Skip Bayless Teases New Gig While Spinning The Reason He Parted Ways With FS1

FS1

Skip Bayless officially ended his eight-year run with FS1 when he appeared on his final episode of Undisputed on Friday, and he entered the spin zone while hinting at why he’s moving on while teasing a new job he’s seemingly already lined up.

In 2016, Skip Bayless made the fairly shocking decision to leave ESPN and First Take behind by heading to FS1 after more than a decade with The Worldwide Leader.

The veteran sportswriter essentially picked up where he left off with Stephen A. Smith by co-hosting Undisputed with Shannon Sharpe, but things took a turn for the worse when the Hall of Fame tight end departed in 2023 after a purported feud with Bayless led to the formation of an untraversable rift.

That turned out to be an absolutely disastrous development for Undisputed, which started to hemorrhage viewers in the wake of Sharpe’s departure (the show had an average audience of 482,000 people in May of 2023, a number that had fallen to just 52,000 a year later).

In July, we learned Bayless was gearing up to leave FS1—a development most people understandably assumed stemmed from a directive issued by network executives who were forced to accept the fact that Undisputed had reached the point of no return.

However, that may not actually be the case based on the tweet Bayless posted when he confirmed the Undisputed episode that aired on August 2nd would be his last.

Based on how Bayless framed the news there, it sounds like he had some say in his decision to bring his time on FS1 to an end (although there’s a good chance he was strongly urged to “pursue other opportunities” or simply saw the writing on the wall).

It’s unclear what those opportunities are, but based on what unfolded when news of his exit surfaced, it’s not going to have anything to do with ESPN; the network made it very clear it wasn’t interested in a reunion, and Stephen A. Smith also slammed the door on that possibility when it comes to First Take.