“Let me put this to bed—I wasn’t laid off, I was fired,” Ryan Clark said after his ESPN departure following a decade-long stint with the network. It’s fair to say the exit has hit Clark hard. In fact, after returning to The Pivot podcast, he was asked whether, knowing everything that had happened, there was anything he would have done differently while staying true to himself. Clark, however, admitted he wouldn’t change a thing.

“When I see people in public, like OGs and aunties, and they tell me they proud of me, and they proud of the way I represent the community,” Clark said on his Podcast, while holding back his tears but ultimately failing to do so. “Yeah, I wouldn’t change anything. Because that means the world to me. When I go home and this kid from the West Bank is so accepted in New Orleans now, I wouldn’t change that, you know, never. All I ever wanted to do was be accepted. So yeah, I wouldn’t change.”

While speaking about everything that had gone down, Clark was visibly emotional. This didn’t sit well with the former NFL wide receiver T.J. Moe. Moe took to his social media handle and took a dig at Clark for crying publicly.

“Embarrassing. All of the men crying in the media. Embarrassing. Cut it out. Cry in private if you need to. No shame in shedding the occasional tear in private. All of this public crying is truly embarrassing,” Moe wrote on X.

A Super Bowl champion and a Pro Bowler, the former Pittsburgh Steelers safety joined ESPN in 2015 following his retirement from the NFL. During the stretch, he remained a key voice at NFL Live and SportsCenter before his departure.

Clark wasn’t the only name part of the ESPN layoffs. The round of cuts included names like Cam Newton, Charles Davis, Tom Pelissero, and others. Clark, however, doesn’t view his departure as a layoff. Instead, he has made it clear that, in his eyes, ESPN fired him.

“They’re using layoffs as a cover and a camouflage for what they already intended on doing,” Clark declared. “But there was no cause for it. So because there was no cause for it, you couldn’t just fire me, you had to wait ’til the layoffs so you could camouflage it and veil it.”

ESPN was reportedly planning to announce Clark’s departure on Tuesday. However, fearing the news might leak beforehand, the network broke it a day earlier, shortly after Clark appeared on NFL Live on Monday. At the time of his departure, Clark was under contract, making around $2 million per year. Since then, the NFL legend has bid farewell to his co-panelists Mina Kimes, Dan Orlovsky, and Marcus Spears. What his future has for him, meanwhile, remains to be seen.