Cris Carter isn’t a fan of Skip Bayless.
Join the club. There’s a long line of former FS1 and ESPN employees who were seemingly rubbed the wrong way by Skip Bayless, who recently hosted his last Undisputed show for Fox Sports. While Carter hasn’t been with Fox since his departure in 2019, he’s since dabbled in the podcasting space and taken up coaching.
The Pro Football Hall of Famer co-hosts Fully Loaded The Podcast with Shawn Meaike, in addition to his duties with Florida Atlantic University’s football program. After serving as a volunteer coach in 2023, Carter now holds the title of Executive Director of Player Engagement for Tom Herman’s program.
In addition to holding new titles, Carter holds a grudge against the embattled Bayless and seemingly has a deep-seated skepticism about the authenticity of sports television.
“A number of years ago, I was on a show with Stephen A. (Smith) and Skip Bayless,” said Carter. “I was working at ESPN, doing NFL. I would do Mike Greenberg after doing my NFL stuff, and then I would come on there because Stephen A. and I were friends. I didn’t know Skip personally, and I’m gonna be honest with you: Skip Bayless was not one of my favorite people.
“So, I’m on there doing the show. I do the show and everything. And all of a sudden — this is when the (Tim) Tebow phenomenon was going on, and he was a huge Tim Tebow guy…So I come on there on a Monday, and we’re trading barbs and everything. We go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And then I just level said it and was like, ‘Listen, if throwing the football is important in the NFL, Tim Tebow will never be a starting quarterback.’ So, he got defensive and then he came back and said, ‘Well, that’s why you didn’t win a Super Bowl,’ which got nothing to do with nothing.”
As soon as the show went to commercial, Carter removed his earpiece and confronted Bayless directly.
“I told him, ‘I’ll never be on your show again, and if you ever say anything like that to me again, I’ll punch you right in the f*cking face,” Carter bluntly said.
Carter stormed off the set in a fit of rage. Despite pleas from colleagues, including Stephen A. Smith, to stay, the Pro Bowler refused to continue the show with Bayless.
“I won’t be on this show again as long as he’s on there,” said Carter.
Fast forward a few years, and both Carter and Bayless found themselves at Fox Sports. The network’s decision-makers, aware of the past tension, cautiously broached the subject with Carter. To their surprise, he downplayed the incident, suggesting there were no lingering issues.
“‘Well, we talked to him; he doesn’t have a problem with you.’ ‘Why would he?’ So, I had very little interaction with him when I went to Fox,” says Carter, “but I knew, it’s like playing in a card game — the deck is tricked up. The No. 1 thing you should know about Skip Bayless and some of the programming, the way it was done at ESPN and at Fox, I’m gonna say this, that it’s a form of wrestling. You know who gonna win. And a lot of the arguments and everything are either predetermined or assigned. And everything is slanted in Skip and Stephen A.’s favor. They pick the subjects and they pick which side they gonna take.”
And Carter picked the side of telling Bayless that he’d punch him right in the f*cking face.
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.