Craig Carton’s first order of business Monday morning wasn’t promoting his return to WFAN afternoons. It was rewriting the story of why he left.
Appearing on Boomer and Gio hours before his debut show with Chris McMonigle, Carton spent several minutes defending his three-year run at FS1 and pushing back against the perception that his shows failed.
“The highest rated quarter hours in the history of FS1 in the morning?” Carton said of his short-lived eponymous show. “The one that dropped 40% when they took my name off the wall? The one that dropped another 60% when they kicked me out of the building altogether? It was called Breakfast Ball.”
Carton conceded that the television experiment didn’t end the way he’d hoped, but maintained the story hadn’t been told accurately.
“Was it the highest-rated show of all time? No,” he continued. “Was it the highest-rated quarter hours they’ve ever had in the time slot? Yes. Did the show lose ratings when my name came off it? Yes — all tangible. But Fox was also very, very good to me, and continues to be good to me.”
FS1 gave Carton three separate opportunities to host morning television from 2022-25. The Craig Carton Show launched in September 2022 with former MLB player Cody Decker and rotating analysts. Carton initially juggled both the FS1 show and his WFAN afternoon slot with Evan Roberts for nearly a year.
In 2023, FS1 rebranded the show, adding David Jacoby as a co-host. Jacoby had just left ESPN after 23 years, where he’d co-hosted Jalen and Jacoby with Jalen Rose. Carton left WFAN entirely to focus on television full-time, reportedly on a seven-figure deal. It was his second attempt to make the format work after the first iteration struggled to find an audience.
After Undisputed collapsed following Skip Bayless’s departure in 2024, FS1 retooled its entire morning lineup. In August 2024, Carton was given a third chance with a completely reimagined format. His show was rebranded as Breakfast Ball, with Danny Parkins from Chicago’s 670 The Score and Mark Schlereth as co-hosts.
Less than 11 months later, FS1 canceled Breakfast Ball. The network replaced the morning slot with Wake Up Barstool, a partnership with Barstool Sports featuring Dave Portnoy on Mondays and rotating Barstool personalities the rest of the week.
Carton’s claim on Monday that ratings dropped 40% when his name came off the wall and another 60% when he left is technically accurate. The question is whether those numbers prove what Carton thinks they prove.
Breakfast Ball had averaged around 32,000 viewers, according to Nielsen data from June 2025. Those weren’t good numbers, but they were numbers. When Wake Up Barstool launched in September to replace it, the show opened at 16,500 viewers in its first week — roughly half of what Breakfast Ball had been pulling. The premiere episode drew 20,000 viewers, down year-over-year from both Breakfast Ball and The Facility.
By the second week, Wake Up Barstool had dropped to around 12,000 viewers. At one point, the show hit a low of 7,000. Even Dave Portnoy admitted the numbers were “awful” and blamed FS1 for not promoting the show properly.
So yes, the ratings did drop after Carton left and yes, Wake Up Barstool initially performed worse than Breakfast Ball. But if Breakfast Ball was pulling 32,000 viewers and still got canceled, those weren’t numbers FS1 considered worth keeping. For context, The Facility — which aired right after Breakfast Ball in the 10 a.m. to noon slot — averaged 121,000 viewers. That was nearly four times what Carton’s show was doing, and virtually identical to what Undisputed had pulled during a similar period the previous year with Skip Bayless.
The entire FS1 morning block was struggling to compete with ESPN. Undisputed never matched First Take’s ratings during its eight-year run. The Craig Carton Show, in its various forms, never found an audience. Breakfast Ball couldn’t break through despite featuring two successful radio hosts and a three-time Super Bowl champion.
“The animal is different, obviously, TV versus radio, and the companies are different,” Carton admitted. “There are rules about what you can do, what you can’t do. It was a great experience. I’d never done it before.”
Carton spent a decade dominating New York morning radio with Boomer Esiason before his 2017 arrest on fraud charges. After returning to WFAN in 2020, he and Evan Roberts built a successful afternoon show before Carton left for FS1 in 2023. His style — big personality, willingness to push boundaries, improvisational energy — worked in New York radio but didn’t translate to national cable television competing against ESPN’s morning lineup.
Carton still hosts The Craig Carton Show podcast through Fox and Red Seat Ventures, which launched in September 2025. The continued relationship suggests things didn’t end poorly between Carton and Fox, even after Breakfast Ball was canceled.
Carton’s return to WFAN marks his third stint with the station. He co-hosted Boomer and Carton from 2007 to 2017 before resigning following his arrest by the FBI. After serving 12 months of a 36-42 month sentence for fraud, he returned to WFAN in 2020 to co-host afternoons with Roberts until leaving for FS1.
He’ll now host The Carton Show in afternoon drive from alongside Chris McMonigle, his former producer.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.