First Take from 2012 to 2016 was appointment morning television for a very specific kind of sports degenerate. Skip would say something insane about LeBron, Stephen A. would explode, and you'd be late to class or work because you couldn't stop watching. Then Skip bolted for Fox Sports 1 in 2016, and the format limped along. Now ESPN has run it back, and the response was instant.
The pitch is exactly what you'd expect — same two guys, same debate, 10 years later.
ESPN getting Skip and Stephen A. back together for the first time in 10 years and running back the exact same debate they've had 100x before is so perfect
The beautiful part is that nobody is pretending this is some evolved, modernized version of the show. It's the same debate. The same LeBron talking points. The same volume. And the nostalgia hit immediately for anyone who used to keep this on in the background of their dorm room.
A clip from the reunion segment, which feels like the show never went off the air.
Skip wasted exactly zero time getting back to his bit. Within the same broadcast he rolled out a top 10 NBA players of all time list and slotted LeBron way lower than any reasonable person would. That's the whole job. That's the only reason this pairing works — Skip lobs the grenade, Stephen A. detonates, repeat for 2 hours.
The LeBron ranking that set the whole segment on fire.
This is crazy. Skip Bayless just did his top 10 nba players of alltime and he… did not rank LeBron very high AT ALL
And then came the nickname. Skip dropped "Stephen NAYsmith" on his old foil like he'd been workshopping it in a basement for a decade waiting for this exact moment. PFT called it Count of Monte Cristo behavior, which feels right — you don't sit on a name like that for 10 years unless the revenge is the entire point.
The "Stephen NAYsmith" reaction in real time.
Skip unleashing “Stephen NAYsmith” as a nickname for SAS after 10 years apart is some count of Monte cristo shit. When a revenge plot comes to life>>>>>>
Whether this version of the show holds up over a full season is a separate question. The takes will get stale, the LeBron debate has been dead for years, and eventually somebody is going to have to actually break news instead of just yelling about Bron's playoff record. But for one morning, it worked exactly the way it used to. All is right in the world again.