Coming across like Woody Allen’s younger, deranged cousin, if he had one, leavened with some Richard Simmons unctuousness, and there - boom - you got your most incisive, bang-on critique of any sports commentator that you’ve seen in a long time.
No paragon of he-manliness.
But this part is precisely what makes your comment so dumb: the idea that “he-manliness” or “some air of testosteron-y/athletic bearing” is in any way necessary to be a good analyst and commentator on sports.
Optics are a consideration here, though. Of course optics doesn’t have any bearing on his actual commentary skills, but considering he doesn’t have any, then he’s got nothing to fall back on, other than that eel-like grossness he expresses himself with.
It was made clear in the OP that this wasn’t going to be trenchant, given the subject. If it was on Jim Rome or Dan Patrick - whole different ball game - they’re deserving of a more measured, substantive discussion, while Skippy should be likened, every day, to a puddle of goose vomit with berries in them.
That’s Rick Bayless’ brother? Rick makes homemade Mexican food from the ground up. I’ve seen him do some cooking stuff on t.v. that looks really good, and he seems like a decent guy, too.
Yep.
Rick Bayless makes awesome food, and listening to his brother makes you want to throw it back up again.
I was joking. Jim Rome is one of the founding fathers of sports talk douchebaggery. I agree about Dan Patrick however.
Which you are so correct, and in which I’m so inexplicably brainfartingly off when I put him in the same company as Mr. Patrick in my previous post.
He was very good at nights on XTRA out of San Diego. He invented a new way to do sportstalk radio. This was when they actually took calls from listeners. It was hilarious to listen to him feud with Lee Hacksaw Hamilton.
I’m not really all that familiar with Jim Rome, so sadly I was whooshed. 
My theory is that Bayless and SAS are both guys who are smart enough to realize they can make a lot of money by acting stupid, and probably don’t actually believe a lot of the shit they spew, like Rush Limbaugh. They just do it for ratings - people love to hate them.
Some hilarious examples of Skipper’s analytical and prognosticating abilities. Unfortunately you’ll have to deal with some wildly inconsistent audio levels and cheezy little peanut-gallery-type edits, which I admit were a tad bothersome, but there are definitely some Skipadelic gems in there.
ETA - More Mr. Smith goodness thrown in there, as well, in case we’re not getting enough.
Total hijack - just came up with a brilliant new tongue-twister/lower-mouth exercise: “These are how our cars are made.”
Skip Bayless is perhaps the biggest sports media troll. I don’t think he really believes most of what he says, he just wants to get a reaction. It’s the only way for him to stay relevant. I can’t think of another sports personality, even Jim Rome, who does this as often as Bayless.
“I hate Howard Stern! He’s so crude and crass and is the worst person in the world”
“Then why do you listen to him?”
“To see what he says next!”
Game. Set. Match.
I have nothing to back it up, but I think Bayless and SAS are the reason that ESPN is doing so poorly. Yes, their show gets really high ratings, but I think the rest of the audience has been so turned off by them, they avoid the channel altogether - that’s really what happened to me. Specifically, it was Skip’s infatuation of Tim Tebow, and the network’s inability to talk about anything but Tim Tebow during his brief reign as media superstar, that made me just turn the channel permanently.
About the only time i see ESPN is on the TVs at the gym, but from what i’ve seen there recently, i was under the impression that Bayless and Smith are no longer on the same show together. Is that not true?
If that’s what people do, then more fool them. But as Munch suggests, for me the mere presence of Bayless on the screen (especially when he is/was with Smith) caused me to immediately switch the channel.
The more general problem, i think, is that sports networks now exist in a world where we don’t actually need them to see the sports anymore. I remember the first time i lived in North America (Canada, early 1990s), i used to love ESPN. I knew that i could turn it on at night and get highlights of all that day’s baseball games, or all the hockey games, or the football, or whatever. I used to particularly look forward to watching Van Earl Wright on Sports Center; i found his commentary hilarious. Now, if i want to see highlights of the day’s games, i fire up MLB.com. I have a subscription so i can watch full games, but even without a subscription i can still see highlights of every game. Same with other sports.
All of this means that sports networks these days spend a lot of time talking about sports-related things rather than showing sports. And the result is a fucking shitload of mediocre, sensationalist, and often flat-out bullshit television. They can take up an hour talking about some baseball player who spent a couple of seconds too long watching his home run, and whether that “disrespects the game.” They can spend another hour talking about whether LeBron’s tweet about Charles Barkley was warranted or disrespectful. Another hour can be devoted to J.J. Watts’ offseason training regimen or Gronkowski’s bro-like selfie videos.
And most of this stuff requires nothing but opinion. Even when they talk about actual on-field performance, a significant proportion of it is little more than mere speculation. Hours devoted to guessing about how some new draft pick might fit into the team, or which NFL teams are most likely to regress this year and miss the playoffs, or whether some guy’s performance slump means that you should “buy” or “sell” him. Admittedly, i usually turn off when any of this stuff is on the TV, but in all the times i’ve listened to these sports talking heads on shows like ESPN, i can count on one hand the number of things i’ve actually learned about the game. And most of those came from Peter Gammons.
Skip Bayless is not at ESPN anymore. He’s at FS1. I haven’t seen his show, but I listen to Cowherd from time to time, who by network association is compelled to tell us what stupid things Skip is saying.
“I’d rather have Tim Tebow than Aaron Rodgers.”
I don’t care how much of a Vikings fan you are, that statement alone tells you everything you need to know about Bayless.
Skip Bayless gets paid to piss in people’s cornflakes – that’s basically THE reason that he and other commentator personalities (Stephen A Smith, Colin Cowherd, etc) exist. I stopped taking him seriously a long time ago. I liked the combo of Bayless and Stephen A occasionally just because I wanted a little more noise in the background from time to time, but that’s basically it. If you’re angry and posting about it on a message board, then from their point of view, they’re…WINNING.
Okay, I’m going to write something here that’s going to read as elitist as all hell, but I don’t know how else to explain what I think is the truth.
Most sports fans don’t know very much about sports. The majority of fans are pig-ignorant, value opinion over facts, put one hundred times more emphasis on issue of personality and “character” than they do things that matter, and are, in a surprisingly high number of cases, unconsciously racist. They’re stupid.
The quality of sports discussion on the SDMB is probably ten times higher than a radio call in show and 100 times higher than a casual conversation. From time to time I can hear our neighbors talking about sports in their backyard, with their friends, and when they talk about sports it’s as if I am listening to cavemen trying to explain how airplanes work. They don’t know what they’re talking about, full stop. That’s what most fans are like. They’re the imbeciles who call the radio station and say the Blue Jays would win if only they bunted more, which to anyone who has ever in their lives watched baseball, and were to watch this team for a week, is approximately as stupid as saying the Titanic would not have sank if only everyone on board had thrown their hats into the water so the boat wasn’t as heavy.
The discussions in here, or in other corners on the Internet where people are having fact-based discussions about sports, are NOT typical. They’re unusual. Most fans are dumb, and they want dumb explanations.
So they LIKE Skip Bayless, and they LIKE Stephen Smith, and they LIKE Don Cherry, and they like other people who yell about LeBron and Yasiel Puig and Colin Kaepernick. The reason there isn’t a lot of intelligent discussion of sports on TV is because there is very little market for it. People want stuff that’s easy to swallow, and yelling idiots are very easy for yelling fans to swallow. (The other easy product is the Announcer/Commentator Who Really Doesn’t Say Anything You Didn’t Already Know But He Sounds Folksy.)
These guys are popular for the same reason there are still Burger Kings, and for the same reason “The Big Bang Theory” is on its 168th season; they may suck, but they’re easy to consume and understand. Takes no brainpower.