Eddie Barstool tells his Barstool story on One More

One More is Dana's sit-down series where Barstool people explain how they got in the door. Eddie's route was longer and stranger than most.

In the clip, Eddie admits he had cooled on Barstool from roughly 2015 to 2017. Then came a call in the summer of 2018 about Barstool picking up Red Line Radio, the Chicago podcast he'd been doing with Chief, Carl and White Sox Dave since 2016. That September the crew went to Barstool's New York headquarters for the official announcement. The episode promo puts the 2018 Bears at the center of all of it. That was the season that opened with the Week 1 loss in Green Bay, and Eddie's old selfie fan rants from that year are the videos that got him noticed.

It was not an overnight thing, either. Eddie put in more than 5 years of unpaid work before he went full-time. Red Line Radio became a full-time operation in January 2019, when Barstool opened its first office outside New York, in Chicago's Ukrainian Village. That office is where the episode gets nostalgic.

Viva La Stool

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“That’s what I really think about: Just like how new and how simple it was, and how amazing it was that I was waking up every day to go work for Barstool” -Eddie

Viva La Stool

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Eddie talking about his journey to Barstool t.co/JLc8tO0Av3

In that segment they remember a tiny rented room shared with whatever other small businesses were on the floor, with Dave stopping by for his first look at the place. These days Barstool Chicago runs out of a proper set with a Wrigley sign on the wall and Dana's Yug Station beer tap on the table. Remembering the early days is the whole point of the show, and Eddie's line about waking up every day to work for Barstool lands because he waited so long to say it.

Every Barstool lifer has some version of this story, and none of them got in the same way. On a Fore Play episode the week before, one of the hosts put it this way:

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“Dave brings you in for god only knows what reason, nobody has the same path to get in here.”

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For Eddie, that path ran through a Bears season, a podcast with a few buddies and a phone call he didn't see coming. The full One More episode is out now. It's worth watching if you only know him from the Bears postgame shows, because the guy breaking down Chicago's defense every Monday spent years doing this for free before anyone paid him.