Skip Bayless needs to “retire”, but not for why you think

Most people, outside of my eventual bankruptcy lawyer, know that I didn’t start VikingsTerritory.com. I have started a Minnesota Vikings news/opinion/content website though, that site is purplePTSD.com which I launched in May of 2015. After about two years of good growth and using my background in internet start-up management and monetization to rub elbows with a who’s who of local sports personalities, I decided to purchase VikingsTerritory.com in a sort of “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality.

That raised purplePTSD.coms’ profile and with that came email after email each week that all essentially could not believe that I would openly mock post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been told that PTSD is a real disease, that I am unpatriotic for mocking the military, that people like me make people with PTSD ashamed to get help, etc.

The thing about it?

I was diagnosed with PTSD in 2014.

Whoops!

Beyond that, I don’t think I’m mocking anything. Sure, I’m basically saying that being a Vikings fan is so traumatic that it can cause a condition, but if anything I’m mocking the Vikings. I get it though, if I ran another site called TimberwolvesLeprosy.com, or MNTwinsBubonicPlague.com, or MinnesotaWild.com, I’m sure people from the turn of the 20th century, the dark ages, and St. Paul would all be up in arms (until those arms fell off at the Target Center, anyway).

But, I am a laughter is the best medicine (besides actual medicine) type guy, and coming from a guy who has a condition that basically implies I’m too sensitive, I do think that people are too sensitive these days. The internet has created the idea that if something offends someone, it is by-and-large worth ruining the offender’s life over.

I’ve been sober from alcohol since the tail end of 2010 (with a short relapse in 2013). There is nothing in this world that I loved more than alcohol or that had the all-encompassing draw that booze had to me. I was more of a binge drinker than your standard everyday alcoholic, but that’s because my body didn’t enjoy being poisoned and also because when I drank I had to have enough to drink to blackout otherwise I’d get incredibly angry.

It was like a thirst that needed to be sated the second the first sip of alcohol hit my innards. It’s hard to explain because it didn’t feel like being really parched inside. It more felt like my soul needed to be completed and the only thing that could accomplish that fate was… Bottom shelf vodka, apparently?

Do I get offended when I see NFL news from the Atlanta Falcons site the “Falcoholic”? No.
Why?

Because their intention isn’t to insult me personally, or to insult at all, but rather to convey that the love they have for the Falcons is on par with my love for Taaka Vodka. There’s a site called SportsOverdose.com that the content from this site as well as its sister site, purplePTSD.com, get posted to. Does that upset me because I have also been sober from opioids since 2011 (with no relapse), as well?

But let’s say it did upset me. I wouldn’t create a petition to end that site’s existence. Instead, I’d probably at most say something snarky on social media, or start a site like SportsNarcan.com, that would post sarcastic responses to their posts (even though they’re an aggregator so I’d just be writing sarcastic responses to my own articles (which sounds like a great idea for a series! “Sure, Mr. Johnson, let’s draft only players from the Big Ten!”).

What does this have to do with Skip Bayless and his IQ and 401k?

Well, first, I wanted to explain to those of you that are new to the site(s) (which according to Google Analytics is 80% of you every day) that there isn’t anyone in local sports media that is more open about their mental health than I am. My site is a reference to my PTSD diagnosis, but not in the way I implied above. Rather, it’s a reference to the “short” relapse I referenced above. I ended up going to treatment at St. Joe’s hospital, and it was there that I reaffirmed everything about me that I had lost from a pretty rough go of things from… 2002-2013… after a pretty charmed first 18 years of my life.

It was in treatment that I remembered things about myself that I had either forgotten or that I had stripped from me by people around me. So, when I was diagnosed with PTSD it was a gigantic sigh of relief that I had finally found out why things were as they were. I wasn’t solely diagnosed with PTSD, though, I also was diagnosed with major depressive disorder as well as generalized anxiety disorder.
All of this has been the longest intro ever to the point of this article, Skip Bayless’ comments about Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott. If you haven’t heard, Prescott said on an episode of “In Depth with Graham Bensinger” that while he was cooped up at home because of COVID he began to experience anxiety and depression. Then Prescott’s brother Jace committed suicide and that only compounded his newfound mental health disorder(s).

Bayless being Bayless, he decided that this was a great time to make this somehow a negative not for Prescott, but ABOUT Prescott. How? Well, it’s pretty spectacular actually. Wait, that was my autocorrect. I actually meant that it was pretty just lazy and dumb.

Now, I’m not going to take the route you presume by my intro, as I’m not offended by things that are contrived and most of what Bayless does is contrived. He’s like a vampire that survives on outrage, and from the looks of the videos of him saying this… He really needed this controversy.

Let’s take a look at what he said on his show “Unemployable” or I mean “Undisputed”, with a couple of breaks for me to add my thoughts:

“I have deep compassion for clinical depression, but when it comes to the quarterback of an NFL team, you [Shannon Sharpe] know this better than I do, it’s the ultimate leadership position in sports, am I right about that?”

First of all, don’t include Shannon Sharpe in your nonsense, dude.

I am not even trying to be funny (but sometimes I can’t help it, a har de har har), I just mean that he’s clearly looking for affirmation from someone near him before he goes into fifth-gear and lays out something that he knows will piss everyone off. Right Shannon? That he knows he’s gonna piss everyone off and does so in a contrived fashion because that’s the brand he’s not just created but completely limited himself to at this point.

If “Uneducated”/”Undisputed” gets canceled, he knows there aren’t any other national sports stations left to hire him, so he has to get press, clicks, and views in any way possible because when your name is Skip, you really never had any chance to develop the human empathy needed to interact with anyone but Shannon Sharpe, and thank God only in short spurts Steven A. Smith (the ‘A.’ stands for something that rhymes with grass mole) in the first place.

“You are commanding an entire franchise… And they’re all looking to you to be their CEO, to be in charge of the football team.”

Yep. That’s how it works. Oh no. I agree with Skip Bayless? What have I become? Wait. I have a special note hanging on the wall behind a plate of glass that says “Break in case of reaching rock bottom as a sports journalist”, so, give me a second…

*Sound of glass breaking and a bit going on too long*

The note says it’s Skip Bayless, just keep listening/reading and the feeling of agreeing with him will dissipate…

“Because of all that, I don’t have sympathy for him going public with, ‘I got depressed,’ ‘I suffered depression early in COVID to the point that I couldn’t even go work out.’ Look, he’s the quarterback of America’s team …”

Yep, the note was right!

“The sport that you play, it is dog eat dog. It is no compassion, no quarter given on the football field. If you reveal publicly any little weakness, it can affect your team’s ability to believe in you in the toughest spots and it can definitely encourage others on the other side to come after you.”

Now, I’m not going to take the stance that other people have on this for a few reasons. First of all, he wasn’t really minimizing Prescott’s diagnoses. He did say, strangely, he didn’t have sympathy because he’s a quarterback and… apparently, because the NFL is compassionless, Skip has to be too?
Cool, Skip. Two words that have NEVER been said ever.

Just like these seven words. “Mom, can my friend Skip sleepover?”

But, yeah, I won’t be all up in arms because Skip hurt my feelings. That’s probably what he wants, or, considering his doubling down by saying his comments were “misconstrued”, followed by saying that if Dak had mental health issues during the COVID lockdown he should’ve gotten treatment then (because we all know that you can have your mental health issues can be cured with only one treatment of My Pillow!).

I won’t say, even, that Skip’s comments might add stigma or make those who want to ask for help, NOT ask for help. I mean, has anyone ever listened to this dude? The only reason this picture exists is that he learned what reverse psychology was.

What I DO take issue with is something that’ll make me sound complicit, though.

What I take issue with is that these controversies of Bayless’ (Bayli?) are so transparent and obvious. He finds opportunities to say something he knows will get press but not get him fired, that’s why he doubled down or rather, actually made things “worse” because perhaps he didn’t get the response he was looking for or maybe he wanted to extend his press coverage through the weekend.

Either way, is that really the sort of sports journalism any of us should even validate at this point? Again, I know, I am validating it myself but I am only doing so once because it sadly falls into the realm of my “expertise”. Beyond that, I saw what the response has been and I felt that people were missing what was as obvious as the fact that Skip and the woman in the above picture sleep in separate bedrooms.

How can I be so sure? Well first, Skip was spotted at Bed, Bath, and Beyond buying TWO different comforters. One was for a queen-sized mattress and the other for one of those race car beds… Oh wait, you meant how can I be so sure he’s doing this for the sweet, sweet attention?

Because his point makes no sense.

Skip has been around football long enough to know that an opposing defense can’t exploit an opposing quarterback’s depression or anxiety. What are they going to do? Steal his SSRI’s? Trigger his anxiety by not sacking him, but surrounding him on four sides while smelling like freshly cut spring grass as if he’s inside a room in mid-April? “…It can definitely encourage others on the other side to come after you”… Hahahaha, what? That’s their job, Skip. They’re coming no matter what. What game did he watch where the defensive ends on the opposing team stopped pursuing a quarterback because he wasn’t sad enough?

Also, the “If you reveal publicly any little weakness, it can affect your team’s ability to believe in you in the toughest spots…” bit?

So, you’re telling me that if the Cowboys were down by 1 in Super Bowl LV, and had the ball at the Kansas City Chiefs’ 9-yard line with:02 seconds left, and somehow Dak evaded the pressure from the Chiefs front four reminding him of COVID and had Amari Cooper AND CeeDee Lamb wide open in the end-zone, they’d drop the ball because they just didn’t believe in Prescott because of his natural human response to the combination of isolation, cabin fever, the fear of the unknown/lack of control that come from living in a pandemic, a tragic loss in his family?

Maybe that’s why Laquon Treadwell is a free agent now! He just didn’t believe in Kirk Cousins/Matt Ryan, which means that they might be one of those QBs that could’ve been cured of their melancholy had they, you know, just tried.

Again, I am not a fan of the roving eye of Sauron that is those on social media who hyperbolically react to things they disagree with and say that because they are offended, the person they disagree with needs to lose their ability to avoid homelessness. I don’t like cancel culture, nor do I think that something that offends me offends everyone and thus should get the offender punished. That’s such a narcissistic worldview to me (that’s not to say that there aren’t objectively offensive things that all reasonable people know are offensive).

So why am I saying that Skip Bayless should “retire”?

Because if this is what passes as sports media these days then we’re really failing you here at purpleTERRITORY Media. I know that some on the right side of the aisle seem to think that ESPN’s “Woke” culture is what made people stop watching their stuff or that FS1 is a second rate channel, but while I think that contributed to it and it is (respectively), I think it’s more nuanced than that.

I think it doesn’t help that sites like mine are readily available after a game, which means that the days of waiting 1.5 hours for 1.5 seconds of Vikings coverage right before the commercials run. Even when you waited for a show like NFL Live to start, you’d have to sit through NFC East/Patrick Mahomes/Tom Brady climbing palm trees in Tampa news/clips/propaganda before they spend 30 seconds on the Vikings (unless of course they’re playing the NFC East/Patrick Mahomes/buying coconuts from Tom Brady as part of his exercise regime from Alex Guerrero).

I also think that cable sports channels like ESPN’s slow death is the definition of the death by a thousand cuts. Before the proliferation of smartphones, especially, those channels were on the cutting edge of what it meant to cover and view sports content. Now? It just feels old and tacky, like a shell of its former self. Like watching your newly divorced uncle show up at a high school party you’re throwing in his 1985 Fiero GT, cut off jean jacket, and (minutes later) parole officer.

That’s why Bayless is consistently making news for statements like this. He’ll chalk it up to cancel culture or PC Police, which is part of his lazy craptacular “plan”. He knows that to stay, or rather become, relevant again in a sports industry that left him behind years ago… He needs to find things just controversial enough to both get him maximum press on the very sites that are responsible for his part-time job scaring kids in the woods while being either not controversial enough for him to lose his job or for him to get backhanded by Shannon Sharpe.

While maybe he won’t be fired, perhaps his plan didn’t completely go as planned as Fox Sports released this statement about Bayless’ behavior:

“At FOX Sports, we are proud of Dak Prescott for publicly revealing his struggle with depression and mental health. No matter the cause of the struggles, FOX Sports believes Dak showed tremendous courage which is evident in both his leadership on the Dallas Cowboys and in his character off the field. We do not agree with Skip Bayless’ opinion on Undisputed this morning. We have addressed the significance of this matter with Skip and how his insensitive comments were received by people at FOX Sports and our audience.”

Seems that they missed the point as well. First of all, when you say something like “how his insensitive comments were RECEIVED by people” you’re just going to play into his narrative that it’s a perception problem, not a reality problem.

What Fox (or FOX, I guess) should really be releasing a statement about is why a sports station continues to employ someone who might as well be working at TMZ and sipping water through a straw while conducting a room full of soulless husk people whose job it is to determine what “news” or pictures they pay for from morticians to the stars, Jake Gyllenhaal’s from ‘Nightcrawler’ and the Dementors from Azkaban.

Either way, to step away from mocking Bayless for a second. What is really gross about this, to be honest, is that he uses opportunities like these to further his career. While I don’t think it’s offensive on the level that other people do, it just may be MORE offensive (that objective offensive I mentioned above) because he’s actually looking at a moment in which a male pro athlete is coming out to discuss both his mental health issues (something that only a few male pro athletes have done thus far) and the suicide of his brother and saying… Hmm… How can I use this to further my shell of a career?

Instead, he could show some compassion toward other human beings, like he did before that fateful night he was bitten on the neck and left for dead only to awake in a mass grave for victims of the Spanish Flu and catch the first steamer to the New World(!), and, you know, actually, do some in-depth sports reporting?

Why would he, though? He’s made millions by getting away from the sort of stuff that he did earlier in his career when working for major newspapers and doing the sort of stuff that allowed him to jump from one of those video screens on ‘Around the Horn’ to his own show? While, sure, he was reprimanded this time, he has only been handsomely rewarded for his “takes” because we keep rewarded him by acting all offended while we’re helping brand and reward his show/employer/banner provider on the website hosting said clip.

Then again, I also did make a gigantic competitive mistake above by opening up about both my mental health and addiction issues, both things that I could’ve had cured had I had them treated at the time or so I recently heard. Then there’s the fact that if my competition finds out about the above they’ll come after me which couldn’t come at a worse time as my team of over 10 writers will most likely lose confidence in me during the toughest times.

After all, sports journalism is dog-eat-dog. Or, rather, apparently, an industry with very low standards as Bayless has continued to manipulate others in the media to keep his name in the press by doing things like this.

So, next time?

Let’s just do what would make him so anxious and depressed that he might have to get treated TWICE to get cured…

Make like every mirror since 1918 and ignore him.

PS – I know I’ve taken other writers to task for calling other writers names in lieu of real analysis, but I wouldn’t say that this applies because this “take” by Skip isn’t some subjective take on a trade it’s an objectively awful and transparent attempt to use what Dak has said and been through to keep his name/show in relevant.

So, I don’t believe in insults over on the field (or off the field stuff like transactions, etc.), but this is something that cross so many lines by so many feet that the normal protections don’t apply.

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