Longtime NFL Network personality fired

Charles Davis is the latest well-known face swept up in ESPN’s ongoing layoffs.

According to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, Davis, who will take over for Gary Danielson as CBS’s lead college football analyst alongside Brad Nessler this fall, is expected to be let go from NFL Network.

Davis’s departure adds another name to a week that’s already reshaped ESPN and NFL Network’s on-air roster, starting with the Monday night firing of Ryan Clark that unfolded live on the air. Tuesday morning brought news that Karl Ravech was let go after 33 years at the network, just one night after calling a Dodgers-Phillies game. Awful Announcing also learned that David Lloyd, Stephania Bell, and Tom Pelissero were among the cuts. ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro addressed the layoffs in a company-wide memo Tuesday morning, framing the cuts as a byproduct of integrating the NFL assets ESPN acquired earlier this year, while acknowledging some positions outside that acquisition were affected as well.

Davis’s TV career has spanned more than two decades and nearly every major network. He got his start as a college football analyst for Fox Sports South in 1997, a job he called a “fluke,” before moving to TBS in 2002 and then to Fox Sports full-time in 2007, where he became the network’s lead college football analyst and worked three consecutive BCS National Championship games. He shifted into the NFL side full-time in 2015, pairing with Kevin Burkhardt and Pam Oliver on Fox’s No. 2 broadcast team, before leaving for CBS in 2020 to join Ian Eagle’s booth. Throughout all of it, Charles Davis maintained a home at NFL Network, where he’d been part of the network’s draft and Scouting Combine coverage since 2007.

That draft role is where Davis’s exit will be felt the most. Fox’s Joel Klatt, who has appeared alongside Davis, Rich Eisen, and Daniel Jeremiah on NFL Network’s draft coverage since 2021 as an informal loan from Fox, said back in April he believed he’d already worked his final draft for the network, telling Kay Adams on Up & Adams that his contract with Fox wouldn’t allow him to cross over into ESPN’s ownership structure.

With Klatt already effectively out and Davis now expected to be let go, that leaves only Eisen and Jeremiah remaining from NFL Network’s core draft broadcast team, even as ESPN has said it intends to keep producing a separate NFL Network draft telecast alongside its ABC and Pat McAfee-led coverage.

For now, Charles Davis joins a growing list of recognizable names — Clark, Ravech, Lloyd, Bell, and Pelissero among them — whose exits have defined layoffs that Pitaro’s memo suggests are still not finished.

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