By Jack McLoone

I thought we had, as a group, decided stereotypical “frat bro” culture was garbage, something to be made fun of with abandon. So how is it that Barstool Sports has been able to carve out such a large section of media sphere?

I’ll preface this by saying I’m not here to paint the entirety of Barstool with one misogynistic, ad hominem brushstroke. There are some people, like Twitter personalities Uncle Chaps and PFT Commentator, who I was aware of before they joined Barstool and I have, on the whole, still remained a fan. Even “Pardon My Take,” which I have actively avoided listening to – much to my brother’s chagrin – is mostly harmless relative to most of Barstool’s other fare.

Barstool was back in the news again when the “Pardon My Take” crew, PFT Commentator and Dan “Big Cat” Katz, had a show called “Barstool Van Talk” on ESPN 2 that was canceled after just one episode. President of ESPN John Skipper cited not being able to fully divide the typical brand of Barstool humor on their site from “Barstool Van Talk” as the reason why the show was canceled. Leading up to the premiere, the site was hit from two different angles. The first was ESPN host Sam Ponder, who brought up how the site had posted a blog in which they said her “entire career and livelihood is based on appealing to guys like me and blogs like ours.” The other was, and trust me on this, a picture of a pumpkin with a sexually suggestive caption.

Let’s talk about the latter example first, because I’ll be honest it was, in a vacuum, pretty funny. That being said, ESPN is well within its rights to feel uncomfortable about it, especially considering they are owned by Disney. But it isn’t close to the kind of stuff Barstool posts on a literal daily basis. Yes, Stoolies, I’m referring to your beloved daily “Smokeshows.”

For those of you out of the loop, the smokeshow is just a post full of pictures of an attractive young woman. How do you want yourself to be taken seriously if that is the content you routinely post, the content you are maybe most known for? Or if you “grade” all of teachers who get arrested for having sex with students?

As for the comments about Sam Ponder, the head of Barstool, David “El Presidente” Portnoy held an “emergency press conference” following the canceling of the show and in his attempts to defend the Barstool brand, he really just underlined why it is an online compost bin. Instead of apologizing for the comments about Ponder – which, it needs to be clear, is so incredibly easy to do, even if you aren’t sincere – he said he wished he didn’t defame Ponder so that it wouldn’t have been a catalyst for the show being canceled. Let me emphasize this: he was only upset that his actions got a show canceled, not that he undermined the work of someone by saying she was “a chick that has a job where the #1 requirement is you make men hard.”

“I don’t take back any of it,” he said. “Because that’s how we act for 15 years.” It was quite literally the “things have always been this way, why should we change” defense.

It’s fitting that Portnoy goes by “El Presidente” considering that he is the analog for Donald Trump in the sports media sphere. I mean, just take a look at some of the quotes:

“This is exactly why Barstool has to exist. It has to exist because we’re one of the few places, maybe the only place on the internet where we don’t let agendas dictate what we do.”

“People who follow this company know we just talk, shoot the s—, try to be funny, don’t let PC America get the best of us.”
“Everyone is saying, ‘ESPN is not cool,’ ‘No one is paying attention to ESPN.’ They’re all paying more attention to the Barstools of the world. Why? Because we’re authentic.”

“All this does is just reinforce why we’re the fastest-growing media company in the world because we don’t care about this. We will suffer a couple of setbacks. We will take a couple of L’s. In the end, it just makes us stronger, stronger, stronger because we’re not changing.”

Tell me that those aren’t just Trump quotes twisted to fit the sports media world instead of politics. He uses the same rhetorical “technique” of just being blustery and blaming everyone of “working against Barstool” and as “haters” and “losers.” You have to give Portnoy and Barstool credit; they certainly have the voice of their audience down.

What’s most fun about Barstool, though, is their reaction to pieces like these, where their very clear flaws are thrust into the light instead of their more palatable fare. Either it comes in the form you saw above or in the form of digging up examples to show their critics are being hypocritical. This happened to Ponder, who had made remarks about other women, and also to the founder of FanSided, Adam Best, who was one of the more high-profile people to call out ESPN for hiring Barstool following the pumpkin tweet.

Is calling out someone for being hypocritical totally fair? Yes. But just because someone else is totally fine acting depraved on the internet to appeal to “frat bro” society doesn’t give you a pass to do so.

ESPN has been pretty terrible in terms of handling their talent lately, particularly the suspension of Jemele Hill. But firing the “Barstool Van Talk” crew, despite being the “lighter side” of Barstool, is not one of their issues. Muerte la Stool.