Skip Bayless is off TV but not done arguing about sports

Skip Bayless materialized on a computer screen one morning this week in a Vanderbilt sweatshirt and with a ball of white fur in his lap.

“This is Hazel,” he said. “She is the fiercest Maltese this side of Malta.”

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“She’s a diva,” added a voice that came from just off the screen. It was his wife, Ernestine, working on the video call’s connection and fidgeting with a straw in Skip’s health shake (vanilla cream flavor, 30 grams of protein, no sugar.) “Hazel did not want to leave Skip’s side,” she said.

Bayless, 72, was as recognizable as ever: full head of hair, square jaw, slight Oklahoma twang. He was in a hearty mood, too. Vanderbilt, his alma mater, had upset top-ranked Alabama for the first time in 40 years over the weekend.

Bayless watched the game in his man cave - with Hazel, but not Ernestine. “I’m a psycho during the games,” Bayless said.

He was back in the cave Sunday night for more good news, a Dallas Cowboys win. After the game, Bayless, who’d logged 5½ treadmill miles earlier that day, did a back and chest workout.

It was a familiar fall weekend for Bayless, aside from Vanderbilt winning. He spent the last decade-plus as one of the most recognizable faces on ESPN and then Fox Sports. But this week, on Monday morning, he didn’t venture onto TV to crow about the Commodores or the Cowboys.

Bayless ended his run on “Undisputed,” the Fox Sports debate show he starred on for eight years, when his contract expired this summer. For a guy who made his living by the decibel, it was a quiet end. Ratings had fallen, and the show had never recovered from co-star Shannon Sharpe’s departure the previous year.

Fox Sports, meanwhile, has declared a pivot away from debate shows. Bayless was the format’s first big star, on ESPN’s “First Take” alongside Stephen A. Smith, but is less of a philosopher on what it all means.

I don’t have perspective on where it’s all going,” he said. “I just know who I am, and what I did, and what I do.”

Now he is focused on his own grand plans. He wants to create a digital network for a YouTube channel. He’s already got his weekly solo show, but he is planning to add an interview show and a debate show. He said he’s considering five or six different debate partners, though he declined to name names.

“Maybe someone to lighten me up,” he said. (He’s also talked to his friend, rapper Lil Wayne, about collaborating.)

His other projects include a book about his years in television (that he says he couldn’t write while working for a TV network) and a screenplay centered on a LeBron James-like character that he plans to shop. Asked for any details on the movie, Bayless smirked and offered: “A lot of sex and religion.”

Bayless talks these days like any TV star who isn’t on TV anymore. There is a freedom to the internet, he said, without any bosses or corporate red tape. But he will have to prove he has a loyal following with a younger demographic than on TV. He was scheduled to appear this week on Barstool’s “Pardon My Take” podcast.

“I was able to make some money in television,” Bayless said. “Now it’s time to make my mark.”

“Skip is good at adapting, and he’s really in tune with what keeps his audience engaged,” said Gabe Goodwin, the founder of digital production company Blue Duck, who’s worked with Bayless at ESPN and Fox. “That’s the recipe for a great podcast, so I would bet on him.”

Yet Fox Sports bet on Bayless, when he and Sharpe clashed, and it’s not hard to argue the company bet on the wrong co-host.

Fox Sports paid Sharpe around $5 million left on his contract to leave, according to multiple people familiar with the figures, and rebuilt a show around Bayless with a cast of other contributors. Today, Sharpe is a bigger star than ever, with multiple hit podcasts and a regular role with Smith on “First Take.” Bayless was never the same without Sharpe. (Sharpe has said his partnership with Bayless was doomed when Bayless lost respect for him.)

Of Sharpe, Bayless said: “It dumbfounds me [that he said I lost respect for him] ... I only gained respect for Shannon Sharpe day after day after day that he could hang on this show.”

Still, Bayless said his departure from Fox had been in the works for years. When his first Fox contract was up a few years ago, he said, he wanted to reunite with Smith at ESPN. Bayless said he had a contract offer from ESPN but that Fox exercised a matching clause.

“I was devastated. Stephen A. was devastated,” Bayless said. “They were obviously not real happy that I would be so disloyal as to try to strong arm my way out of FS1.”

Bayless later had extensive discussions about doing an ESPN Plus show with Smith, but that never came to fruition, at least in part, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions, because the network walked away from the deal when Bayless questioned Dak Prescott’s leadership skills after the Cowboys quarterback discussed his battle with depression. (“I thought we got past that,” Bayless said.)

ESPN, Fox Sports, Smith and Sharpe declined to comment.

The post-Sharpe version of Bayless’s show debuted ahead of football season last year, but it shed viewers and never found its footing. Bayless was quick to acknowledge its shortcomings. “My heart was no longer in it because I didn’t want Shannon to leave, and I fought for him to stay,” he said. “It was a shock they pushed Shannon out.”

He said there was no plan to replace Sharpe, and when he was asked to take a two-month break before the new show launched, it sent viewers to the competing “First Take.” He was critical of the new show’s format, too, which put Bayless in more of a facilitator role.

“After the first show, I said, ‘This just doesn’t work for me, because I’m a fire starter, and if I moderate, I have to stay moderate,’” Bayless said, adding: “After a while, I didn’t even look at the ratings, because I knew what was coming: we would get crushed. And we did get crushed.”

Could Bayless have done something different?

“I should have resisted [the plan],” he said.

Bayless remains devoted to the craft of debate. If, to some viewers, morning sports conversation is background noise at the gym or the airport, Bayless viewed these debates - “LeBron vs. Jordan” or “Should the Cowboys re-sign Prescott?” - as noble crucible among combatants. The debaters are gladiators in the arena matching wits, if not swords. (One gets a similar feeling from Smith, too.)

For more than a decade, Bayless lived in that world. He woke up at 2 a.m. in Los Angeles for “Undisputed” and lives within a two-minute drive of the Fox studios. It is a schedule for a man who appreciates a schedule: games, segments, scoreboards. (Bayless says he has never lost a debate.) He runs on a treadmill in Los Angeles, where it’s sunny nearly 300 days a year, to avoid the traffic. He said he has missed two days of cardio since 1998.

Whatever is ahead of Bayless, he also can’t help but look back. As he considers his roster of debaters, Bayless was asked if Smith could be a possibility, given Smith’s newfound freedom at ESPN to appear on so many outside platforms.

“Could he?” Bayless asked. “That’s breaking news to me. I would love to do that, and I will try to do that. Thank you.”

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