The Best Damn Sports Show Period was an American sports television show that aired on Fox Sports Net and Comcast SportsNet. The show regularly featured irreverent and opinionated interviews with top athletes, coaches, celebrities, and entertainers. It also aired Top 50 countdown shows and other sports specialty shows. Since its debut on July 23, 2001, BDSSP welcomed thousands of guests and aired more than 1,300 episodes. The last original show aired June 30, 2009; however, FSN taped a handful of Top 50 specials. The show aired weeknights at 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. local time, usually after FSN Final Score, or later if there was a local live sporting event that ran longer than expected, depending on the region and telecast schedule. History Conception In 1999, FSN's nightly sports news show - Fox Sports News and what was later renamed the National Sports Report - was losing ratings ground to ESPN's SportsCenter. The executives at FSN wanted a 2-3 hour show that could provide consistent, original programming on nights when there were no local basketball, baseball, or hockey games being broadcast in FSN regions. The decision was made to do a sports roundtable type of show with the same camaraderie and energy as the Fox NFL Sunday pregame show. Fox NFL Sunday, which debuted in 1994 on FSN's network brother - Fox Sports, quickly became the top-rated NFL pregame show due in part to the personalities of NFL veterans Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long. However, the new show on FSN would focus on not just football, but every sport, as well as the entertainment world. Fox Sports' president David Hill modeled many aspects of the show from The Footy Show, a sports talk show which covered the Australian Football League in Australia (Hill's home country). The preliminary idea for the format of the new show for FSN would have one main host and different ex-athletes as hosts for each major sport. It would interweave sports talk with comedic sports-related content. Test run In June 2001, the producers started doing screen tests with over 30 different TV hosts and former athletes. Tom Arnold was one of the celebrities called to try out as the "comedian" of the show. At first, he says he was reluctant to do it, and "didn't know what to expect", but he wasn't doing much at the time because he was just waiting for True Lies 2