Dave Portnoy addressed the elephant in the room on the latest episode of the BFFs podcast alongside Brianna LaPaglia and Josh Richards.
That elephant is not Zach Bryan, as Barstool Sports has said its piece about the embattled country music star.
Barstool’s beef with Bryan comes as a result of the country star’s breakup with LaPaglia, who co-hosts the BFFs podcast alongside Portnoy and Richards. On last week’s episode of BFFs, LaPaglia detailed the couple’s seemingly toxic relationship, revealing that he had offered her a $12 million NDA following their breakup, which she declined to accept.
But what got lost in the mix while LaPaglia talked about her relationship and subsequent breakup with Bryan is that Portnoy announced he’d be done with the BFFs podcast at year’s end.
“My plan at the end of the year was to be done with BFFs,” Portnoy said. “Just because I’m getting older, like nearing 50. Talking about teenage drama, a little out of my wheelhouse. So, we’ve known this for months, and we’re like, ‘What’s the best way to announce it?’ (The Zach Bryan drama) came up and complicated the whole thing a little bit because we recorded the podcast, didn’t air. And the one thing about me, I can’t know sh*t.
“I just can’t know it and not say it…It was a really murky situation. I thought that’s how this was ending. I thought I was gonna get on and be like, ‘Hey, I respect their decision. We’re not gonna talk about the Zach thing, but I can’t be on it anymore because I have to talk about it if we’re gonna do it.’ And I woke up the next morning, and it’s like, f*ck the money; we’re going.”
Though Portnoy initially planned a quiet exit from BFFs, the Bryan situation threw a monkey wrench into those plans.
He eventually clarified that the podcast wouldn’t end with his departure.
“The subjects don’t interest me at all…They show me the topics when I go in there, I haven’t done any research, and I’m just ripping apart 18-year-olds, who I don’t even know,” Portnoy said on the Unnamed Show with Ryan Whitney and Kirk Minihane Thursday. “I don’t love necessarily doing that. It’s a little different.”
After launching BFFs with Richards in 2020 and LaPaglia joining them a year later, Portnoy is now preparing to step away from the podcast by the end of the year, leaving LaPaglia and Richards to continue the show with a revamped format.
“It certainly accomplished what I wanted to accomplish when we started it,” Portnoy added. “Josh and Bri will contiune it. It’s super successful. But, yeah, it’s time for me to try the next thing. I had run my course with it.”
[People]
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.