First Take Page 5 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Rob Parker: <em>First Take</em> Producers Knew What I Was Going To Talk About
Rob Parker's suspension for asking if Robert Griffin III was a "brother or a cornball brother" ends in a week or so and 1.) he really doesn't seem that sorry about what happened and 2.) he says First Take producers knew what he had to say....
ESPN Suspends Rob Parker For A Month
After taking a week to think about it, ESPN has hit Rob Parker with a 30-day suspension for his "brother or cornball brother?" comments. Also, ESPN is promising "enhanced editorial oversight" over the show, which means ... well, I'm not sure what. In a statement, Marcia Keegan, vice president of pro...
ESPN Suspends Rob Parker After "Cornball Brother" Remarks, Promises "Full Review"
ESPN execs are not sitting on their hands on this one. A day after Rob Parker's "is he a brother or is he a cornball brother" comments about Robert Griffin III, ESPN said that Parker is suspended indefinitely....
Rob Parker Lowers The Bar On <em>First Take</em>: Is Robert Griffin III "A Brother Or A Cornball Brother?" [UPDATE]
Yes, amazingly, today's cringe-inducing, bang-your-ahead-against-the-wall moment from First Take does not come from Skip Bayless. It comes from Rob Parker, who is First Take's new Saturday host! He's taking to the role perfectly....
ESPN's Jemele Hill Is Here To Answer Your Questions
ESPN columnist Jemele Hill is live from Colorado and ready to answer your questions in the discussion below. She's got sideline duty—her first year doing it!—for Friday night's Hawaii-Air Force game on ESPN2. Also, it's been an eventful week at ESPN, and Jemele's done plenty of work at First Take. L...
How ESPN Ditched Journalism And Followed Skip Bayless To The Bottom: A Tim Tebow Story
In October, Doug Gottlieb, a radio host and basketball analyst who'd decamped for CBS the previous month after nine years with ESPN, went on The Dan Patrick Show and dropped something of a truth bomb about his time in Bristol: ...
First Take Lets Us Know That Tity Boi Still Likes The Lakers
Not everyone is panicking over the new-look Lakers' season-opening loss. Certainly not Southern rapper 2 Chainz, who used to go by Tity Boi, a fact that a First Take producer probably wishes they had noticed....
Stephen A. Smith Says "Nigga, Please" On ESPN2, And Everyone Gets Stupid In Response
On Thursday morning's First Take, Stephen A. Smith expressed his disbelief that Kobe Bryant would miss time with an injury by saying "nigga, please." This was not a thing he should have said on TV, yet he did. It was barely noticeable, but at least one person noticed, uploaded the video, and cert...
This Week's Signs Of The Apocalypse
For nearly two decades, Sports Illustrated has stirred the tea leaves to discern a weekly Sign of the Apocalypse. Deadspin salutes the magazine's ongoing effort to cover the end of times but declines to cede the scoop on the biggest event in world history....
<em>Men's Journal</em>'s Skip Bayless Article Contains The Saddest Paragraph In Recent Memory
Skip Bayless, as a major member of the sports discourse, is a lamentable thing. He gets an enormous amount of airtime to manufacture controversy, and his style of vacant carnival-barking is, if not actively lowering the intelligence of your average daytime ESPN-viewer, at least taking up time that c...
ESPN Personality Rob Parker Pissed Off Every Intelligent Baseball Fan On The Internet Today [UPDATE]
Do you know who Rob Parker is? You probably don't because there's really nothing special about Rob Parker. He currently exists as a member of ESPN's stable of chuckleheads who are periodically rotated into duty on First Take, where their main job is to sit there and let Skip Bayless do his thing....
Former ESPNer Dana Jacobson: "I Was Molested As A Child"
Now that Jerry Sandusky has been convicted, count former ESPN personality Dana Jacobson among those empowered to speak out about a personal experience with child sex abuse. Jacobson, who hasn't returned to TV since leaving ESPN at the end of April, relates a story on her personal blog this morning a...
Mark Cuban Appears On <em>First Take</em>, Spends Entire Appearance Trashing Its Hosts
It's no secret we're loath to feature the programming on ESPN's First Take, mostly because we value our remaining brain cells enough to not risk obliterating them by watching the ratings-deprived shout-fest. Ever since First Take turned into the Golden Corral of inane sportschat—complete with a ch...
Why ESPN Should Worry About <em>First Take</em>'s Ratings Slide
This has been the working theory: ESPN2's First Take is bad for the soul but awfully good for business. In late September, ESPN made the show the personal property of the professionally disagreeable Skip Bayless, turning the format into wall-to-wall staged argument. The conceit looked like a hit an...
Stephen A. Smith Is Your New Argument Against Human Cloning
Never mind there being 10 or 100. Can you even imagine if there were two Stephen A. Smiths? My God, there'd probably be an entire ESPN network devoted to chattering Stephen A. heads all day long. The horror ... the horror ......
Sun Shines On The Dog's Ass That Is Stephen A. Smith, As Technical Glitch Renders Him Unable To Hear Skip Bayless
Readers send us tips about ESPN2 offal vomitorium First Take regularly, but we're loath to provide the program any more attention than it already has (and, valuing our sanity, avoid watching it ourselves). So we thank Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch for the head's up on this brief technical g...
Jalen Rose Called Out Skip Bayless's High School Hoops Fantasy And Bayless Confessed
After reports emerged yesterday that ESPN's Skip Bayless had grossly exaggerated his high school basketball career—claiming he started for a state finalist team when his own high school yearbook suggests he averaged just 1.4 points per game—First Take panelist and actual basketball star Jalen Ros...
Skip Bayless: High School Sports Hero
Earlier today via Twitter, Skip Bayless was talking about his favorite "hometown" team, the Oklahoma City Thunder. Specifically, Skip was discussing how to fix the Oklahoma City Thunder. Long story short, he wants to play Russell Westbrook on the wing and make James Harden the point guard....
Skip Bayless, Emmy Nominee
Did you know that sports has its very own Emmy Awards? It's perfectly fair to honor the great work being done out there in the televised sports field, with amazing technical inovation in game broadcasts and shows like Outside the Lines, E:60 and Real Sports doing real, actual journalism on par with ...