Paul Finebaum is no longer going along with ESPN\u2019s account of his absence last fall.<\/p>\n
On the\u00a0Awful Announcing Podcast,<\/a> Finebaum said ESPN pulled him from its programming after he told OutKick\u2019s Clay Travis in September 2025 that he was considering a run for Tommy Tuberville\u2019s U.S. Senate seat as a Republican, a year after ESPN publicly insisted otherwise.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course, I was sidelined,\u201d Finebaum said. \u201cI\u2019d done the same shows every day for 13 years, and the next thing you know, I\u2019m not on there after a college football weekend.\u201d<\/p>\n Travis broke the news<\/a> of that absence on Oct. 6, 2025, citing sources who said the Disney-owned network had canceled all of Finebaum\u2019s \u201cnetwork appearances on all shows, including some that have occurred for a decade plus\u201d in the wake of his interview<\/a> with Travis expressing his potential political ambitions<\/a>. On3\u2019s Pete Nakos confirmed<\/a> Travis\u2019 report, which ESPN vice president of communications Bill Hofheimer vehemently denied in a post on X.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not true at all. The below is TOTALLY FALSE,\u201d Hofheimer wrote while quote-tweeting Travis\u2019 initial report.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u2014 Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 6, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n Travis responded<\/a> to Hofheimer\u2019s post by asking him to cite all of Finebaum\u2019s ESPN appearances since their sit-down. To that end, a review of Finebaum\u2019s appearances showed he appeared on the network the day after his interview with Travis, but not on\u00a0Get Up\u00a0on Thursday or\u00a0SportsCenter on Sunday, as he had\u00a0the previous week.<\/p>\n Finebaum did, however, appear on the ESPN-owned SEC Network that Saturday, as well as SportsCenter anchor Matt Barrie\u2019s weekly video podcast<\/a> that Sunday. But on ESPN\u2019s flagship channel, it\u2019s hard to argue that Finebaum\u2019s presence hadn\u2019t 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, \u201cAs we stated last year, Finebaum was never banned.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond Hofheimer\u2019s post, ESPN left the job of explaining Finebaum\u2019s missing appearances to anonymous sources, whose accounts reached the public through a local Birmingham television station<\/a> and a national trade publication<\/a>. Finebaum, for his part, didn\u2019t want to discuss it at the time\u00a0and hung<\/a>\u00a0up on a caller<\/a> who raised the subject on his SEC Network show.<\/p>\n What he did discuss, however, in his conversation with Contes was how the Senate run materialized in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is usually where you kind of say that\u2019s really funny, you give an emoji. I said yes. For the life of me, I don\u2019t know why,\u201d Finebaum said.<\/p>\n Within two weeks, a top political consultant from Washington, D.C. was at Finebaum\u2019s 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\u2019s Burke Magnus a heads-up beforehand, with Magnus telling him the network would do whatever it could.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThat triggered a reaction,\u201d Finebaum said. \u201cAnd the next week, Clay wrote that I had been banned, and then ESPN\u2019s PR people said that was a total lie.\u201d<\/p>\n Finebaum said he never spoke with anyone at ESPN about his absence, communicating only through Kramer, and that he still doesn\u2019t know exactly what transpired internally. He does know he wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cListen, I know what happened. They know what happened. Do I want to ameliorate this situation? And at the time, I was still probably running,\u201d Finebaum said. \u201cI thought the best thing to do is just go back and do my job, whether I ran for the Senate or not.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d Finebaum said. \u201cThe relationship at that moment was off the rails.\u201d<\/p>\n Finebaum\u2019s interest in the race faded as the season went on. He still hadn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Ultimately, though, Finebaum said the people pushing him to run talked him out of it.<\/p>\n \u201cThe real reason I didn\u2019t run is that the politicos in D.C. were telling me what I had to say, and that\u2019s something that I was not comfortable with,\u201d Finebaum said. \u201cThey were saying you have to trash Disney, your employer.\u201d<\/p>\n Finebaum worked through the end of the regular season, as he had said he would<\/a>, before announcing in December 2025<\/a> 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\u2019 Major Garrett, he said political operatives, including two sitting senators, told him his best path to victory was to campaign against \u201cwoke Disney,\u201d which he said he would not do<\/a> to the company that had employed him for 13 years. Finebaum also told AL.com\u2019s Kyle Whitmire that consultants flagged past comments<\/a> 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\u2019s death.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s air.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d Finebaum said. \u201cNow, they deny that to this day, and I\u2019m probably not helping my cause, but I\u2019m just telling the truth. There\u2019s 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\u2019t need you today.\u201d<\/p>\n Finebaum\u2019s ESPN contract expires after this college football season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paul Finebaum is no longer going along with ESPN\u2019s account of his absence last fall. On the\u00a0Awful Announcing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":891349,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[172304,167085,36570,3716,399,398,396,397,8021,99,3692,3078,3079],"class_list":["post-891348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-awful-announcing-podcast","tag-burke-magnus","tag-clay-travis","tag-disney","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-paul-finebaum","tag-sports","tag-stephen-a-smith","tag-tommy-tuberville","tag-u-s-senate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=891348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/891349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=891348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=891348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=891348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}