The Thing About Skip

It's the NBA Finals. Miami and San Antonio. I'll confess, the NBA is not my wheelhouse. I don't really pay much attention to pro basketball until the playoffs and usually not until the conference finals. And even then it's not appointment television for me. It also means that it's the time of the year for one of the great trolls of the internet to return: Skip Bayless (well, at least now that Tim Tebow isn't around.) Now I know everyone has an angle on Bayless and how he's been one of the thing's that killed sports journalism.

Bayless is a polarizing figure that has risen to stratospheric levels of stardom in the world of sports talk thanks to the decision by ESPN to "embrace debate" and the bite sized portions of opinion of Twitter. Now, I know that I'm sort of throwing stones since I am a Twitter maniac, but I'll make my point in a moment.

I could go on and on about Skip and all the dumb things this guy has said but I really don't want to do that. You could start here. Or here. There's his unhealthy obsession with Lebron. These are all annoying things, but I think the thing that bothers me the most about Skip is that he's just lazy. He presents himself as this grinder working his ass off at his craft. But in reality, he's nothing more than Michael Scott yelling, "That's what she said" over and over and over. (Especially if someone disagrees with him.)

Bayless goes to the lowest common denominator. There's nothing about him that's particularly original, insightful or even smart.  He sounds like my 9th grade boys debating basketball. There's no commentary. No real analysis. Just repetition of one, singular idea, louder and louder. He says that he's "1,000 percent authentic" and I believe him.  He long ago abandoned any illusion of being a legitimate journalist. He doesn't have the capacity for going deeper than just below the surface. (Unless, of course, he has to 3,000 words on Tim Tebow that reads like a really bad college essay about his hero.) That's the reason Twitter is the perfect milieu for him. He doesn't need to explain himself. He doesn't need to elaborate. He doesn't write anymore. He has a more effective method of expressing his idea: the hashtag. And yet he is as powerful a voice as there is in sports right now.

Skip Bayless really is the personification that is everything wrong with the 4 letter. But he's not going anywhere. He's part of the narrative now. So, we might as well get used to it...or stop watching. That's what I've done. If I want to listen to elementary level analysis of sports, I'll tune in. Otherwise, I'm done. It's like that whole riddle about the tree falling in the woods, does it make a sound? If Skip is the tree, I just don't care anymore if he's making noise.

What do I know, so, f**k Doug Gottlieb.