ESPN’s Barstool Sports Show Almost Made It Two Whole Weeks

It may be worth applauding an outspokenly pansy and progressive sports network for partnering up with a frat house vibe male POV sports website for a TV show. But it’s not. Hold your applause.

ESPN, the worldwide leader in Twitter storm led resistance sports coverage, unexpectedly announced a co-promoted show, Barstool Van Talk. The show would be a TV version of the Pardon My Take podcast hosted by Dave “Big Cat” Kats of Barstool Sports and an anon Internet sports blogger who goes by PFT Commenter. The two provide a completely counterculture, trolling opinion to most sports programming and are largely fucking funny.

It made zero sense for the sensitive sports network, especially when Barstool chief Dave Portnoy insisted it only run if ESPN kept the Barstool name in the title. Like Richard Spenser coming to speak at Howard University, or at least that’s how dramatically it would be received by ESPN employee and higher ups. I bet Howard is managed by people who would foresee this.

The first to make a stink was Samantha Ponder. Sam because she works in sports and wants to be taken seriously. The ESPN hostess and wife of NFL first round QB bust, Christian Ponder. Portnoy had routinely trolled Sam Ponder for her work on ESPN in 2014, including several fairly ribald blog posts with a bunch of nasty name calling. Sam Ponder reposted on Twitter and expressed outrage over timed to the first episode of the Barstool Van Talk show. See two paragraphs above for how ESPN and Disney management respond to Twitter outrage from certain groups. Fold. The Barstool Van Talk show was canceled after one episode.

Dave Portnoy took it all in stride, insisting that this was Ponder’s three-years in the making revenge and that’s how grudge matches go. Not quite admitting culpability, but accepting the inevitable fate of being an outspoken ass for a living. Then he reminded ESPN they suck and they needed Barstool Sports more than vice-versa. That’s not entirely true. Though it is most definitely partially true.

ESPN President John Skipper, a man whose many horrible management decisions of late have been well publicized, issued a terse press release:

Sort of an incredulous comment for a show you agreed to be called Barstool Van Talk. But this guy is getting really practiced at issuing nonsensical rationales. You wonder exactly what comes up at his employee review in terms of goals. Indeed, we did ask you to alienate a big percentage of the public, fuck up tons of highly notable employee decisions, and lose subscribers in record numbers. Please say you’ll come back.

As always, default to what Jemele Hill so not artfully noted. ESPN owns the best games, what are you going to do? Like a woman with big tits and a shitty personality. Still getting asked out.