Many current sports media discussions are about comments made by ESPN personalities such as Ryan Clark. There’s incentive for aggregators to pass those around and draw reaction, especially with the current state of engagement monetization on X. But this gets particularly wild when old comments from those figures get passed off as new (and are sometimes even misquoted entirely along the way), something that happened twice this week with Clark’s past comments on Baltimore Ravens’ quarterback Lamar Jackson:
ESPN analyst Ryan Clark said #Ravens QB Lamar Jackson is the first “authentic” black quarterback. pic.twitter.com/JukCn7DMOt
— MLFootball (@_MLFootball) June 13, 2025
Powerful: ESPN’s Ryan Clark says that Lamar Jackson needs to win a Super Bowl to continue the evolution of the black quarterback:
“Lamar passed Vick for most rushing yards all-time by a QB, but it’s a collective win for the evolution of the black QB.”
👏👏👏 pic.twitter.com/oSbLPn0eVo
— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) June 14, 2025
The latter post there from “Kleiman” at least includes a full clip, but no indication of when it’s from. That led to writeups like one from Devon POV Mason at The Shadow League, saying Clark’s comments from him “speaking on ESPN’s First Take this past week.”
But while Clark was speaking on First Take, it wasn’t this week. A TVEyes search reveals Clark has used the key “evolution of the position” phrase (which shows up at 0:10 in that clip) here at least four times, most recently on a NFL Countdown pregame show in January.
The specific comments Clark made here on Randall Cunningham, Michael Vick, Cam Newton and more came on First Take on December 27, 2024. (A clue is Newton’s presence in the shot; Newton appeared on First Take this football season, but hasn’t been there recently, although he’s continued with his own shows and has picked up an upcoming BET gig.) Clark also posted this clip to Instagram himself that day. And yet, Kleiman’s tweet of that clip more than six months later had racked up more than 360,000 views (as per X’s displayed statistics) and more than 1,800 likes as of Sunday afternoon.
The “first ‘authentic’ black quarterback” from @_MLFootball is perhaps even more egregious. That’s because that doesn’t appear to be something Clark has actually said. But the same aggregator account also claimed he said it last March:
Lamar Jackson is the first “authentic” black quarterback, says Ryan Clark of ESPN. pic.twitter.com/ctPeSCmkoS
— MLFootball (@_MLFootball) March 14, 2024
Some searching around that seems to tie this “quote” to an OutKick piece from Bobby Burack one day before that @_MLFootball post, on March 13, 2024. That piece, titled “Lamar Jackson Vs. Josh Allen Remains Least Honest Debate In Sports,” saw Burack write “Allen and Jackson have already been cast by the media. Allen is a white boy from Wyoming who once used the N-word on Twitter as a teen. Jackson is the first ‘authentic’ black quarterback. At least according to Ryan Clark,” and then post this clip, which Clark himself posted to X on January 26, 2024, a clip of his appearance on First Take that day:
I know we had Doug Williams, Patrick Mahomes, & Russell Williams win the Super Bowl, but @Lj_era8 is a different breed. He’s one of the best in the world today, and his authenticity to who he is unique. He’s been told that people who talk like you, wear their hair like you do, or… pic.twitter.com/3KGkXLVVqw
— Ryan Clark (@Realrclark25) January 26, 2024
But Clark doesn’t actually say “authentic” there, and especially not “the first fully authentic Black QB,” which this gets expanded to in some recent posts such as the Shadow League one Sunday promoting Mason’s piece:
ESPN’s Ryan Clark says Lamar Jackson must win a Super Bowl to take the Black quarterback legacy to its next chapter— calling him the “first fully authentic Black QB” whose journey builds on legends like Vick, Cunningham, and Cam.https://t.co/pFmAMkIlzy
— The Shadow League (@ShadowLeague) June 15, 2025
In his written comments accompanying that clip, Clark certainly does talk about Jackson as “a different breed” relative to those other Black quarterbacks and says “his authenticity to who he is is unique.” And in the clip itself, which starts with Clark saying “Yes” to Molly Qerim’s question on if the 2023 NFL season would be “a failure” for Jackson if he didn’t win that Sunday’s AFC Championship Game (spoiler, he did not), the closest Clark comes to “authentic” is in his comments beginning at 0:40:
“Let’s be real: Lamar Jackson is playing for more than himself. And I know we’ve had the Doug Williams win Super Bowls, Patrick Mahomes, we’ve had the Russell Wilsons. But Lamar Jackson is different than all of them.
“Lamar Jackson has gone against the status quo, against the familiar, since the moment he was drafted, by not choosing an agent, staying with his mother, allowing her to be part of his representation. By the hair he wears, by the way he talks, by the way he plays. This is bigger than Doug Williams.
“…He never switched up. He never became anything but Lamar Jackson. He never changed his style of play. He just improved. He never changed the way that he directed, or that he behaved, in press conferences, he just improved on it. And he never changed the way that he led a locker room, he just improved on it, but it stayed authentically Lamar Jackson.
“And for that reason, when he wins or when he loses, the conversation is about so much bigger than just who he is as a player. So this is imperative that Lamar Jackson wins not just this game, but he wins the Super Bowl. Because it’s an entire culture on the back of that jersey, not just the name Jackson.”
Clark’s arguments in both of these clips can certainly be debated. He may feel that Jackson represents an “evolution of the position” from past Black QBs, and that a Super Bowl win for Jackson would be “bigger than Doug Williams.” Others can, and do, disagree with those stances.
But disagreements with Clark’s takes should be over what he actually says and writes, not over incorrect versions of his comments relayed by aggregators. And that’s especially true when it comes to attaching polarizing lines like “authentic” to “Black quarterback” (which Clark does not say in the above clip: the closest he comes to that language is “it stayed authentically Lamar Jackson”), and to relaying old comments from Clark as if they’re fresh (a repeated tactic for some of these accounts).
Clark’s past comments can certainly be kept on file and used in reference to new discussions about his takes on Jackson, or even his other discussions of race. But they should be clearly presented with what he actually said and when he said it. When they’re not, you get a significant portion of sports social media arguing about comments made months to years ago as if they’re new. And that’s sometimes even with outright misrepresentation of those comments.