Skip Bayless makes money with his mouth – but former NBA player Matt Barnes says those very words have led some people to want to physically attack the pundit.
The former small forward video was taken from his car talking about Bayless and his words after Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest.
Bayless faced backlash for his tweet, which appeared to question why the NFL postponed the game following Hamlin’s fall in the first quarter.
FOX’s Skip Bayless says he won’t delete a tweet about Damar Hamlin’s injury
‘No doubt the NFL is considering postponing the rest of this game – but how?,’ Bayless tweeted on Monday. ‘This late in the season, a game of this magnitude is so important to the regular-season outcome … that it suddenly seems irrelevant.’
Bayless continued on his ‘Undisputed’ show the next day without his co-host – NFL Hall-of-Famer Shannon Sharpe. When Sharpe returned on Wednesday, the show began with a heated exchange between the two.
That led to Barnes making his response, saying Bayless’ tweet was ‘blatantly disrespectful’ before noting that he had to stop two situations where physical violence was heading Bayless’ way.
“Not really talking about this Skip Bayless situation, because I want to see if he has any remorse after what he said on Monday,” Barnes said in the video. ‘First of all, Skip is a professional in this field – is highly respected and has put in many years of work.
‘So you know when people say “read the whole tweet he said the game was irrelevant”: he knows he has to put that at the end of the bulls**t he’s saying, hope we don’t see those bulls **t. Because what he really felt was his original first sentence.’
Barnes continued, saying: ‘Fast forward, I’ve been feeling very, very, very disrespectful and out of pocket lately and that’s normal. But he’s like that with Shannon and you can see Shannon bite her tongue, you can see her take a deep breath because she didn’t jump on the table and squeeze that guy’s neck.
Matt Barnes said he had to ‘personally’ stop two separate people from fighting Bayless
‘But I think Skip’s day will come. and it may not be from a firing standpoint because we know white men in this profession can get away and do anything… you know, whatever they want. And it makes good TV, you know that sells controversy. So of course FOX will want to keep these kinds of ratings.
‘But I know personally, personally that I have to diffuse two situations, one with the coach, and one with the NBA player. They want to f**k Skip. Personally, I have to do it. One was this year, the other was last year.
‘Personally, I had to contact Unc [Sharpe] and set up a conversation for people who want to f**k Skip. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed, but this is too far in my opinion.
‘And again, Shannon’s got a lot of love – or she’s got a lot of love for the dude – but you can see Shannon’s fed up and somebody’s going to hurt Skip because his ego, his pride, the his disrespect, is always this level. But now… I think its going to a new level and now he’s disrespecting his co-host.’
Sharpe (L) and Bayless had a heated exchange when the former returned to the Weds show.
On Wednesday, the two hosts returned to the table and Sharpe began addressing his absence from Tuesday’s show. Which led to this exchange:
Just a few weeks ago, Bayless and Sharpe were going at each other when Bayless seemed to disrespect his co-host’s NFL career by saying Tom Brady was ‘better’ than Sharpe.
‘You make me look crazy! I’m in the effin’ Hall of Fame. I got three Super Bowls!,’ Sharpe angrily replied.
‘You’re willing to take a personal shot at me, to say he’s better than me, because I say he’s playing bad this year?’
Bayless responded by accusing Sharpe of disrespecting Brady who was beneath his co-host’s ‘dignity’.
Sharpe and Bayless got into a heated exchange just a few weeks ago over a slight oversight
Other members of the media were listening to the co-hosts’ chemistry – including former ESPN and FOX Sports host Marcellus Wiley offering his thoughts on the day before.
‘You don’t want to see this. Skip and Shannon break up on live TV every day. When your partner can’t get through his monologue, it’s all bad,’ Wiley said in an Instagram post.
‘Reminds me of a “Wileyism” that in any relationship that ends, you spend half the time apart. And what we are witnessing now on live TV is their separation.
‘You could tell they weren’t even talking outside the building, outside the show. Want to know how I found out? We all saw it. Looks like an ambush to Skip. “Well we weren’t supposed to talk about that. I didn’t see that in the notes. We didn’t discuss this. You don’t know what the bosses said.”‘
‘Man, stop playing with me. Y’all this is not about a tweet. It’s not about Brady being better than Shannon. It’s not about any of that. None of them are arguments. You know what it is? It is primal. Yes.
‘These are two alphas fighting for territory. It’s about power. Because the power dynamic has changed on that show, whether it’s real or imagined, and now we’re all seeing the fight for it. Let’s see who comes out “Undisputed”.’
