Watch: Skip Bayless blasts ex-colleague Trent Dilfer’s “plantation mentality”

Former ESPN personalities like Bill Simmons, Jason Whitlock and Colin Cowherd have taken prominent shots at their old company and some of their ex-coworkers, and Fox Sports commentator Skip Bayless is the latest to join them, delivering some of the harshest criticism we’ve seen of a particular former coworker yet. On Wednesday’s edition of FS1’s Undisputed with Bayless and Shannon Sharpe, Bayless went off on ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer’s controversial comments that Colin Kaepernick’s “job is to be quiet,” saying that evoked a “plantation mentality”:

Skip Bayless ethers Trent Dilfer's "plantation mentality" in reaction to Colin Kaepernick. This is dope. pic.twitter.com/WQy3XGeegM

— Jessie Karangu

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Bayless starts by criticizing Dilfer’s “old-school quarterback mentality, ex-white quarterback mentality” as “disconnected to the point of being clueless,” then goes on to say Dilfer’s comments are beyond the pale (0:50):

“Obviously, I’m not black, but this is one thing I do know, after years and years of working with a lot of black players and black commentators on many networks, if you go to the place where you’re telling a black man or a black woman that ‘You should know your place and stay in it,’ when you get to there, them’s fighting words! That smacks of plantation mentality. You cannot go there, and he went there. Because no matter what you’re trying to say in the football context, we’re not in the football context any more. We have risen above it to an issue that is far more important than any football game.”

Bayless is far from the only one to criticize Dilfer, of course, as local media have blasted him as a “mouthpiece” and “spin-meister” for 49ers general manager Trent Baalke, and Kaepernick himself went off on Dilfer after Monday night’s game:

I just heard briefly about it. But I think that’s one of the most ridiculous comments I’ve heard.

The fact that you say, ‘You’re a back-up quarterback, stay in your place’… that’s an issue.

To me, you’re telling me that my position as a back-up quarterback and being quiet is more important than peoples’ lives.

I would ask him to really have a conversation with the families of people that have been murdered and see if he still feels that way.

Because I’d bet you he doesn’t. Just because he hasn’t experienced that type of oppression.

Still, this is a remarkably pointed shot from Bayless, and one that’s risen to a level of not just blasting Dilfer and his comments, but saying “You cannot go there.” Dilfer has stood by his guns so far,  but we’ll see if he continues to do so as the criticism keeps rolling in.

[Jessie Karangu on Twitter]