Fox was more upset with Shannon Sharpe for skipping Undisputed than they were with the tweet that led to the absence.
The relationship between the now-former FS1 hosts reached a boiling point after Bayless had an untimely tweet as Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest during a Monday Night Football game more than three years ago. As Hamlin was carted off the field, Bayless was tormented on social media for wondering how the NFL could logistically postpone the game, which contained playoff implications.
The following day, Bayless was left to host Undisputed on his own, with Sharpe skipping the show in protest of the controversial tweet. And according to Bayless, Fox had a bigger issue with Sharpe’s unexcused absence than they did the tweet about Hamlin.
“I have no idea what he was thinking,” Bayless said of Sharpe during a recent interview on VladTv. “I just know he didn’t come to work the next day in protest. And the higher-ups at Fox were very unhappy with him…and then the next day he came back, and I was told he would let it go and talk about an injury his brother Sterling had suffered that ended his career.
“We came on live, and Shannon went after me about the tweet. And I told him, nobody upstairs had any problem…nobody at Fox had any problem. If you can find somebody who had a problem with it at Fox, you’re way ahead of me. But I certainly didn’t know of anybody, and I certainly wasn’t scolded or suspended or penalized in any way, shape, or form for that tweet.”
Sharpe left Fox a few months after the blow-up, with Bayless sticking around to build a new show that lasted until his contract expired one year later. As for whether the dispute over his Hamlin tweet is what led Sharpe to leave, Bayless isn’t sure. But Bayless did say Sharpe asked him if there was any way they could make things work to continue Undisputed together just two days before he left Fox.
“I tried to go upstairs and fight his battle for him,” Bayless claimed. “And I was just told that bridge is burned. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know the gory details of what happened behind the scenes, but that working relationship with Fox ended.”
According to Bayless, he would have preferred to continue working with Sharpe rather than having to build an entirely new show in the final year of his contract. But it was Fox who declined to make that happen, ultimately leading to both of their unceremonious departures from the network.
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