Bill Simmons is leaving ESPN

He's incredible. If anything though, I think they'd lose him to the NBA though, like how a couple of past Baseball Prospectus people are now in front offices.

 

I'm a big fan of Juliet Litman and Chris Ryan - both are energetic and quick, and I think they're known more for their podcasting stuff. Ryan has been the broadcast partner of Andy Greenwald for the past few years, and Litman does a food podcast and a reality TV podcast with David Jacoby, who ESPN had already promoted to a semi-daily radio show with Jalen.

I believe Fennessey and Rubin are both well-regarded, behind the scenes researchers and copy editing types. However, from the original tweet on this, I was kind of assuming that the names would be bigger too. Greenwald, Lowe, Bryan Curtis, Jonah Keri, Charles Pierce... The latter two might only be on freelance or part-time contracts, but all of them have more name-value than those four, which are probably only known to regular readers of the site.

 

Lowe is in the right place at espn.com. I think he is enthusiastic about the NBA and certainly knows a lot about tactics/analytics/the salary cap. And from his podcasts, he seems like a nice guy and hard worker who is also plugged into the league. But I don't think he's a great writer by any means and the access with a rights holder is the best place for him. The Basketball Jones/Starters guys do a similar podcast thing as Lowe does, so he can't go to NBA.com/Turner

He and Simmons made a good combination on their podcasts together because both really love hoops and he was able to steer Simmons away from some of his sillier aspects.

 

A year from now, does Grantland exist?

 

I don't think that Simmons is putting together a website to match Grantland, especially with respect to sports. These hires look like creative people who will be part of the behind the scenes team of his HBO show.

He can put together a podcast network, but I'm guessing that he can't pay a staff enough money to take a lot of the better writers from espn.com

 

The non-sports side of Grantland is all but dead. Three stories yesterday. One story today.

 

It never should have been alive in the first place, the non-sports side. And I think the world of Wesley Morris as a critic, and like some of their other writers. As a business model, it made no sense and represented a waste of resources. And Simmons, who lives on Jupiter, believed the site understaffed.

Grantland's eventually going to cease to exist because, essentially, it was Bill Simmons' artist-in-residence program underwritten by ESPN.

 

And now Rembert Browne gone:

Rembert Browne Joins New York Magazine As Writer-at-Large

 

I've like his writing and he seems like a smart guy on podcasts. But if they are going to tear down the pop culture side of the site, this makes sense.

 

The best thing Rembert did at Grantland was when he spent a summer driving across the country, stopping at random places and writing about it. That was fantastic.

 

Jim Miller writes that Simmons' new podcast has revenue north of $5 million per year. That simply can't be true. Even if he does 4 podcasts a week (he's been doing less) and reads 4 ads per podcast. That's a max of 800 ads per year, which means that he would have to be getting over $6,000 per read (and more like $10k per read based on his output).