Did Nate (AKA – The Spider Monkey) Abuse His Power As Editor In Chief By Badgering Francis On His Agenda Before Publishing His Pro Mean Girl Blog?

So this morning I received a phone call from a certain employee that will not be named (he’s bald, just celebrated his 40th birthday by drunkenly walking into the back of car and giving himself a black eye)

Anyway this nameless employee (We’ll call him Mr. Bald for the sake of this blog) called me and asked if I was up to speed on all the Mean Girl Drama.   I replied that I was because I thought I was.  I told “Mr. Bald” that I had read both the Kelly Keegs blog and the Francis rebuttal blog.   But apparently according to “Mr. Bald”  Nate our editor in Chief fought like hell to keep the Francis blog from being published.    That there was long back and forth between Nate and Francis before his blog saw the light of day.  That Nate thought defending the Mean Girls was below us as a company and was a bad look for everybody who works at Barstool Sports.   He was our dark knight protecting us from filth that was too vile for our simple minds to comprehend.

So when I heard this new information I went right to the source and asked Nate if it was true.    He was incensed and denied it.   He said he didn’t badger Francis and that the blog was scheduled instantly.  I asked Nate to send me his texts with Francis before publishing the blog and Nate refused.  It wasn’t that the texts would incriminate him, but he was furious I was questioning his integrity and honor.  After angrily hanging up on me he did send me 1 screen shot of his conversation with Francis.

Vindication for Natedog right?  Well I then texted Francis and asked to see his conversation with Nate and he sent me 11 slides. Here they are.

Now to me this is a gross abuse of power by Nate Dog.  Why is he badgering Francis about his angle and why he wrote this.   (As a sidenote I totally agree with Francis’s blog.  I’m not saying Mean Girls is the next Call Her Daddy because there will probably never be another Call Her Daddy.   But the amount of whining and complaining internally about them while they just go out and put up relatively big numbers is astounding.  I don’t believe at all that their success negatively effects anybody else at the company.   Quite the contrary.  They are brining in revenue that helps everybody, but that’s netiher here nor there.)   

The point is that people at this company are allowed to say and do whatever they want for the most part as long as it doesn’t fuck with everybody else’s money.   (IE -Brandon Walker being a brain dead idiot)  It is not the job or place of the editor to pick sides in a battle like this and badger somebody on why they wrote a blog just because you don’t like their angle.    

Now I will admit that Nate never said he wouldn’t publish the blog and in our conversations and he was adamant that this was never in question.  He was always going to publish it.  Instead he just kept hammering Francis on why he wrote it because of intellectual curiosity. (My words not his)  I told Nate that I believe without a shadow of a doubt that if he could have convinced Francis not to publish it that Nate would have gladly killed it.  This is something Natedog vehemently denies.   I guess we’ll never know what would have happened if Nate actually flipped Francis, but either way to me Nate was way out of line here.

And just to be sure I wasn’t playing favorites I sent Kelly Keegs a text and asked her if anybody questioned her about her blog trashing the Mean Girls.   Here is what she said.

To me this is case closed.    The editor of the blog should be concerned about pageviews and protecting us against things that could get us cancelled.   He should not be taking sides in an argument on the merits of the Mean Girls pod.   As both myself and Mr. Bald have said countless times.  We don’t play favorites here.   We try to promote the things that bring the most revenue back to the company.  Mean Girls has been one of our most successful new franchises under any metric you use.  You don’t have to like it, but as the great Tiko Texas (does she still work here?) once said….Numbers Never Lie.