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In What May Be The Worst Thing ESPN Has Ever Televised, Rick Reilly And Skip Bayless Attempt To Give The Internet A Stroke

When we heard yesterday that internet punching bag Rick Reilly would join internet punching bag Skip Bayless to debate the merits of Tim Tebow on internet punching bag ESPN2 program First Take, we were intrigued. It was a morbid kind of intrigue, sure, but intrigue nonetheless. Well, today, the two men were united. And…it went about like you thought it would.

Reilly waded through the crowd like a Price is Right contestant, took his spot next to the biggest Tebow homer out there, and readied himself to play (relatively) bad cop with…Rick Reilly puns and jokes:

Well, at least the crowd booed the beer thing. It continued on about like this, with Reilly giving reasons Tebow doesn’t deserve all the credit for the Broncos’ success (a valid point, for what it’s worth). And then, Reilly came in with a Reilly pun about Broncos kicker Matt Prater. Here it is, but be warned: it is not for the faint of heart…

Skip: “That’s a good line, I like that.” No. No, it is not. It is a painful line, possibly crafted by Reilly precisely to be so. The line is so painful that if you showed it to Tim Tebow himself, perhaps on a loop, eventually he would walk away, shellshocked, saying softly, “I have been deceived. There is no God. Religion is but a construct to feel better about our essential impermanence. Eternity is an infinite black void of nothingness. Soon I will be nothing. I am already nothing. Existence is nothing. We are all nothing. We are all doomed.”

Anyway, things thankfully calmed down pun-wise, perhaps enough for one to regain one’s faith in a benevolent higher power. There was some weirdness – like Reilly making a joke about Bayless and Stephen A. Smith being great friends off camera who “cut each other’s meat” in the ESPN cafeteria, that got the desired “Ooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhh!” from the crowd. Ultimately, though, the Reilly-Skip pairing was a worthy act of trolling viewers. Hey, it got us to watch. And if The Onion ever wants to update the picture that goes along with this old article, well, check out that thumbnail at the top of this post.