Rest assured, Ryan Baer, there are opinions other than Dave Portnoy’s.
The president and founder of Barstool Sports chided Baer, a Pittsburgh offensive tackle, for his receding hairline, which was featured prominently during Thursday night’s six-overtime GameAbove Sports Bowl.
The bald and balding community, though, led by none other than the most respected and revered bald head in the sports-watching world, came quickly to the redshirt sophomore’s defense.
“Dude it’s fine. Fine,” ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt wrote on X.
Van Pelt quote-tweeted Portnoy’s inciting X post, which read, “This 6OT game just blessed us with this hairline. How old are college kids again?”
Portnoy’s post also featured an image from the game broadcast zoomed into Baer’s receding hairline.
While the Toledo Rockets squeaked past the Pittsburgh Panthers in the bowl game, Baer, 22, didn’t take his biggest hit of the evening until after the final whistle had blown and he opened up his phone to find his naked skull plastered all across the internet.
“Damn,” the offensive tackle tweeted.
Amid a bevy of comments piling onto Portnoy’s wisecrack — variations of “he had hair when the game started,” read at least a half dozen — Baer found an abundance of support, too.
“Ryan, you look tremendous,” NFL lineman turned sports media personality Kyle Long wrote on X.
“It’s alright brother, bad camera angles happen to the best of us,” added another former player turned analyst, Mike Golic Jr.
Portnoy’s post, as of Friday morning, had accumulated nearly 8 million views and hundreds of thousands of reactions. Whether the Barstool founder meant to or not, Baer, now, is a national icon.
“This dude is gonna parlay his receding hairline into a job isn’t he?” Portnoy observed in a subsequent post to X.
Thursday night’s six overtime GameAbove Sports Bowl, which the Rockets won, 48-46, was the longest bowl game ever.
By all means, the game never should have gotten that far — the Panthers carried a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter and many disagreed with Pittsburgh coach’s Pat Narduzzi’s call to kick a field goal in the second overtime.
Four overtimes later, the Toledo defense forced Pitt’s walk-on freshman quarterback Julian Dugger into a bad throw to secure its first bowl win since 2022.
