Rick Reilly done writing ESPN column July 1

He'll continue as a presence on their golf coverage, I bet.

 

That's the safest bet ever made.

 

That's a bad typo. It should have said 1999.

 

I thought his contract was up really soon. I can't imagine they keep him, at least not not at $3 mil plus a year.

 

I wasn't going to read Levin's piece but began.

The "copying riffs" graf is good. Unfortunately, the links in the graf don't transfer here in a c-and-p, so ...

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/03/rick_reilly_retires_why_the_espn_columnist_couldn_t_survive_in_the_era_of.html

 

In a word: He lacks their passion.

I bolded the last sentence of the quoted passage because I think it is a cousin of what we were talking about on the Newsweek Bitcoin thread: The demanding modern reader. You can't half-ass it any more. People are just too informed.

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/03/rick_reilly_retires_why_the_espn_columnist_couldn_t_survive_in_the_era_of.html

Whatever you think of Simmons, you can’t doubt his love of sports or sportswriting. Silver’s pieces are full of a different kind of ardor, the obsessive zeal of someone on a quest to right the wrongs of mainstream punditry. Reilly’s columns, by contrast, read like stifled yawns. The columnist has his interests (Elway, Tiger), but he can’t replicate the Sports Guy’s day-to-day investment in who’s going to win the NBA title.

It’s not just that Reilly is out of ideas. It’s that the sands have shifted underneath him over the last three decades. These days, we demand Simmons-grade sports nerdery, and fans catch on if you lack the gene. We don’t want to spend time with someone who just doesn’t care.

 

Eh, more Slate wank-spank.

Fans don't demand "sports nerdery." They demand that a new column be, well, new. Preferably about a new topic, but at the very least using words that have not been strung together in the same way previously. There's a whole ton of writing that doesn't go near Simmons in style or length.

 

i agree that levin is off-point (just based on the quoted portion, havent read the whole thing). i think what happened to reilly is a specific case of someone who used to be top of the heap, and now he isn't, and it's obvious to everyone, and reilly isn't dealing with it well. i don't think it has anything to do with the new media landscape.

 

All kinds of sportswriters have large audiences. Readers want writing on any topic to be entertaining and/or informative, preferably and. There's no one style preferred. IMO every writer eventually runs out of things to say. If Reilly's made that self-perception, more power to him.

 

No, but I do believe they demand more knowledge than the old lazy columnists who refuse to evolve and stick to useless cliches and old time ideologies.

This is not to say they need to agree with new metrics or the way the games are changing but they should have an understanding of these things and be able to present an intelligent counter point other than "nerds and blogs."

 

And I don't even think it's all about metrics. We get bogged down in that sometimes. A columnist could do a damn fine job without more than a passing knowledge of advanced stats.

Does Reilly know which four Western Conference teams are battling for the last three NBA playoff spots? I doubt it. Want to guess if Simmons knows?

Could Reilly name, say, three starters on Wichita State? Could he name their coach? Think Simmons could?

Do you think that Reilly could tell you, a year later, who the Chiefs picked first in last year's NFL Draft? Do you have any doubt that Simmons could?

 

Just using metrics as one example.