Bill Simmons Questions ESPN's Support of Grantland

I read Grantland all the time. I'm guessing it's been five years since I've eaten at Subway.

 

- Does Simmons have a blog?
- The Grantland name is nothing without him. He hated the name. If he and ESPN parted ways, there would be another outlet happy to scoop him up and recreate the site with a different name. He is the brand.

 

I don't think ESPN's kept Simmons around for the financial payoff. I really don't.

I think ESPN perceives him as more or less the coolest person/thing it has. And he may be, I dunno. At the bottom, ESPN makes its money by overpaying for sporting events, saturating the market with said product, and banking on cable fees because sports are the one TV event you have to watch as it happens. But is it cool? Is SportsCenter cool anymore, with its nerdy, self-referential anchors who constantly seem like they're trying out for a comedy show? Is Chris Berman cool? Is Lee Corso cool? Jon Gruden? Jeff Van Gundy? It lost USA soccer/world cup. ESPN found a way to lose soccer, of all things. It does not have the best basketball analyst (that's Barkley) or the best football analyst (that's Collinsworth). Its lead analyst is a football wonk so far inside the rear end of schematics that all he does is spout vague compliments and football cliches, and NFL Network still seems to have the credibility advantage with Mayock. Its most popular talkers are 66 (Tony K.), 63 (Bayless), 56 (Wilbon) and 47 (SAS) and heaven help me, SAS is so cranky and serious he acts like he's 57. I think Keith Olbermann's an elite thinker/talker, personally, but his last day of fun might have been in 1974 or something.

But ESPN has the coolest media dude in Bill Simmons. That's what he's selling, more or less, right? He's the cool older brother, or maybe the cool dad. He talks basketball, movies, TV, fun stuff! He gambles. He likes wrestling. He lives life barely governed by the workaday rules of the rest of journalism, right? Even the cool people like him. His value to ESPN is that he makes look like just slightly more of a lark than the calculated money-printing machine it actually is.

That's what ESPN was trying to do when it tried some weird trade for Katie Nolan. Nolan seems fun. Cool. It's what ESPN was trying to do when it got Michelle Beadle back. And ESPN's suits are trying to buy that up, in part because they know: The network is, mostly, so fucking un-fun, so up its eyeballs in money and conflicts of interest that it's desperate to buy some fun.

 

Jeff Van Gundy is cool. And funny.

 

Is Simmons 'right'? They pay him huge fees to do, essentially, what he wants, and they promote the stuff. The stuff is good and it makes money for ESPN, so its not as if I'm saying he doesn't deserve what he gets, but he is in fact getting it. Seems like a fair arrangement for both sides.

What more does he want? A pat on the head and adulation?

 

Freud would enjoy Simmons' company.

 

I never considered Simmons cool.
He's a male-geek who might even be less cool than his senior handlers.
If that's the branding tool then ESPN is way off base, as usual.
Ask women if they think Simmons is cool.

 

Lee Corso is to cool what Dick Vitale is not.

Not many other ESPNers I follow anymore,
though you can always count on good work by Bob Ley.

 

Bob Ley and OTL are great. It's like 60 Minutes on sports. I should watch that more often. I watched some Mike&Mike this morning as they filled in their brackets, and one Mike (Greenberg) wasn't even there. The whole time, I could just feel brain cells dying as I watched it.

 

Now there's good radio- listening to an asshat like Greenberg fill out an NCAA bracket.

 

ESPN would be nuts to let/force Simmons out and he would be 100 times more nuts to leave of his own accord. It's a great arrangement for both of them. Think of what independent producer Simmons would face trying to finance and peddle 30 for 30 as a project or even as one or two films.