Jon Gruden now employed by Barstool Sports

[Just in Atlanta]

He said some nasty things, but also got railroaded by the NFL. If he’s cleaned up his act, I would welcome him back into the league as a fan. 

[BillsPride12]

[Mr. WEO]

how is Barstool Sports still a viable business at this point?

[paulmm3]

Watched a little bit of Gruden/Barstool yesterday. I like the guy. He's got an energetic and engaging personality, knows an insane amount football, and is good at communicating what he knows to morons like me.

[uticaclub]

4 hours ago, Mr. WEO said:

how is Barstool Sports still a viable business at this point?

Are you serious?

[GETTOTHE50]

23 hours ago, BillsPride12 said:

Bro probably came up with the Super Bowl game plan with a bucket of wings & double Ds

[benderbender]

Not a Barstool fan myself, but it didn’t sell for half a billion dollars because everyone hated the concept. 

 

Gruden is the Matthew McConaughey of sports personalities: he always gets into character. The same character. And someone keeps paying him. So he won’t stop.

[Mr. WEO]

1 hour ago, uticaclub said:

Are you serious?

 

yeah--it's essentially Deadspin (which lost relevance years ago) for shlubs.  It's a bunch of jabronies writing "articles" from twitters posts as well as meatheads sitting around and commenting on what everyone else comments on everywhere else.  Plus the boss reviews pizza.

 

lol, come on. 

[Mr. WEO]

5 minutes ago, benderbender said:

Not a Barstool fan myself, but it didn’t sell for half a billion dollars because everyone hated the concept. 

 

Gruden is the Matthew McConaughey of sports personalities: he always gets into character. The same character. And someone keeps paying him. So he won’t stop.

 

The company bought it sold it back to him for $1 (2023---after Barstool lost 16 million in the first Q).  It's estimated Penn lost 800 million overall on this deal.  Penn, a gambling company, wanted to join ESPN and form ESPN Bet--using Barstool as the conduit.  Turn out the Barstool viewers were felt to be too young and broke to maintain a gambling hybrid sports content venture, so they sold it back to Portnoy for nothing to cut their losses.

[Sabres 2025]

1 hour ago, Mr. WEO said:

 

yeah--it's essentially Deadspin (which lost relevance years ago) for shlubs.  It's a bunch of jabronies writing "articles" from twitters posts as well as meatheads sitting around and commenting on what everyone else comments on everywhere else.  Plus the boss reviews pizza.

 

lol, come on. 

 

Barstool is not Deadspin or anything close to it. Barstool is quite the juggernaut. It raised over $40M for small business during covid thanks to it's loyal fanbase. Like Barstool or not, it has the audience that advertisers love. 

[Sabres 2025]

1 hour ago, Mr. WEO said:

 

The company bought it sold it back to him for $1 (2023---after Barstool lost 16 million in the first Q).  It's estimated Penn lost 800 million overall on this deal.  Penn, a gambling company, wanted to join ESPN and form ESPN Bet--using Barstool as the conduit.  Turn out the Barstool viewers were felt to be too young and broke to maintain a gambling hybrid sports content venture, so they sold it back to Portnoy for nothing to cut their losses.

 

They sold it back for nothing for the 161.7 million in tax benefits. They wanted the bigger deal with ESPN, which they paid 1.5B for over 10 years. It was done primarily because ESPN/Disney has deals with the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB and they knew they would now be allowed to advertise gambling on the broadcasts. Watch a game and you now get bombarded with parlay picks,etc.

[Mr. WEO]

16 hours ago, Sabres 2025 said:

 

Barstool is not Deadspin or anything close to it. Barstool is quite the juggernaut. It raised over $40M for small business during covid thanks to it's loyal fanbase. Like Barstool or not, it has the audience that advertisers love. 

 

16 hours ago, Sabres 2025 said:

 

They sold it back for nothing for the 161.7 million in tax benefits. They wanted the bigger deal with ESPN, which they paid 1.5B for over 10 years. It was done primarily because ESPN/Disney has deals with the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB and they knew they would now be allowed to advertise gambling on the broadcasts. Watch a game and you now get bombarded with parlay picks,etc.

 

It loses money.  As you point out, it was only sold to ESPN because the latter wanted to use it as a conduit to gambling.  ESPN, in the end, wanted no affiliation with Portnoy and Barstool, So Penn  sold it back and realized a tax benefit.

 

BArstool was a cutting edge thing for bro-sports info, etc, when it sold at it's peak.  Since then, it isn't unique in any way and there are countless youtube imitators for it to off anything novel for advertisers.

[FireChans]

17 minutes ago, Mr. WEO said:

 

 

It loses money.  As you point out, it was only sold to ESPN because the latter wanted to use it as a conduit to gambling.  ESPN, in the end, wanted no affiliation with Portnoy and Barstool, So Penn  sold it back and realized a tax benefit.

 

BArstool was a cutting edge thing for bro-sports info, etc, when it sold at it's peak.  Since then, it isn't unique in any way and there are countless youtube imitators for it to off anything novel for advertisers.

I think they still lose money. 2014ish was their peak market. 
 

Now it’s a losing game. 
 

I think they did partner with DK which probably floats them at this point.

Edited November 17 by FireChans

[extrahammer]

23 hours ago, Mr. WEO said:

how is Barstool Sports still a viable business at this point?

 

Bc investors all bought and sold it for parts a few times, raked in hundreds of millions and paid the founder less than 3/4ths what they made from it. 

 

Barstool has never expanded beyond what it was in the early days. They've lost their biggest talents like Alex Cooper and Pat McAfee. Now it's like TheBlaze for sports. Gruden signed with them because they were really his only option, no one else was offering Gruden anything. 

[Mr. WEO]

1 hour ago, FireChans said:

I think they still lose money. 2014ish was their peak market. 
 

Now it’s a losing game. 
 

I think they did partner with DK which probably floats them at this point.

 

1 hour ago, extrahammer said:

 

Bc investors all bought and sold it for parts a few times, raked in hundreds of millions and paid the founder less than 3/4ths what they made from it. 

 

Barstool has never expanded beyond what it was in the early days. They've lost their biggest talents like Alex Cooper and Pat McAfee. Now it's like TheBlaze for sports. Gruden signed with them because they were really his only option, no one else was offering Gruden anything. 

 

Brings me back to my original post---who's still watching this stuff?  Bros stuck in 2014.....

[extrahammer]

9 minutes ago, Mr. WEO said:

 

 

Brings me back to my original post---who's still watching this stuff?  Bros stuck in 2014.....

 

I will say, I did enjoy Gruden's previews the last few weeks on YouTube. I think he could have done just as well if not better on his own. Now his show is gonna be jammed with infinite ads, promotions, and super stale bro references. 

Edited November 17 by extrahammer

[Mr. WEO]

7 minutes ago, extrahammer said:

 

I will say, I did enjoy Gruden's previews the last few weeks on YouTube. I think he could have done just as well if not better on his own. Now his show is gonna be jammed with infinite ads, promotions, and super stale bro references. 

 

I think Gruden is a good watch.  Always liked how he would interview QB draft prospects----grilling them on film and having them diagram plays for him.

 

I bet the Colts wish Gruden had vetted Richardson like that.  Interview would have been over in minutes, lol.   Could have avoided their disastrous pick.

 

Barstool is the Starter jacket of sports sites....

[Sabres 2025]

25 minutes ago, Mr. WEO said:

 

 

Brings me back to my original post---who's still watching this stuff?  Bros stuck in 2014.....

 

Lots of people. Half their viewers are still between 18-34.  They have 41.2 million TikTok followers. ESPN, which is much larger basically has 48.5. They have 17M Instagram followes. ESPN has 28M instagram followers.  And ESPN has a monster company in Disney behind it.  Barstool is actually even more popular than ESPN with the demographic advertisers want.  People live in their bubbles on the internet, and obviously your bubble doesn't include Barstool, but millions of other people's bubbles does include barstool.  Barstool is very good at marketing. It is basically a marketing company.

Edited November 17 by Sabres 2025

[HomeskillitMoorman]

20 hours ago, benderbender said:

Not a Barstool fan myself, but it didn’t sell for half a billion dollars because everyone hated the concept. 

 

Gruden is the Matthew McConaughey of sports personalities: he always gets into character. The same character. And someone keeps paying him. So he won’t stop.

 

Right. I used to like Barstool years ago, not really anymore, but they have a big following obviously. A lot of people probably disagree because they still have so many followers, which is fine as there’s plenty of content to go around for everyone,  but I thought their content started to become much more manufactured than it used to be. 
 

Also agree on Gruden. I didn’t like him on Monday nights because he was so afraid to be critical, especially of QB’s because he probably didn’t want to be disliked by them. I think he even glazed on Trent Edwards one night where he was literally just in Captain Checkdown mode and I just couldn’t believe he was watching the same game I was. 

[Mr. WEO]

3 minutes ago, Sabres 2025 said:

 

Barstool under Penn gaming lost money. Barstool today makes money. Penn gaming lost money because they were trying to make it into a gambling site, because that is what gaming companies do.  Barstool is really not designed for that. It is designed to make money via advertising revenue. Barstool still has tens of millions of unique users and half of them are still in the key demographic of 18-34 year olds.  It is public information that the site brings in tens of millions of revenue per quarter. 

 

My guess is you don't like the owner or his politics, but that doesn't mean you can argue with the basic facts. It does enormous amounts of revenue in advertising still.

Penn, a huge gaming/casino company, wanted Barstool for Barstool Bets to partner with ESPN in their online gaming venture.  ESPN  didn't want to be associated with Barstool in the creation of ESPN Bet.  Without this partnership, Barstool was of zero value for Penn (which had 6.5 billion in revenue in 2022) as .  They instead partnered with ESPN without BS.   If Barstool was printing money, it stands to reason that they would keep BS as a profitable asset, rather than taking a writedown.  Similarly, if they thought BS had significant market value, they wouldn't have sold it back to Portnoy (let alone for a dollar).  

 

Obviously not all (or, perhaps, any) revenue is profit.  Last reports I see online are losses of 16 million Q1 and 12 million in Q2 for 2023.  Can you link to the more recent public info re: current financials?

 

Barstool Bets is an insignificant online betting player---Penn thought BS would funnel tons of it's broke ass readers to "ESPN Bets" for them.  unfortunately their 18-34 viewers were the wrong betting demographic.

 

Portnoy's politics aren't an issue for me (it's worth familiarizing yourself with this guy's history though), but they were for others--he was the reason that Penn could not get licensed to operate gambling online in certain states.