finebaum’s ESPN contract expires after this college football season.