Say what you want about Barstool Sports, but being in the fire there every day isn’t easy.
In a new documentary released on the Pardon My Take YouTube channel about the show’s very short-lived Barstool Van Talk late-night show on ESPN, the show’s hosts and former CEO Erika Ayers Badan (neé Nardini) opened up about the “tax” and “scarlet letter” that Barstool talent must manage.
In 2017, former ESPN president John Skipper greenlit the TV spinoff of PMT to air Tuesday nights at 1 a.m. ET. Before the first episode aired, a social media feud broke out between Barstool founder Dave Portnoy and ESPN host Sam Ponder over lewd comments on a Barstool podcast from years earlier. Before the second episode could air, ESPN pulled the plug.
In the new YouTube documentary, viewers can see the moment that hosts PFT Commenter and Big Cat hear the news. Both hosts also discuss their feelings at the time.
“There was definitely a little bit of a, ‘Should we leave?’ Is this not going to be sustainable long-term?” Dan “Big Cat” Katz recalled. “This scarlet letter that people put on Barstool, is this something that’s going to stop us?”
PFT Commenter opened up about the frustration he felt toward Portnoy (as well as ESPN execs) in the aftermath of Barstool Van Talk‘s cancelation.
“I was mad at everybody. I was also pretty upset with how things shook out,” Eric “PFT Commenter” Sollenberger explained. “ESPN, I was mad at them for kind of stabbing us in the back and lying to our faces. I was mad at Dave (Portnoy) because I felt that all Dave had to do was just stop getting into a public spat with Sam Ponder.
“I was also incorrect about thinking that, because regardless of whether or not Dave had tweeted at Sam Ponder that day, it was just showing that there was a very real disconnect at ESPN in terms of what they were doing with Barstool.”
Perhaps the most clear-headed explanation of the “tax” of working at Barstool in the documentary comes from Ayers Badan. In comments near the end of the video, she broke down the “complicated” emotions of working for the controversial company.
“It’s so funny, I think everybody’s relationship with Barstool is so complicated,” Ayers Badan said. “Because there’s so much to be grateful and it provided so much and it enabled so many things, but in other ways it holds you back or it’s with you.
“I think in those days, I would imagine in (the PMT crew’s) minds, the PMT, Barstool, Barstool, PMT, it didn’t all sit together exactly right. And I think losing the show made it feel like, Barstool’s a tax we don’t want.”
It doesn’t always go well when Barstool talent criticize the company. But the PMT hosts have clearly earned the right to discuss their own careers with this kind of clarity, and Ayers Badan can likely be more candid now that she is no longer working for the company.
The feelings PFT Commenter and Big Cat describe are human. In hindsight, Skipper and ESPN clearly did not anticipate what it would mean to get into business with Barstool. Anyone in the PMT hosts’ position would resent every element of that situation.
Yet these comments are also interesting in what they say about Barstool. All three speak about the company as if it is necessarily controversial. While that is how Portnoy has always run the place, there is a world in which Barstool went out of its way to sand down its edges and play nice with traditional media.
The $550 million valuation Barstool Sports got when Penn Entertainment bought it in February 2023 would signify that Portnoy’s chosen route worked just fine. But the “tax” Nardini references is not gone.
The company is a normal part of sports media now, but its back-catalogue is still full of off-color comments and the frat-dude attitude toward women that insulted Ponder back in 2017, when a Barstool blog post referred to her as a “slut.”
In a rare moment of transparency, this doc highlights how staff in the building navigates those challenges.
