Hoda Kotb Responds to Rumor She’s Replacing Kelly Clarkson on Her Talk Show

Hoda Kotb won’t be taking Kelly Clarkson’s job anytime soon.

Kotb set the record straight about rumors that she was being courted to take over for Clarkson on The Kelly Clarkson Show during her return to the TODAY show Wednesday.

While Kotb announced her new wellness company, Joy 101, on the NBC morning show following her exit in January, her TODAY replacement, Craig Melvin, made sure to ask her about the talk show chatter.

“Do y’all think — I want to ask y’all a real question — do you think if I ever came back to TV, do you know where the only place I would ever come back to is?” Kotb then asked Melvin and her former co-anchor, Savannah Guthrie. “Right here. This is the spot.” Being even more direct in her response to the rumors, Kotb said simply, “Delete, not true.”

Guthrie teased, “I thought you were because I know you’ve been playing your guitar and singing a lot lately, and I thought you were ready for some Hodaoke,” joking about Clarkson’s “Kellyoke” segment on her show. But Kotb assured Guthrie that there was no truth to the rumors, and while she will be appearing on Clarkson’s show next week, it’s “just for fun.”

Also during her appearance Wednesday, Kotb revealed that 6-year-old daughter Hope had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which “definitely weighed in” on her choice to leave TODAY.

“As anyone with a child who has Type 1 [knows], especially a little kid, you’re constantly watching, you’re constantly monitoring, you’re constantly checking, which is what I did all the time when I was [at TODAY],” she told TODAY.com. “You’re distracted.”

“You just get a priority check in your life,” Kotb added during her conversation with Guthrie and Melvin. “I can be here and sweating what’s happening to Hope in the morning and in the night, or I can be there and feel relief that I can see.”