Skip Bayless thought about quitting First Take in 2010 - “You will fall on your faces”

Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith gave First Take legs that still hold up today. Bayless left the program in 2016, but indicated that he thought about leaving much earlier.

Speaking on the Skip Bayless Show, the show host indicated that he had thought about quitting the show in 2010, more than half a decade earlier than when he did eventually leave.

Here's how he put it:

"I had two producers - 'Cold pizza' refugees, if you will - stop me in the hall and tell me this was the biggest mistake anybody has ever made at ESPN. 'This will not work. You will fall on your faces.' What if Marcia Keegan's other meeting had forced her to miss our meeting...? I don't know what would have happened. At that point. For me, First Take was becoming a dead end."

Catch Bayless' comments from 22:00 onwards:

Keegan was a key force in getting the show up and running at ESPN. He continued, naming a list of reasons why leaving would make sense:

"Would I soon just given up and gone back into writing newspaper columns and magazine articles and books? Maybe, very possibly. I didn't make much money, not by TV standards at that point. There was nothing really to hang on to. [I wasn't married to Ernestine yet, but she had a great job in New York and I had to live in Bristol... It was hard on us."

---

Skip Bayless once again caught showless

Undisputed show host - Courtesy of Skip Bayless on Instagram

After seven years on the air with Shannon Sharpe, the TV debater once again finds himself attempting to rebuild a show, after losing the former Broncos tight end this offseason.

Undisputed is set to make a comeback on August 28, but it's unclear which direction the show will take.

Will it follow in First Take's footsteps and pivot to an alternating set of hosts, or will it attempt to find "Shannon Sharpe 2.0?" At this point, the show host appears to be taking an extended break from the airwaves as he searches for the answers to these questions.

With a return date already set, one can only assume the show has some sort of plan in motion. Of course, there's no guarantee that the new era will entice fans more than the previous, which could put the show host in a similar mindset to where he was dangerously close to slipping in 2010.