Two talents laid off by Vox Media and SB Nation earlier this year have found a home in the ESPN family. With Marcus Spears moving to NFL coverage, Thinking Out Loud on the SEC Network was going to need a total makeover. That is coming in the form of Spencer Hall and Richard Johnson.
Alyssa Lang will be the one hold over from last season on the Thinking Out Loud set. In addition to losing Spears, the show also loses Greg McElroy, who will focus exclusively on play-by-play and College Football Live for ABC and ESPN respectively. The show will also add six-year NFL veteran and former Georgia Bulldog defensive back Brandon Boykin to the cast for 2020.
Both Hall and Johnson confirmed their new jobs on Twitter. Hall even made a point to note that he would not be shaving his large, wild beard.
They were amongst the four staffers of SB Nation’s boutique college football site Banner Society that were furloughed and then later took buyouts over the summer. Hall and Johnson, along with the other two former Banner Society staffers to suffer the same fate, Jason Kirk and Alex Kirschner, recently launched a new college football community called Moon Crew. Hall and Kirk have relaunched the popular podcast Shutdown Fullcast under the Moon Crew banner.
For Johnson, this is a return to ESPN. He wrote for the network’s website for a year beginning in 2015 before moving to SB Nation. Hall is well known to ESPN viewers and is a favorite guest of Scott Van Pelt on SportsCenter and of Bomani Jones on The Right Time podcast.
SEC football kicks off on Saturday. That means a new season of Thinking Out Loud starts this Monday.
