I Lost My Cool On Brandon Walker Today

Today on The Yak, I blew up. I yelled at Brandon Walker for something that irked me that at the end of the day, was originally my fault. 

I make the prep sheets for The Yak. Always have. In each show, we've got a handful of ads that I copy and paste from our lovely dashboard where they get fed into. They're condensed into talking points and a call to action. I used to do that for Barstool originally. I was the Senior Director of Ad Operations and there are people that look over the ad copy. 

I've since moved to Content where the prep sheets and the ads are still part of my role with The Yak. Sometimes when reading an ad, if Brandon gets caught up on language on there is a typo, he will call me out during the read. That has always annoyed me as not only does it make me look bad, but sometimes the read will be so botched the advertiser will request a makegood (free ad). Today it reached a boiling point. I realize as I type this if I don't make some type of error, this never happens. And that's a fair shot. Certainly. What I'd say is that we do probably 1,000 ads/year on The Yak and it's impossible to never make a mistake. If you mess up 2% of the time, it's frustrating to be called out by one guy. Nobody else has ever called me out consistently. Not justification for my actions, just letting you know my thought process.

So when reading an ad earlier in the show, one that we were instructed to read verbatim, he called out the copy saying it was confusing. He was right. It was. But it still annoyed me to have the ad stopped.

Later in the show, he was reading another ad where I accidentally copied and pasted the same ad twice. Not necessarily a big error, but just a clerical thing. Still an error and my fault entirely. But to call me out during the ad again set me off. I definitely took it a little too far but was a bit frustrated already. We had a brief back and forth before he stormed off. 

After a few minutes, the moment had passed and I'd cooled down. He walked away but was headed back to the studio when I went to go talk to him outside. He wanted no part of it as he was still stewing, which is fair. When he sat back down, we had a back and forth on The Yak after and got some things off our chests. I gave him a genuine apology as I definitely did take it too far. I have expressed my dissatisfaction for being called out for those types of errors before live on air to him. Those are things I feel like could be handled in house. I'm sure Colorado's offensive line doesn't like being called out by Shedeur Sanders in post-game pressers, so I was just feeling that type of way. 

Brandon's stance was that I only go hard at him and I do not feel that's the case. I view Brandon as a good friend. I've met his entire family, I've gone to his house in NJ to feed his pets, we've discussed meeting up to play pickleball, we've chatted life stuff and worked with each other for several years now. I think he is a good guy and I enjoy his company. On the show, a lot of friendly ribbing is not meant to be taken personally. Within these walls, I feel anybody can say anything about me, and if it's just about me, it's cool. I would've had a similar reaction to Nick, KB, Big Cat, Titus, or Kate if they had repeatedly called me out in a manner I didn't care for. And anybody can catch these verbal hands if the time is right.

But I do feel bad about overreacting so much, so I'll own the L. Brandon was in the right and I was not. And for that I apologize.

Catch the full Yak here: