Bomani Jones Learned From Stephen A. Smith When Asked To Compare Beyoncé And Rihanna While Previewing The Super Bowl

Now that the Grammys are out of the way, the biggest music event fans are looking forward to is the Super Bowl. Yes, there will be some football — maybe even some good football — but more importantly, Rihanna is performing at the Halftime Show after nearly seven years out of the limelight.

Naturally, this offers plentiful opportunities for discussion, but not everyone is equally suited to talk about the event. For instance, Stephen A Smith, the outspoken ESPN pundit, who asked about Rihanna’s upcoming performance and immediately when into sports talk mode to preemptively compare Rihanna’s performance to Beyoncé’s previous Super Bowl performances.

After he was lambasted by basically the entire internet he apologized, but that wasn’t enough for some — including Leslie Jones — and the whole escapade culminated with Smith having a minor meltdown on his own show, First Take, over it.

In what was perhaps a bit dedicated to ribbing his former ESPN colleague, HBO host Bomani Jones pretty pointedly sidestepped a similar faux pas on his own new show Game Theory. While his cue cards teed him up to answer the question of whether Rihanna could really outdo Beyoncé, Jones seemingly goes off on an unrelated tangent, bringing in Adam Silver and LeBron James, the BeyHive and the Navy, and Jalen Hurts, he jokingly plays both sides before lampshading the whole speech. “If this were a presidential debate,” he explained, “I’d have done what they do when they don’t wanna answer the question: I just started talking about some other sh*t.” Watch the hilarious bit below.