NFL great Shannon Sharpe was absent from his daily FS1 show Undisputed on Tuesday, the morning after the frightening medical situation with Bills safety Damar Hamlin unfolded and caused the postponement of Buffalo’s AFC tilt with the Bengals in Cincinnati. Sharpe’s absence was also notable, as it came after his co-host Skip Bayless caught significant heat for a questionable tweet in which he asked how the league would figure out rescheduling the game as the Hamlin situation unfolded.
In his Wednesday morning return to the air, Sharpe addressed Hamlin—who went into cardiac arrest on Monday night and had to be resuscitated on the field, and remains in critical condition at University of Cincinnati Medical hospital—as well as Bayless’s tweet. He clearly caught Bayless off-guard with the comments, and the two had a very heated exchange, in which they repeatedly cut each other off before begrudgingly moving forward with the program.
“There’s been a lot of speculation about why I wasn’t on air yesterday, and I won’t get into speculation, conjecture or innuendo, but I will say this. Watching that game on Monday night, what happened to Damar Hamlin struck me a little different,” Sharpe said to open his monologue. “As a brotherhood in the NFL when injuries happen, we know injuries are part of the game. I’ve seen guys suffer ACLs, an Achilles tear, but I’ve never seen anybody have to be revived and fight for his life on the field…
“Skip tweeted something and although I disagreed with the tweet, and hopefully Skip will take it down, but I didn’t want,” he continued, before Bayless jumped in.
“Timeout, timeout. I’m not going to take it down because I stand by what I tweeted,” Bayless said.
“I cannot even get through a monologue without you interrupting me,” Sharpe fired back. “I was just going to say, Skip, I didn’t want to yesterday, to get into a situation where Damar Hamlin was the issue. We should’ve been talking about him and not get into your tweet. That’s what I was going to do. But you can’t even let me finish my opening monologue without you interrupting.”
“I was under the impression that you weren’t going to bring this up, because nobody here had a problem with that tweet,” Bayless responded.
“Clearly the bosses wanted you to offer explanation, so clearly somebody had a problem…,” Sharpe said, before Bayless jumped in again.
“No, they did not have…nobody,” he started to say, before Sharpe cut him off in an attempt to get on with the show.
On Monday night at 9:30 p.m. ET, shortly after Hamlin collapsed on the field, Bayless tweeted, “No doubt the NFL is considering postponing the rest of this game – but how? This late in the season, a game of this magnitude is crucial to the regular-season outcome … which suddenly seems so irrelevant.”
“Nothing is more important than that young man’s health. That was the point of my last tweet,” said Bayless in a follow-up tweet nearly an hour later. “I’m sorry if that was misunderstood but his health is all that matters. Again, everything else is irrelevant. I prayed for him & will continue to.”
On Tuesday, Bayless hosted the debate show without Sharpe, and opened by apologizing for attempting to weave in other sports topics, but ultimately declining to apologize for the tweet itself.
“I apologize for what we’re going to set out to do here today if it offends anyone because we’re gonna try to do the show pretty much as we usually do the show. I’ll admit up front, I’m still shook up by what happened last night to Damar Hamlin,” Bayless said to start Tuesday’s show, without Sharpe. “In fact, I’m still wrecked. In fact, I’m not sure I’m capable of doing this show today. After barely sleeping on it last night, I decided to give it a try.
“We wrestled through much of the night whether to even do a show today because it felt like in our mind we almost can’t win with this. Because the last thing we want to try to do is come off as insensitive to what this young man is going through in a life-or-death situation… As this show goes on, we’re going to try and talk about a little bit of sports, but we’re going to continue to talk about what happened to this young man last night and try to sort back through it with help from you and the audience.”
He later addressed the tweet, saying again that it was misunderstood. He was the first to say that his Fox boss asked him to clarify what he meant.
“And then came my third tweet, which I believe was widely misconstrued, misinterpreted,” Bayless said Tuesday, per Awful Announcing. “I don’t follow what’s happening on Twitter, I just tweet. But my boss here at Fox called and said, ‘Hey, people are really reacting strongly to your tweet, maybe you should clarify.’ Which I immediately did.”“I made the point that this late in the season, with a game of this magnitude, it’s very difficult to postpone it, yet the end of my tweet was, all of which suddenly seems so irrelevant. For the first time in the history of the NFL, my point was, it was all rendered irrelevant by what was happening on the football field in front of all those football players… they were shaken to their foundations.”
Evidently he doesn’t agree with the notion that the Fox brass had an issue with the tweet, something that Sharpe believes based on how things played out. In any event, the entire debacle made for some seriously awkward, uncomfortable television on FS1 Wednesday morning.
