Did Jason Whitlock cost Cam Newton his ESPN job?

After being laid off by ESPN, Cam Newton insists he never saw the exit coming. But BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock isn’t buying it — especially considering longtime nemesis of Whitlock, Stephen A. Smith, was involved.

“A few weeks ago, Cam Newton was one of Stephen A.’s brothers and … then Cam Newton made the mistake of interviewing me, and everybody seems to be blaming me for Cam Newton losing his position at ‘First Take,’” Whitlock says before playing a clip of Newton from his own podcast.

“Did you see it coming?” Newton was asked on “4th&1.”

“I didn’t, but that’s not the topic that I want to kind of belabor on. Only thing I can look at now, I will not be going back to ‘First Take,’” he answered.

“He’s totally surprised by this? I find that a tiny bit naive, and it was kind of what I was trying to communicate to Cam. You know, I think he thought that by letting Stephen A. come on Cam’s show and make a fool with Cam that he had paid a pittance that was going to protect him,” Whitlock says.

“But, you know, Stephen A. is so funny, so inauthentic that I’m shocked that Cam fell for it and didn’t see it coming. It’s a level of naivety that, maybe it shouldn’t shock me, but it does,” he adds.

However, Dre Baldwin isn’t surprised.

“This is corporate. ESPN’s corporate. And in corporate America, when you get the pink slip, it’s not like they tell you two weeks before. They tell you the day of. They don’t have to give you a reason, and that’s that. So, I actually can understand Cam having not seen it coming,” he explains.

“When they fire you, they fire you. I mean, did they tell you ahead of time they were going to fire you?” he asks Whitlock.

“No, but I could see it,” Whitlock says.

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