Marcellus Wiley’s departure from the now-defunct program “Speak For Yourself” had many people giving his former co-host Emmanuel Acho the side eye as he continued with FOX Sports. However, Wiley wants to clear the air that although Acho was making moves behind his back, he already gave him his blessing for a straightforward reason: they didn’t want the same things.
“We’re talking about how it really goes down. We’re talking about the streets, we’re talking about how it really affects us, and that’s what Acho didn’t necessarily want; he wants to be a star,” WIley said to reporter Nick Hamilton, “and a star role in sports media is not what I was doing, so I wasn’t going to help him. What he didn’t know was is I knew what he wanted, and I knew how he was going about it.
“But once again, I just sat there quietly every day working with my boy who was trying to have meetings and having meetings and constructing different shows, and I just knew it. But I was like, ‘Dog, we are not fighting for the same thing so therefore, I dont think you’re backstabbing me.’ But the world at large takes it that way because they think I was dying to do that show again.”
Not On The Same Page
Wiley was a co-host on Fox Sports after leaving ESPN in 2018. He replaced Colin Cowherd and joined Jason Whitlock and Emmanuel Acho on “Speak For Yourself” with Whitlock, eventually leaving to start the “Fearless with Jason Whitlock” program for conservative media company Blaze Media.
Acho stayed with Fox Sports on a rebranded version of the show now entitled “Speak,” and co-hosted by LeSean McCoy and Joy Taylor. For Wiley, leaving Fox was a choice, not the consequence of a backstabbing moment.
“FOX offered me another two shows. … I wanted Acho to be the star he wanted to be and the role he wanted to be,” Wiley continued. “Ideally, they would have threw a bag at me (and) changed ‘Speak For Yourself’ in a way where we could have been deeper, but they didn’t. They kept it surface, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ I wasn’t bitter because I wanted to go somewhere else and be better, and that’s hard for people to understand because people don’t leave those jobs.”‘
