The (Complicated) Truth Behind Why Skip Bayless is Leaving TV

Intro by the age of five he claims he was already raising himself by the time he graduated high school he had earned a full- ride scholarship to one of the most prestigious universities in the country and was winning national awards for his journalism but now skip bis has being called the most hated man in sports less than 15 years after he changed the industry forever so how did he get here and what was skip secret to going from the child of two parents who said they never wanted him to becoming one of the most iconic figures in sports media history because there was a specific strategy he used to achieve this meteoric rise and it's the same thing that's now responsible for his downfall well we're about to find out and by the end of this video I'll share the one way I think Skip can salvage his career because it is still possible he just won't like hearing it John Edward Family Background bis II was born in Oklahoma City in 1951 to levita and John Senor almost immediately his dad started calling him skip which was short for Skipper and was also the nickname of his his mom Lita in fact skip recalls never once hearing his parents call him by his birth name John which bothered him so much that by the time he was 20 he legally changed his name to skip now his mom earned this nickname because she was the head of the bis household and as the oldest of his three siblings young skip took after her in many ways and not all of them good see Skip's parents owned a barbecue restaurant called the Hickory House in OKC where he began working at the age of four it was here that he began to describe his mom as a vain self-absorbed woman who told him many times to his face that she never wanted to be a mother meanwhile his father was an abusive alcoholic who rarely said more than a few words per week to his kids this upbringing meant skip was pretty much on his own starting at age five which made him resent almost everything about his childhood to the point that in his 20s he vowed to never have kids of his own for fear of turning into either Childhood one of his parents now aside from his family life Skip's childhood can be described as is fairly typical he fell in love with sports at an early age particularly basketball and baseball and while he was better at baseball he says that basketball became his first love however he stopped growing in high school at 5'1 which meant that he had to rely on his ferocious competitiveness to make his high school team the same competitiveness that often landed him in fights at a young age and when he reflects on it skip blames his dad for giving him as he describes a type A+ personality since he grew up always thinking that he had to prove his dad wrong that's because aside from drinking his dad's favorite hobby was being disappointed in everything skip did to this day Skip can't recall one time either of his parents ever asked how he was doing in sports or school or even told him that they loved him this sted a fire in him at a young age that can actually still explain some of his actions today but early on it simply meant that skip became solely focused on one goal leaving Oklahoma City and going to college now at this point no one in his family had more than a high school education and Skip thought that his ticket out of that cycle would be through basketball but by his senior year he was only averaging 1.4 points per game luckily he had a hidden talent to fall back on he just didn't realize it yet as skip tells the story one day High School & College during his junior year his English teacher asked him to stay after class he describes how she didn't ask but rather ordered that he joined the journalism Club because of his promising writing skills skip objected but to no avail and that year he began covering the very same teams he was playing on this led him to earn a sports writing scholarship that allowed him to attend vanderbelt University on a full ride here he majored in English in history only calling home a few times per year he was happy to have escaped Oklahoma City and by 1974 he graduated kumlade and took a job working at the Miami Herald now Becoming an Award-Winning Journalist early in Skip's career he became well known for his investigative work as a sports columnist who never shied away from covering potentially touchy stories for instance in 1976 when he took a job at the Los Angeles Times at just 25 years old he made a splash when he published a piece on the Dodgers Clubhouse resentment of their Golden Boy first baseman Steve Garvey and his Celebrity Wife Cindy another time he ruffled feathers when he reported that LA Rams owner Carol Rosen Bloom was actually the one making the behind the-scenes decisions to start different quarterbacks every week skip stories were part sport part reality TV but they were always well sourced expertly written and extremely in depth often 3,000 to 4,000 words long he even won his first national awards for outstanding writing in 1977 at age 26 the same year he became one of the youngest sports writers to have a national column at the Dallas Morning News and later the Dallas Times Herald here he would go on to be voted Texas sports writer of the year three times Between 1979 and 1986 but then in 1989 skip would publish a story that would set his career on a cra course no one could have predicted now Dallas is known for its extremely hot summer heat but you don't have to live in the south to know that the worst feeling is being hot and sticky down there luckily I found the next best thing to just shoving a fan down your pants and they're called chillboy chillboy is owned and operated by two guys right here in Minnesota and over the past decade they've become obsessed with finding the most comfortable material to make underwear out of that also keeps your boys free and dry this might be TM I but I actually just wore their super soft bamboo boxer brief to a baseball game when it was 90° out and normally I would completely dread standing up because of all the swass you get from sitting down too long in the summer but these things have been expertly designed with a no sweat vent in the lower back area that kept me feeling cool and dry the whole time all while staying odor-free thanks to their Advanced antimicrobial fiber and don't just take my word for it because every single one of their designs has hundreds if not thousands of five-star reviews so ditch that old wornout cotton underwear that I know has been sitting in your drawer for The Last 5 Years and get yourself something that you actually look forward to wearing and when you use my code tw15 chillboy docomo to chillboy docomo's rides to Fame in Dallas Riding the Cowboys Wave coincided quite well with the Cowboys in popularity and in 1989 and 1993 he wrote his first two books chronicling the rise of the team both pieces featured the exact kind of work skip had become known for they were well sourced and in-depth but contained the kind of salacious drama that helped them fly off the shelves that's when skip took things one step further and published his third and final book in 1996 titled hellbent the crazy truth about the winner R Dallas Cowboys after their third Super Bowl win in 4 years but this last book contained a section that Drew major scrutiny at the time and is something that still follows skip around to this day see skip learned that controversy and drama soul and nowhere was there more drama with this Cowboys team than between head coach Barry Switzer and Star Quarterback Troy Aman in the book skip reported on speculation by Switzer and people close to him in the organization that Troy Aman was gay and while skip himself never claimed to believe it hi didn't care because he had just been proven right controversy sold the book was a hit and and he was even able to start faxing his column directly to readers for $99 a year when his employer the Dallas Times Herald went out of business but what really solidified Skip's identity as a contrarian was when a relatively new 24/7 Sports Network Came Calling now the same year skip published his first book he also joined ESPN as a panelist on their show The Sports reporters by then he was already well known for being a polarizing figure locally but now he was given the platform to talk about more than just the Dallas Cowboy and he took it by the Joining ESPN 2000s skip had made the leap from the newspaper to completely focus on TV spending the next few years guest starring on different ESPN shows filling in for Jim Rome and even commentating events for the Golf Channel in 2004 skip was finally hired full-time by ESPN to team up with Woody page in a daily segment called first intent the idea was that the two reporters would be featured during ESPN 2's new morning show called pizza and asked to debate a few topics every day in between news and highlight segments but that version of the show wouldn't last long for two reasons both of which have been blamed on skip the first is because according to his co-host wood he page skip was tiring to work with he had always been a loner even during his days in Dallas but his obsession with his job was beyond what anyone else was used to and that's not just coming from me 17 years ago I told my wife on our first date in New York City I told her that night first date first 15 minutes because I had a feeling I said he hey if this goes anywhere just understand you're always going to be number two to my career because it's it's my life it's my passion it's my reason for being it it's all in the end I really care about is my career because it's not work it's not a job it's me it's who I am and while this dedication might have served skip well at his previous jobs taking a light-hearted TV debate segment to seriously had become his specialty to to the point that it resulted in a physical altercation with his co-host Woody Paige I got so tired of working with him and it it was interesting because he genuinely On-Air Fight with Woody Paige believes in what he says and one morning Jay Crawford who was one of the hosts of the show said okay guys we have this funny uh question in the program Golf Magazine says that uh golfers and you play golf golfers would give up sex for an entire year if they could improve their hand cap by four strokes and they said to skip would you give up sex for I don't know that I've ever told the story would you give up sex for a year to improve your golf game and he said I have a great golf game he said I've had more sex than anybody in this room combined there's 10 people in the room you've had more sex than everybody combined and there wasn't any laughter or anything he wasn't being funny he was being serious and the producer of the show at the time said uh that's not the answer we want you to give give on the air you know give something else so we go in the air we're live that show was live in the morning for two hours it was like the Today Show of sports version of The Today Show and so we come toward the end of the show and they said okay what you got a funny story here uh C magazine would you give up sex for a year and I told him the same story I said of course I would yes fact I'll give up sex for two years if I can improve it by six Strokes in handicap and so that Jay turned to skip and said would you give up sex for a year if you could improve your golf game and he said I've had more sex than W he's ever even thought about I got up we were at a sort of a this is on live TV right Woody so I got up and I went over and I started choking him that's not a good thing but I I grabbed him by the throat and honestly he was he worked out every day he was in a lot better shape than me I did a lot a lot of drinking in New York that argument got into a fight that ended up on the floor you can look at it find it on YouTube and close by was a door to 8th and 34th Street in New York City and we kind of opened the door and just went outside and we could hear the producer director and they said Let It Go Let It Go and so we're like tumbling into the street now other people familiar with this incident say that Woody is playing it up a little bit but the tension was certainly real and whether or not the reason cold pizza only lasted 3 years what you can't refute is that skip was the architect behind what came next in 2011 almost 4 years after the cancellation of cold pizza a show called First Take was launched to take his place however this show wouldn't have any of the segments or highlights that normally came within ESPN Morning Show instead it would be built solely around the most popular part of the program it The Rise and Fall of First Take was replacing the debate and at the center of it would be ESPN's most polarizing personality skip bis immediately the show was a success seeing a 58% increase in ratings in just the first 3 months and after cycling through different debate partners for 6 months the network decided to make another emerging star Skip's permanent co-host a local NBA reporter from Philadelphia named Stephen A Smith this decision launched the show to an entirely new level with First Take regularly averaging close to half a million viewers per episode making it the most viewed original program on the entire network but just like what happened before Skip's overly serious attitude mixed with his knack for leaning into controversy created a rift that proved too much for him to come back from now it's hard to pinpoint the exact moment that skip bis jumped the shark but one example could be his tireless coverage of Tim TBO from claiming that TBO was a better Prospect than Andrew Luck in 2012 to saying that he would take him over Tom Brady and Aaron Rogers with the game on the line skip found a way to shoe horn TBO into almost every Sports debate even long after he was done playing football and evidently this dick grew old quickly with the bosses at ESPN they had remembered that skip bis lived off of talking about Tim TBO every day before I arrived they had accused skip bis meaning the public of being a caricature of himself and even though skip was incredibly proud of his Tim TBO coverage the bosses weren't necessarily enamored with it skip Bas was incredibly proud of his coverage of Tim TBO the boss has felt otherwise but Stephen A and the bosses at ESPN weren't the only ones to notice that the on to steem journalist had become a cartoonish version of himself in fact I think one Dallas resident particular and someone who knew Skip's work before he went into TV put it best right you guys like to talk in complete generalities where no one can question you right you don't ever use facts you don't ever use substance you ever use facts no that's all I use on this show what excruciating pressure undeniable this you know it's just all generalities but none of this phased skip because he was doing the one thing he was best at storing the pot and now he was doing it on the biggest network with the biggest show in the country and he was about to receive a call that would validate all the work he had been doing for the past 40 years see in 2015 the network Fox was trying to build out its Sports Department in a way that could finally rival ESPN to do this they added some of their competitors best talent which included a 4-year $20 million deal with skip to create a similar debate Style Show to challenge the success of First Take and if skip Joining Fox wasn't already stuck in his ways before this big payday he definitely was now and honestly you can't blame him he was now making more money than he probably ever had in his career to do the one thing that he had become most famous for debating sports on TV in 2016 FS1 Undisputed premiered with former NFL tight end Shannon sharp sitting across from skip but this just proved to be the beginning of the end in its first full year on the air the show barely averaged more than 120,000 viewers four times less what first take was pulling but Fox doubled down on the format resigning skipped to another 4-year $32 million deal in March of 2021 however the slide continued and after a public Fallout between skipping Shannon in 2023 sent Shannon packing for PN Undisputed has failed to average over 100,000 viewers since so it's no surprise that when Skip's contract was up for an extension this year the network decided they were okay with letting him walk but that doesn't mean skip is done because even though it may look like the 72 year-old's best days are behind him just listen to him talk about retirement a few years ago I don't even want to hear the word retirement because I associate it with death it's the first step toward death is retirement to me that doesn't Predictions for Skip’s Career sound like a guy who's ready to pack it up so what should he do his own podcast isn't all that successful and ESPN doesn't seem to want him back well I have two predictions one is what I think he should do and the other is what I think he will do let's start with what he should do at this point skip has likely earned over $ hundred million in his career he has redefined Sports media For Better or For Worse and he's become a household name I think even he'd admit that's far more than he could have ever hoped to accompl but at the same time I think it's clear that he's not ready to just sit on the beach until he dies so why not go back to his roots and write another book on the Dallas Cowboys or any other number of teams his name recognition alone would make whatever he writes an instant besteller not to mention that writing is arguably what he's best at this way he could still be involved in sports but it could happen on his own terms without the needs for all the politics of a big Network and this way he can ride into the sunset as a Pioneer in Sports media while still being remembered for his true talents but if I were to put money on it that's not what's going to happen instead I could see some second rate media Network or even a local radio station offer him a cushy yet discounted salary to spit takes on their channels until he can't walk anymore this would certainly be the saddest option it would be like watching a washed up Rockstar play at a County Fair it's sad and demoralizing and it's probably where he'll end up because at the end of the day Skip has always gotten attention for his is sensationalized takes and ideas not any connection he's built with the real audience and when he wasn't the only one debating sports on TV anymore his audience realized there were better places to go for sports content leaving him on the outside looking in on an entire industry he's responsible for helping create if you enjoy this deep dive consider subscribing I do two of these Sports business profiles every month sometimes they're interviews and sometimes they're just profiles like this one and if you want to give suggestions for who I should cover next make sure to leave those in the comments I'll see you guys in 2 weeks [Music]