One year ago, Jared Carrabis took a risk by attempting to prove he could be successful without the backing of Barstool Sports.
This week, Carrabis joined Comeback Media’s newly launched Short & To The Point podcast with host Jessica Kleinschmidt. During the interview, Carrabis spoke about leaving Barstool, where he became a prominent baseball personality from 2014-2022, to launch a new venture with DraftKings. According to Carrabis, the transition to DraftKings has been rewarding because Barstool instills the belief that its talent is just part of the machine, benefitting from the brand founded by Dave Portnoy.
“If you’re competitive or you want to be the best in the world at something, you have to take that leap,” Carrabis said. “Admittedly, it would bother me when people were like, ‘Oh, you’re Dave’s b*tch’ and ‘You’d be nothing without, without Dave.’ In my head I’m thinking, ‘That’s not true!’ But I can’t prove it, how do I prove that?”
“Getting the opportunity to step out on our own here, obviously having the backing of DraftKings is great from a credibility standpoint, a major sportsbook is down with these guys,” Carrabis continued. “But just from getting an audience, like, ‘Hey, come on over, check us out.’ That’s a hard thing to do on your own. But we’re doing it. The podcast is, it’s us and Jomboy at the top.”
Carrabis said he was happy during his tenure at Barstool, noting that he loved and misses the family dynamic he had with his coworkers there. But had he stuck with Barstool, Carrabis knows he always would have wondered whether he was capable of succeeding outside the machine.
“Are you a product of the company or are you a product of your hard work? And I think it’s a combination of both,” Carrabis admitted. “I know that Barstool helped me a ton. But there are definitely examples of people who go there and work there and move on and you never hear from them again.”
According to Carrabis, his podcast falls into the category of a product that moved on from Barstool and is better off for it, like Pat McAfee, albeit to a much lesser extent.
“I’m not gonna get into how other people feel about the Barstool brand, they obviously have a lot of die-hard fans, but there are a lot of people that hate Barstool,” Carrabis said. “That always bothered me, where people wouldn’t give me a chance because of things that were said or done by other people. That’s not fair…Now I have the opportunity to be judged based on what I do and what I say, versus what other people do and say.”
