On National Signing Day last week, four members of the Mississippi State University football creative services team were fired less than a year after the team was formed.
As reported by The Commercial Dispatch in Columbus, Jonathan King was hired in January as the senior director of creative strategy for the football program. King, Ryan Ortegon, Bryce Mitchell and Natalie Clark were fired Wednesday. King posted a thread on X the following morning, saying he was told he could not ask further questions in the meeting when he and his coworkers were told they were being terminated.
Per the reporting of Benjamin Rosenberg of The Dispatch, Ortegon was the Bulldogs’ director of football video, Mitchell had been in charge of graphic design, and Clark joined the department in June as the director of football content and strategy. Caleb Allen, the assistant director for football creative video, is still in that role.
Mitchell said the full team received a text Wednesday afternoon from David Wilczewski, MSU’s associate athletic director for football administration, telling them that head coach Jeff Lebby wanted to meet with all of them in Wilczewski’s office.
Lebby delivered the news, then turned the floor over to deputy athletic director Terry Prentice, who oversees student-athlete brand services and business development. Prentice went over the severance packages for King, Ortegon, Mitchell and Clark. The termination letter the four received was signed by Lebby and athletic director Zac Selmon, Mitchell said, as reported by Rosenberg.
According to Rosenberg, MSU introduced the creative content team specifically for football around 10 months ago, and the football program also had its own photographer this year — separate from other sports on campus — for the first time.
Per Rosenberg:
Bulldogs fans on social media Wednesday morning expressed confusion when the posts introducing MSU’s new football signees were delayed compared to when the players officially signed. The team’s website listed several signees by the time the first member of the class was posted on X at 8:12 a.m.
Mitchell said he asked the team’s human resources representative about an exit interview and was told LaKitha Murray, the assistant athletic director for human resources management, would be conducting them if he was interested. He chose not to go through with the exit interview because it would not have given him the opportunity to speak with the people involved with the decision.
An MSU athletic department spokesperson said the terminations were “a personnel matter” and did not offer further comment.
