Suzy Kolber felt the weight when ESPN laid her off in June 2023, after twenty-seven years with the company. Now, she is opening up about the emotions she kept inside.
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“It feels like a bad breakup in a relationship,” Suzy Kolber told Sports Business Journal’s Richard Deitsch on the “Sports Media with Richard Deitsch” podcast back on Sep. 10.
“I think I’m back now. I will be cheering everyone on who is doing the Super Bowl. But for a chunk there, it was painful.”
Doubling down on the same emotion, Kolber expressed her feelings to Mike McCarthy of Front Office Sports about how she got to know and felt about the situation.
“It was a few weeks out, and Steve Young and I did become sort of the poster child for this coming layoffs,” Kolber said. “Our faces were appearing in the paper, and there were articles being written, and I did feel like I was kind of left out there a little bit, sort of twisting in the wind, waiting.”
“I asked one of my direct bosses, and there was no absolute ‘You’re safe’; it was a ‘I don’t know,’ and then Jimmy Pitaro is the president of the company. I put in a call to him, and he called me back, and I thought he was as honest as he could be, and he said, ‘There is a whiteboard, and your name is on it, but I don’t really know right now.'”
Kolber joined the network in 1999 after previously working there from 1993-96. She became well known for her NFL coverage on “Sunday Night Football” and “Monday Night Football.” After leaving ESPN, she said she sometimes avoided watching the network’s NFL coverage because the experience was still difficult for her.
She also cleared the air around her layoff when she spoke to Sports Business Journal. She addressed speculation that ESPN let her go because “she’s making too much money.” But the reality was that she had already accepted a 39% pay cut in the contract she signed before the layoff, while she still had one year left on that deal.
Even after taking the pay cut, Kolber was laid off, and she wasn’t alone. Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young was among the ESPN layoffs on June 30, 2023. Young was 61 at the time and had worked as an NFL analyst for ESPN since 2000. He mainly appeared on “Monday Night Countdown,” the show that aired before ESPN’s weekly prime-time NFL game.
ESPN reportedly laid off around 20 well-known broadcasters during that round of cuts. Young was one of the network’s familiar NFL voices and had spent more than two decades with ESPN before his departure. Young also worked alongside Suzy Kolber on “Monday Night Countdown.”
Both of them drove solid numbers for ESPN. Monday Night Countdown had a strong run in 2021. The show, hosted by Suzy Kolber, averaged 1.384 million viewers, which was 29% higher than 2020 and 5% higher than 2019.
On top of that, viewership among 18-24-year-olds rose 45%, while 18-49-year-olds increased 31% and female viewers grew 23% from the previous season. Kolber hosted the show alongside Booger McFarland, Randy Moss, Steve Young, and Adam Schefter.
After leaving ESPN, Suzy Kolber found a new role in sports media. She is now the host and executive producer of “The Originals,” a new show on Scripps Sports Network. The show premiered on September 15, 2026, at 8 p.m. ET, giving Kolber a chance to return to television.