(10-30-2015 04:39 PM)NittanyLion Wrote: (10-30-2015 04:21 PM)Wedge Wrote: Simmons will never admit he has any responsibility for the demise of Grantland, but Grantland is gone because he wasn't there to fight for it, and the reason he isn't there anymore is that his extreme Boston homerism blinded him to the fact that he was being paid $5 million/year by a giant corporation that didn't want him to repeatedly take pot shots at one of its most important business partners.
There are a few articles out there this afternoon that Simmons "fought dirty" against ESPN over the course of the last 6 months.
Stuff like (1) telling the Grantland editors that jumped ship to Simmons' new HBO venture that "a condition of their new employment" was that they couldn't warn anyone at ESPN that they were leaving, and (2) feeding Jim Miller over at Vanity Fair a bunch of information for articles Miller was writing.
Yes, John Skipper may have screwed Simmons a bit at ESPN. But no, I can't support some of what Simmons has allegedly done since then. You gotta rise above it. There's A LOT of collateral damage that has resulted (all the writers at Grantland), and part of their blood is on Simmons' hands.
I tend to side HEAVILY with Bill Simmons on these points. Editors are at-will employees (unlike the writers that are typically under fixed term contracts), so it's quite hypocritical for ESPN to complain about not getting notice about those editors leaving when ESPN can fire those editors immediately without notice. At the same time, most of us here are likely at-will employees, too - when you have switched jobs, how many of you warned your old employer that you were looking for a new job before you served notice that you were leaving? Likely none of you if you were thinking straight (because your old employer almost assuredly would have just fired you on the spot).
The fact that Simmons is a Boston homer (no question) is largely irrelevant to the overall quality of Grantland (which was extremely high). At the end of the day, he turned out to be an incredible judge of writing talent. Zach Lowe and Bill Barnwell are the two smartest writers on the NBA and NFL, respectively, anywhere in the media. Andy Greenwald was brilliant writing about TV on the pop culture side. There were several other writers that he brought up from nowhere that have since been poached by major entities like the New York Times and the New Yorker.
The writing of Simmons has declined over the years, although his podcasts have been fairly good overall. At the same time, ESPN firing him because of his comments about Roger Goodell ought to infuriate all of us. Guys like Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless can take potshots at players and everyone else in the entire business, yet we find out that the one untouchable holy person at ESPN is the NFL Commissioner. Think about it: ESPN was willing to fire its clear #1 draw on the Internet and the creator of "30 for 30" because the target was Goodell despite the fact that what Simmons said about Goodell wasn't 1/10th as insulting as what Bayless spews daily on First Take. Yes, the NFL is a business partner, but the role of Simmons was as a commentator... and then ESPN essentially told him to not be a commentator when it came to the leadership of the NFL. I'm sorry - that's an absolutely awful stance by ESPN. Note that this standard has never been applied to any of ESPN's other business partners. Bud Selig and David Stern got hammered all of the time by ESPN pundits and even Simmons himself without a peep. Yet, Roger Goodell ended up being the protected one. I can't stand the Patriots, but Goodell and the NFL *absolutely* should be slammed for how they have handled everything. The fact that ESPN has basically said that Goodell is off-limits for pundits destroys any hint of objectivity that they might have had left.
Anyway, it's pretty amazing that there are actually people on this board that never heard of Grantland. I guess that points to why it ended up getting shut down, but it's a shame. Grantland was, BY FAR, the best writing that ESPN has done over the past several years (and it was largely because it was run as a completely separate editorial unit from the rest of ESPN without its branding). It had great writing on the mix of sports and pop culture and was geared toward smart and educated readers that wanted long-form analysis and reporting. This was where I could both read technical breakdowns of advanced metrics on basketball and baseball along with items like an oral history of the production of "Swingers" or why "Closing Time" became such a popular song for those that grew up in the 1990s. I haven't even gone to the ESPN.com home page over the past couple of years because the Grantland writing was so clearly superior.
Even if people didn't like Grantland as much as I did, what we all should be worried about is that the Internet business model is basically only rewarding the lowest common denominator HOT TAKES and aggregators instead of commitments to quality. There are unfortunately a lot more clicks on the latest Kardashian rumors compared to top tier journalism and writing.
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Latest shoe to drop at ESPN: Grantland gone
