The recent reunion between Skip Bayless and Shannon Sharpe hasn’t gone over well with some former athletes who worked alongside Bayless and appreciated Sharpe taking a stand against him during their infamous 2022 blowout over Tom Brady.

In that argument, Bayless lost his temper over Brady’s disappointing final season and, in a familiar move, made it personal. Bayless absurdly claimed that Sharpe, a Hall of Famer, was “jealous” of Brady for being a greater player.

The childish remark was common throughout Bayless’ television career. Once, Cris Carter was on the wrong side of a similar barb during an argument over another Bayless favorite, Tim Tebow.

Carter joined Cam Newton’s 4th and 1 podcast this week and recalled the story, which he has repeatedly said led him to threaten to punch Bayless on set and led to Carter stepping back from First Take. In the podcast conversation, Carter and Newton discussed how Bayless, Stephen A. Smith, and their shows’ producers put athlete panelists “in a corner” in order to maintain the prominence of the star hosts.

Carter said he was an unofficial researcher for First Take at ESPN, feeding Smith data and reporting from his NFL colleagues to inform Smith’s opinions.

“I used to drop him information, I used to text him information,” he explained. “When he’d take a certain subject matter, when he’d take a certain angle, I would hit him with some facts and stuff. And sometimes that stuff would come from the league office, sometimes it would come from people I’m connected to. To make sure that he was on the right side of what he was talking about, and make him more educated as far as the NFL.”

Although Carter was helping Smith make up for his relative lack of NFL knowledge compared with the NBA, he felt the show often minimized him. Carter related the experience of a debate show to professional wrestling kayfabe.

“They force you to take topics. That’s not real journalism. That’s not real conversation,” he said. “And it’s also, you don’t have no respect for the ability of other people to think on their feet that you’re making people say something.”

Even as a Hall of Fame receiver, Carter felt segments were “fixed” to elevate the hosts.

“We’re over-equipped for these fights, man,” he said. “These dudes ain’t been in the trenches. These dudes ain’t never been slapped, these dudes ain’t never slapped nobody. So it’s a fixed fight for us … but the way they produce the show, they got it fixed not in our favor.”

The conversation then turned to Newton, whose run on First Take ended recently after two seasons. Newton felt frustrated by a double standard, both in how ESPN produced him and in what he saw from afar with Bayless.

“We can’t really flex our cerebral ‘football-ness,’ because the man (Bayless) that smokes cigars and wears fashion statements and is loud and rambunctious to some, y’all don’t see him as a football pundit,” he said.

“Y’all see him as a person who, when Cam rushes all over a defense, it’s like, ‘Ah man.’ Josh Allen does it, it’s, ‘He’s making plays.’ These are things that I’ve battled with my whole life, let alone in a commodity that already predetermines and says, ‘You are this, so be this.’ Needless to say, I really know football.”

Newton and Carter agreed that the way someone like Bayless talks about Black athletes on air seeps into how Black athletes are treated alongside him.

“They want to keep you in a corner,” Carter argued.

“Because what they want to say is, you won the genetic lottery. That’s the only reason you’ve been there. But to be successful … in every elite athlete, there’s some brilliance in there. It’s some showmanship in there. It’s some competitive spirit in there. It’s some discipline in there. It’s all the traits that everyone who is successful in any other business, that they have.

“But when you have it, they don’t want to put no respect on it. And that’s the problem.”

Newton, in particular, has had to deal with being both the subject of intense sports talk debates and a participant in these shows, but plenty of athletes have enjoyed working on First Take or Undisputed. And if Sharpe has rekindled his relationship with Bayless despite the disrespect he received on-air, the story may be a little more complicated than what Carter and Newton observed.