Shockwaves were sent through the sports media universe when it was reported this week that Skip Bayless would be leaving FS1 later this summer. Bayless has been a sports television mainstay for two decades and has seen the industry forged in his image through the fire of the Embrace Debate movement, first at ESPN and then at FS1.
But in the past several months, Bayless has been on a long, slow slide into irrelevance since his high-profile breakup with longtime partner Shannon Sharpe. With Sharpe and Stephen A. Smith riding high at ESPN and in their own media empires worth millions of dollars, Bayless is a man without a country , adrift all alone.
How did it all go wrong? Could anything have been done differently? Here’s a look at the journey of Skip Bayless since his move from ESPN to FS1 in 2016 and what happened along the way.
Skip Bayless begins at FS1 with solid, steady success
Spring-Summer 2016: Skip Bayless leaves ESPN after 12 years as one of their prominent on-air figures and the centerpiece of the Embrace Debate movement from the days of Cold Pizza to the juggernaut that is First Take . Bayless moves to upstart competitor FS1 for reportedly north of $20 million over four years . The cable sports outlet Fox had launched three years earlier in 2013, initially as an alternative to ESPN. But hiring Bayless (and fellow ESPN star Colin Cowherd) was a huge statement of intent that FS1 was going to take on ESPN head-on. FS1 even puts up billboards promoting the new show, Skip and Shannon: Undisputed , in Bristol, Connecticut .
September 2016: Undisputed debuts with Skip Bayless, Shannon Sharpe, and Joy Taylor as its starring trio. As Skip had found success with Stephen A. Smith as a foil on First Take , he hopes to duplicate the chemistry with Sharpe. They get beat 3-1 in the ratings by First Take on their first day but still pull in numbers well above replacement programming on FS1. That drops to a 5-1 margin on Day 2 of Undisputed as it draws just 68,000 viewers showing the long climb ahead.
January 2017: ESPN moves First Take , starring Stephen A. Smith and Max Kellerman, from ESPN2 to ESPN in an attempt to boost ratings against Undisputed while SportsCenter moves in the other direction. The sports media world really hasn’t been the same since. After a Dallas Cowboys playoff loss on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, Undisputed pulls in a record viewership of 283,000 viewers . First Take draws over 800,000 on ESPN. By the end of the year, FS1 and Undisputed see increased ratings and are on par with ESPN2, even beating SportsCenter on occasion.
December 2019: Undisputed is still going strong for FS1 after three years on air as the show pulls in 366,000 viewers for its best ratings day in the history of the program . The margin to First Take is less than a 2-1 viewership gap as Undisputed is firmly cemented its place in the sports media landscape.
Cracks begin to appear in Undisputed’s foundation
September 2020: Bayless is heavily criticized for his lack of sympathy for Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott opening up about struggles with his mental health. In spite of the controversy, Bayless remains on track for a new contract extension with FS1.
March 2021: Bayless signs a new four-year deal with FS1 including a hefty raise in salary to $8 million per year. There’s even talk of Fox launching their own courtroom-based show centered around Skip . Thankfully, that show never comes into existence.
June to December 2022: Public cracks start to appear in Skip Bayless’ relationship with Shannon Sharpe as the pair take their sports debates to a more personal and uncomfortable level.
Things reached a boiling point in December when Sharpe took offense to Bayless during a debate about Tom Brady claiming that he was taking personal shots and saying, “You make it seem like I was a bum! I’m in the effing Hall-of-Fame! I got three Super Bowls!”
Shannon Sharpe skips out on Skip Bayless
January 2023: Sharpe skips Undisputed after a disastrous and insensitive tweet from Bayless when Damar Hamlin collapses on the field during a Monday Night Football game. When he returns to the air the next day, the pair break the fourth wall with immediate fireworks over the controversy as Bayless interrupts Sharpe’s monologue to his obvious dissatisfaction.
February-March 2023: Shannon Sharpe tells Chris Russo that he and Skip Bayless had a private meeting in hopes of keeping their disagreements “ between the lines ” after the Hamlin blowup in hopes that the relationship and Undisputed could be salvaged. By the next month, Bayless and Sharpe are having another heated argument on air with Bayless challenging Sharpe if he was calling him a liar.
The drama doesn’t hurt Undisputed in the ratings , with the program scoring its best March ever, averaging 166,000 viewers, up 8% versus the year before.
May 2023: The increasingly fractious relationship between Skip Bayless and Shannon Sharpe comes to an end as Sharpe reaches a buyout agreement with Fox Sports . Speculation immediately turns to what is next for Bayless, Sharpe, and Undisputed with some prophetic takes along the way . One report says that Bayless would handpick Sharpe’s successor and ensure that nobody would challenge him in the same way again .
June 2023: Sharpe has an emotional goodbye on Undisputed , thanking Bayless for sharing the stage with him in spite of their very public fallout saying, “I’ll never forget what you did for me.”
July 2023: Undisputed takes a summer hiatus to retool the program after Sharpe’s sudden departure as FS1 plans to relaunch the show around Bayless, promoting a return in late August before the start of football season.
Undisputed returns as indisputably broken
August 2023: Undisputed retools entirely, mirroring First Take’s strategy with Stephen A. Smith by surrounding Skip Bayless with a rotating panel of former athletes and commentators including Richard Sherman, Keyshawn Johnson, Michael Irvin, and Rachel Nichols among others. As the program debuts on August 28th, Bayless transitions to a host/moderator/pundit role and the result is a trainwreck . Without the competition, First Take reaches its highest ratings in August for six years .
September 2023: At the end of the first week of the new-look Undisputed , viewership crumbles to 78,000 , just over half of the audience that watched Sharpe’s last show a few months earlier and significantly less than what it was doing at its peak.
December 2023: Throughout the fall First Take continually crushes Undisputed by a 554,000-120,000 average margin from September-November. The writing is on the wall for Bayless and his shrinking influence as FS1 touts record viewership for all of its daytime talk shows in December 2023… except for Undisputed .
February-March 2024: Bayless’ slide into obscurity and irrelevance is near completion as Undisputed hits a new low of just 50,000 viewers for the February 27th episode and then dives even further to 48,000 viewers during the height of the NCAA Tournament.
June 2024: Shannon Sharpe and ESPN announce a new multi-year contract as he takes a starring role at First Take with more network appearances on the way and his own budding podcast network after walking away from Bayless, becoming a bigger media star than ever before.
July 2024: Skip Bayless is reportedly finished at FS1 and will leave the network in the summer after eight years and not much left to show for it.
By viewing the timeline in retrospect, it’s incredible to see just how quickly things fell apart after the breakup between Shannon Sharpe and Skip Bayless in May 2023. That was the moment when the 72-year-old’s tenure at FS1 reached the point of no return.
Bayless had six years of decent success at FS1. He certainly wasn’t going to help the network reach or surpass ESPN, but it was decent enough. But without Sharpe and without a true foil to play the contrarian against, Bayless has nothing but his old recycled talking points about the Cowboys and LeBron James that we’ve heard for years. And there’s no debate to be had anymore because sports fans have tuned out.
The post The Skip Bayless timeline and where it went wrong at FS1 appeared first on Awful Announcing .
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