If we had to guess, there are probably quite a few ESPN employees who were not all that broken up about Skip Baylessbolting the company back in June for greener (much greener!) pastures at Fox Sports 1. Yes, Skip brought The Worldwide Leader in Sports plenty of eyeballs courtesy of the success of ESPN First Take. But Skip also said some pretty ridiculous things during his tenure with the company, and at times, it made ESPN as a whole look bad. So some employees are likely glad Skip is gone.
As it turns out, though, he’s not 100 percent removed from ESPN’s hometown of Bristol, Conn. just yet. It appears as though Fox Sports 1 is going out of its way to remind ESPNers about Skip’s departure by putting up billboards with Skip’s face on them in the city. Those billboards are being used to promote Skip’s new FS1 show, Undisputed, which debuts on September 6, and it looks like the billboards were designed to troll people who work for ESPN. They show Skip freeing a bird from a cage. You can see one of the billboards in the clip above.
If FS1 did do this on purpose, it obviously got them the attention they were looking for. But the real winner here is the billboard industry. Between this billboard, the one Drake bought for Rihanna, and the one that seems to allude to a forthcoming Drake/Kanye West collaboration, billboards have made quite the comeback over the last week. Who’s going to end up on one next?!
