Saturday night, we saw sports history.
No, not the Gonzaga-UCLA game at the Jalen Suggs buzzer-beater (although holy cow, how awesome was that?).
No. We saw the perfect hot take.
No idea how you can call that an all-time great college basketball game when it was won by a lucky shot.
— Skip Bayless (@RealSkipBayless) April 4, 2021
What makes this the perfect hot take?
It’s not just that I (and basically all of Twitter) disagreed with it. We’ve come to use “hot take” as a pejorative phrase for any opinion that we don’t like or disagree with. But that’s not exactly right.
Defining a hot take is an inexact science, but this the typology I use in my sports writing classes:
An opinion, often stated loudly, with no other purpose than to get a reaction from an audience.
They’re quick and easy.
They get clicks, shares, and comments.
The audience loves reacting to them.
They’re lazy.
They don’t add anything to the marketplace of ideas.
Bayless’ tweet fits every aspect of this definition.
An opinion, often stated loudly, with no other purpose than to get a reaction from an audience? Check. (At a moment when everyone watching was celebrating a singular game, a legit “DID YOU JUST SEE THAT!?!?” moment, Bayless comes out and rains on the parade … why? To get that reaction.)
They’re quick and easy? Check (this was sent almost immediately after the game).
They get clicks, shares, and comments/The audience loves reacting to them? Check. (More than 6,000 replies and retweets, including 5,600 quote retweets).
They’re lazy? Check. (Sorry, Skip. But this kind of opinion takes no deep thinking. It takes no real work or insight.)
They don’t add anything to the marketplace of ideas? Check.
This last one is why hot takes are so insidious in the long run. They don’t add anything. They don’t tell us something new. They don’t tell us something we didn’t know, or make us reconsider something in a new light. They don’t speak truth to power. They don’t tell a story.
They don’t make us think. They make us react.
They perpetuate the idea that a columnist is doing their job if people are disagreeing with them and yelling at them, which just perpetuates more awful hot takes.
They are everything that’s wrong in sports column writing.
And Saturday’s tweet from Skip Bayless was a perfect example.