It seems so. We shall find out by next week.

Excited to bring my podcast back next week. Really missed doing them. Posting 2 pods each day on 10/1 and 10/2. Details to come soon.

— Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) September 22, 2015

I beat Sal 7-6 (3 ties). Up 2-1 for the season. Excited for next week (Thurs. 10/1) when we get to Guess the Lines as a podcast again.

A photo posted by Bill Simmons (@sptguy33) on Sep 22, 2015 at 1:58pm PDT

Listening to the first Simmons podcast with Cousin Sal now. Already a small shot at Chris Berman at the 2 minute mark.

If you can handle the extreme Patriot fanboyism, Bill is actually fairly entertaining and I'm glad he's back on podcasts. Releasing him from the ESPN "shackles" should also make for some interesting comments this fall.

Yes the guess the lines podcast is probably my favorite sports podcast. I also enjoy most of his non-NBA stuff.

I would add his over the top defense of Tony Kornheiser/MNF to his negatives. I love him on PTI but his Monday Night Football announcing was disastrous and cringe worthy. Are most things at ESPN likely influenced by company politics? Absolutely. Was him being let go of Monday Night Football? Highly unlikely, he just sucked in that format.

Jason Whitlock lashes out over his end days at ESPN - The Washington Post

Missouri folks: I vaguely remember the first Explanation. Was this when he killed Joe Posnanski and other writers at the KC Star?

The Simmons-Whitlock podcast will be awesome.

ESPN is certainly shedding some talent lately. Cowherd, Simmons, Whitlock, Olbermann, the men in blazers (soccer guys from grantland now with NBC) and even Wesley Morris announced he is leaving Grantland for the NY Times. Having Simmons and Whitlock specifically off their ESPN shackles should make for some interesting water cooler talk over the next few months.

Men in Blazers is just the best.

Seems like more is coming out on Grantland and people leaving. According to SI, Sean Fennessey, Juliet Litman, Mallory Rubin and Chris Ryan are leaving Grantland to join up with Simmons in some capacity:

How local MLB announcers handle the national spotlight - More Sports - SI.com

Also, it appears Dan Fierman (senior Grantland Exec) has left Grantland as well. Here's how SI is reporting it:
This is kind of a shame as I enjoyed Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald's podcast together - I hope they don't end up being split up. Whatever the result, it appears even more talent is leaving Grantland and I am not sure what ESPN does with it. It looks and smells like a sinking ship and I can't see too many established guys joining up at this point to replace the guys lost.

RIP Food News. :(

There ought to be a 30 for 30 on the rise and fall of Grantland just to create an ironic coda.

Alright, so I've totally missed this whole Grantland thing. Can anyone give me the TL;DR version?

Basically Simmons claimed ESPN wasn't doing enough to promote the site, somewhere along the line they suspended him as he was entering the last year of the contract. He wasn't fined immediately, ESPN did decide to dock him pay right before xmas. Then eventually they announced he wouldn't be offered a new deal, and he left. Now other people are following course.

and the TL:DR to all of it is that Grantland is not that popular apparently.

I really like Mayes, Barnwell, and Lowe. It will be a shame if there isn't enough of a market for those guys for them to remain on the ESPN platform.

Seems like ESPN might be trying to wind down its "smart talk" guys.

Simmons...

Love his sense of humor and the guess the lines podcast but man on man is he not only a huge homer that won't get over the Brady thing but his vitriol aimed at ESPN is insane. How exactly does he think he got his exposure? Why was he able to rub elbows with all these athletes? Definitely a case of both sides thinking they are more important than they really are.

I get Simmons' complaints about publicizing the site but from what others have written, Grantland staff and writers were paid well above industry norms and had large travel/expense budgets. I'm guessing ESPN quickly realized that they weren't going to generate the type of traffic to warrant all the overhead and they threw in the towel pretty early.

I think combining sports and pop culture makes plenty of sense but in hindsight, maybe they should have gone with either the smart writers on their own (or combined them with Silver's site) or taken a more traditional, but fun sports writing approach still mixed with pop culture. Basically a staff of mini-Simmonses. He loved guys like Barnwell, Lowe and Keri but none of them wrote anything like him.

I think that Simmons would easily be one of the most annoying and insufferable celebrities to know in real life. Love his stuff with Klosterman. Love guess the lines. But you would think after 15 or so years, he would not need to keep pointing out that he hangs out with famous people.

And the Brady stuff has gotten almost weird. Of course Simmons is a homer; that's always been part of his package. But at some point over the last few months, Brady became the greatest QB of all time, and a federal judge saying that the NFL did not follow the CBA guidelines in imposing punishment meant that all of the substantive findings regarding the deflation had been invalidated.

Personally, I am of the I-wouldn't-trust-the-NFL-to-say-if-water-is-wet camp, so I have no idea what really happened with the balls. But it has gotten to the point where I hope that tomorrow some undisputed smoking gun comes out proving that Brady deflated balls while taking steroids and paying off refs, just so that Simmons will stop talking about him.

In order to enjoy Simmons, you have to get past the New England homer-ism. I've been able to do that, so I enjoy most of his stuff now. I like their sports coverage and enjoy reading/listening to Mays, Barnwell, Lowe and Jonah. I've also enjoyed Greenwald and Ryan on TV/pop culture. I think their problem is they tried to do too much with established people. Bringing in guys like Wesley Morris (who I enjoy), Connelly, Klosterman (also enjoy), Alex Pappademas and a few other well established guys who ended up being 3rd/4th in the pecking order for their area seemed a little wasteful. Bring in a few stars (Greenwald, Simmons, Jonah Keri, Jalen Rose) to give credibility - but then fill the rest in with young, somewhat unestablished talent like Rembert, Barnwell, Lowe, and Mays to do the heaving lifting. They signed too many high-priced guys to come off the bench and gave everyone the site too much of a budget (while not fully marketing it).

It's a shame this site will probably end up failing over the next two years given the quality it provided at its apex. Hopefully Simmons can restart it with a better vision and somewhat leaner staff/budget.

I'm with you there...a couple years back I just learned to enjoy and laugh at all his annoying things. It's all entertainment.

I definitely enjoy him. The guess the lines is must listen to radio for me every week. His suspension really left a void last year and the beginning of this year. I just think the ESPN "corporate monster" angle is pretty tired already and is only going to get worse. Berman held people down, I get it. My guess is Simmons is unaware but likely played politics and screwed some people over as well.

Yeah, I do agree that it's hard for Simmons to play the "disenfranchised little guy" angle here. They help build him into a media mogul and decided to bail when he was getting too big/expensive. The landscape is littered with guys like that (Howard Stern, Dan Patrick, Glenn Beck, and even Cowherd is close to that situation). It happens, get over it. He will land on his feet, make a ton of money and have a new challenge now - which is often what the big names constantly say they want.

I think the truth of the situation is part of his shtick is to rip other commentators/sports people. And, for 10 years, he had to hold his tongue on all the ESPN guys. Now that restriction has been lifted and its open season on ESPN talent from his perspective. I don't see him being too hard on the powers that be at ESPN as time passes, but I can see a lot of shots coming the way of Berman, Mike and Mike, the first take guys and so forth.

There's a certain irony about this old Grantland piece I think

The Greatest Paper That Ever Died «

Wow, that is a great find and very appropriate.

really miss The National

Yep. Remembered reading that, which is what inspired my thinking about the irony of doing a 30 for 30 about Grantland as an epilogue of its own creator's relationship with the media giant that gave him all the resources to not only have his own column, but a team of columnists under his banner and a documentary series that he helped produce.

That national piece was my first thought as well but I was too lazy to dig it up

ESPN to Lay Off 300 Workers, Reacting to Shifts in Sports Viewing

ESPN plans to lay off about 300 employees as it reacts to the shifting ways that sports are consumed and as it devises new ways to market and distribute its vast array of sports programming.

“The demand for sports remains undiminished,” John Skipper, ESPN’s president, wrote in a letter to employees on Wednesday, “though the landscape we operate in has never been more complex.” He added, “No matter how many times we’ve adjusted course to lead the industry over the years, the decisions affecting our employees are never made lightly.”

I assume it won't be any of the blowhard idiots they have in front of the camera *cough* Stephen A Smith *cough* that make ESPN largely unwatchable

If he wasn't in front of a camera bringing us the hottest takes every day, the NBA would cease to exist, didn't you hear? :banghead:

USA Today columnist says hi :)
Stop complaining about Stephen A. Smith, Skip Bayless and ‘First Take’ | For The Win


*only shared that 'cause that column actually appeared yesterday afternoon, hours apart from your comment.

They should start by firing whoever was involved in designing and approving the new website layout. 2nd worst redesign of the year after the Clippers logo.

Amen to that.

Don't get me started haha.

Hopefully Maple Leafs isn't one of the people who loses their job.

I'm usually pretty forgiving when it comes to website re-designs, but the new ESPN one is really awful. It just made everything harder to find and more unwieldy. It sucks.

Other than live sports - college football and MNF - or when I'm at the gym or a hotel, I never watch ESPN. Then again, I don't watch Fox Sports One either. If anything, for sports news and/or highlights, I may watch the NHL Network, but that's pretty much it.

I still miss NFL Primetime.

I don't think I've watched more than a minute of first take in my life, but when Stephen A. Smith is the second item on sportscenter talking about how he is more important for the game than Kevin Durant and how Durant should be worshipping the ground he walks on, I think I'm perfectly justified in wanting him to go die in a fire

I thought it was just me when it comes to FOX Sports One. I have tried to watch their sports highlight shows a few times and it is just horrible IMO.

I assume you read the story going around about how they rushed it and farmed it out to the Heat? Some of those fan ones were actually really cool too - save your million and just buy the design of the 2-3 best for 100k then touch them up a little.

Maybe it's my adblocker settings but the absolute worst part of the ESPN redesign is that top bar. If I try to read an article and hot spacebar for page down I have to scroll back up 2 lines that get blocked out by the dumb bar.

I think that might be the reason I still go to Grantland first, even as it does become more pop culture centric than I'd prefer. That layout is just so clean and easy to read whether on a computer or a phone.

So it seems like Grantland's YoutTube channel's content is all gone. I don't know what ESPN is doing, but I only really visit the Grantland site and enjoyed at least some of the YouTube vids. I rarely go on ESPN.com, especially since it seems like all my fantasy sports leagues have moved to Yahoo and other sites.

Does it make any sense to anyone here why they would delete all content on their YouTube channel??

Seems like, for whatever reason, they are killing Grantland. Barnwell and Mayes have not had their podcast for a week and a half now. Apparently the Youtube content is now gone. Death by 1,000 cuts.

My guess is that there are high-up people at ESPN who have never liked Grantland, and now they have the power to pull the plug. My uninformed guess is that most of the staff will be let go, and the ones who remain will be folded into 538 and other ESPN properties.

Can't remember where I saw it, but supposedly the Grantland / YouTube stuff has something to do with YouTube Red, not the immediate death of Grantland.

ESPN had YouTube channels?

(No, I'm not being purely sarcastic. I had no idea such a thing existed, Grantland or otherwise)

Looks like they are targeting 6-figure earning producers/editors/behind the scenes people. The "on-air talent" has contracts so they can't be laid off.

http://thebiglead.com/2015/10/20/esp...igure-earners/

The Richard Deitsch SI Media Podcast with Jim Miller is pretty informative on the Grantland/ESPN issues. Interesting listen.

:+1:

I love Simmons because his approach is so different from the everyday mundane content most sports media gives us.

His Boston homerism doesn't bother me either, because essentially we are all homers for our teams. I am a SF guy, but I get him being so myopic about his teams because I am about mine.

I think his podcasts are usually entertaining, but it was his columns I liked best. I never really thought his TV work was that good because his style didn't fit the give us a 30 second "take" that the medium required. He was much better in a 10,000 word column.

I also thought Grantland was outstanding and I give Simmons a lot of credit for introducing me to alot of people I follow now like Chuck Klosterman, Zach Lowe and Jalen Rose.

as for ESPN in general it went from a daily need to something I avoid for the most part. I am a huge fan of Dan Patrick, I loved the new Keith Olberman show and I thought most of what grantland did was excellent despise the running into the ground every Farve, Teebow, Manziel... story. ESPN has just turned into TMZ Sports at this point.

Mostly video podcasts.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/23/espn-...e-service.html

First I've heard of YouTube Red.

Well here's a nice Friday news dump from ESPN oh by the way Grantland is dead. ESPN Statement Regarding Grantland

All @Grantland33 writers will have their contracts honored; intent is to use sports writers on other @espn platforms.

— James Andrew Miller (@JimMiller) October 30, 2015

The last article was posted an hour ago. Did they not bother to tell anyone there before then?

He makes it sound like they are fulfilling their legally binding contractual obligations out of the goodness of their hearts.

Fuck ESPN. What a fucking clown show. Way to reward horseshit idiots like Bayless and SAS and snuff out the good stuff about your stupid brand.

No, this was a "people found out via Twitter" kind of deal.


Six months was the answer there.

"Look, guys, this is a business. And our business is miserable idiots trolling people with hot takes they don't even believe." - ESPN

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) October 30, 2015

I loved everyone I worked with at G and loved what we built. Watching good/kind/talented people get treated so callously = simply appalling.

— Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) October 30, 2015

"Hey, sorry about Grantland. But coming up next: The Fanduel/DraftKings Shouting Hour," where 8 doughy men shout about YOUR tweets!" - ESPN

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) October 30, 2015

Well, I haven't really gone voluntarily to ESPN for a year or two now. But have been going regularly to Grantland. I liked the columns and would have the podcasts blaring while doing stuff around the home.

Are there any decent sports podcasts elsewhere, other than The Bill Simmons Podcast and The Starters (on NBA.com)?

Sorry to Maple Leafs but I'm sure he'll end up somewhere very good once his deal is up.

Yeah, I'm more sad that the podcasts are/will be gone. Mays/Barnwell and Ryan/Greenwald have been missed.

It's more that I'm going to miss having so many good writers no longer being in one place. Having to track them down is more effort than I'm really willing to put in at this point in my life.

Nate Duncan and Danny LeRoux have my favorite basketball podcasts but they get more in-depth and nerdy than Simmons or even Zach Lowe. Here is an archive of Duncan's podcast and a good starting point would be to check the season preview of your favorite team; he recorded 30 of them with different writers associated with each team.

from the LA Times

Unless I'm misremembering things, uh, The National it wasn't.

Honestly, the stuff worth keeping really can be folded into the other properties pretty seemlessly ... IF there's a market for it. Having a separate brand for it at this point doesn't make a whole lot of sense that I can see.

Like I said, couldn't care less about the brand, just want to be able to read clean articles. I think Zach Lowe and Sean McIndoe are the only two I'd fight through the regular ESPN interface to read.

Btw, it is a little weird that there's no link to the press release on Grantland's front page. If you just go straight to grantland.com you really would have no idea this happened.

Cool, was looking for something like that. I'll check it out.

Gonna miss reading McIndoe, Rembert Browne, and Lowe. They must have known this was coming a bit before this morning though, right? The Rembert Explains article from the 28th states it is his last one, which had me wondering if he was leaving, but they must have known.

Rembert was already planning to leave.

Today was Rembert's last day. It's somewhat funny, on twitter you can see Grantland people tweeting about his last day, then maybe 20 minutes later, tweeting about Grantland shutting down.

The sad thing is, ESPN's handling of this will in no way negatively impact their brand in any measurable way.

I enjoyed Grantland as much as the next person, but people are already laying on the hyperbole in remembering the site. There was plenty of good to great stuff on Grantland. There were also Reality TV leagues and Carles.

Yes. The great stuff was great. But not all the stuff was great. Or even good.

It was a nice change of pace from the Stephen A/Bayless/Jemele Hill/Lebatard "gotcha/hot take" programming we normally see from the site. I think it's funny that Jalen and Jacoby were the only real acts from grantland to be formally endorsed/supported, as they were the thing on Grantland most like the tripe normally found on ESPN.

I hope guys like Lowe, Keri and Barnwell go off to other sites - as trying to track them down on ESPN's crap website will be quite the chore. The men in blazer's left and I watch/listen to them more than I did on Grantland. I don't think any of these guys leaving will impact my ability to read/listen to them.

Hey guys...

I fell behind on this thread. Anything new? We're still talking about sideline reporters, right?

{hug}

I wasn't even aware of the tie with ESPN lol. I have "liked" like a half-dozen things on Facebook and Grantland was one of them, so I would read a couple of articles on it daily at work. Really enjoyed it, so naturally ESPN would fuck it up.

The problem I have with espn.com since the redesign is that they're folding everything I found interesting into other properties. This means I have to search to find the stuff that was a click or 2 away. Every single item on the website that I've read regularly for the past couple of years takes more clicks to find than it did in the past. That's an issue that will eventually drive me away from the site.

Thanks!

I hope these guys don't wind up behind the insider paywall at espn. I'd miss Lowe, Mapleleafs, Barnwell/Mays and Keri.

Lunch sucks without Grantland :(

I know what you mean. It was so nice to have one site where I could access a bunch of good sports columns. I'm sure these guys will all work in the near future again, but it'll be split up among 10 sites and I may not end up reading some of them because I'll just forget. It was nice to be able to go to grantland.com and click on all the various podcasts as well.

Deleted the bookmark from my browser today. Sad feeling.

Yeah. It's weird, the last couple of days I just click on ESPN from my bookmarks by instinct more than anything, scroll down looking for Grantland, remember it's gone, and then move on to another site.

Are there any other sports websites you guys enjoy reading? I used to really like SI but once Peter King got his own site and they had the redesign I've found their writing to be a bit of a tire fire.

Also great tip with the Dunc'd on podcast, I'm working through the team previews and it's just the type of analysis I like to here.

Can't remember the last time I went to the main page of a sports site. I just go directly to articles from Twitter or links on boards like this one.

I don't read a lot of long-form sports columns, so I use the sports websites for quick work-break checks on scores, standings, what games are coming up this weekend, bullet-point breakdowns of playoff races and trade rumors and free agents, etc. ESPN still seems to be the best for that purpose, but they're all pretty similar. But, I don't have the same eye for poor web design most others here probably have. I can get what I'm looking for at ESPN and that's enough.

And simply to prove that we still exist, I'm more in the line of Molson. I check primary sites 2-3 times during the day, accounts for at least 95% of my sports-related web activity.

My biggest beef with ESPN is that it insists on throwing the most garbage mobile player cards. They have virtually no stats or info for the player.

The Detroit Lions have been broadcasting their games on the radio on the local FM sports channel, 97.1, for over a decade now.

They recently announced that next year they are switching stations and moving to an AM channel.

It turns out the reason the Lions are making the move is because they demanded that one of the sports talk radio personalities, Mike Valenti, be fired because he's wildly critical of the team. Valenti is part of the afternoon drive talk show and is pretty much the most popular sports radio guy in Metro Detroit. Some people hate him, but it's a pretty popular show.

It's really embarrassing and shameful. The Lions are such a stupid organization. If you don't want to be criticized so badly, stop sucking. In the last 58 years, it's been one playoff win and a great big bag of dicks.

Isn't that the AGAIN guy?

Some of the clips are still broken, but we just went ahead and published. People in Bristol are working on it, I'm told.

— Zach Lowe (@ZachLowe_NBA) December 8, 2015

Yes!

Huh.

i like that

Sports media in one screenshot:



From [UPDATE: Silver didn’t say this] Adam Silver to North Carolina: Repeal law within 30 days or lose Charlotte All-Star game – ProBasketballTalk

re: that last version of the link


Which, for some reason, made me LOL

And while not entirely a sports media indictment, this seems to fit somewhere in the story. That hoax story about Silver's alleged threat?

It prompted this response
Atlanta City Council makes pitch for 2017 NBA All-Star Game | 11alive.com

edit to add: Point being, I guess, is that if we're electing officials who can't tell the difference (or can't be bothered to verify information) between real & fake, maybe the problem isn't the media but rather the audience.

Uh... the Atlanta City Council made their pitch for the game before any fake news story about Silver's comments arose.

I thought (think actually) the two were in very close proximity.

I find articles citing Silver (allegedly) threatening Charlotte as far back as March 25th.

The Atlanta city council pulled their little grandstand ploy back on March 30th


Is the distinction here -- which I missed if so -- that the initial reports about Silver's threats didn't include an apparently phony quote?

What Atlanta cited is something the NBA actually did say. The fake quote part was the "You have 30 days to repeal the law" aspect. So the officials of the City of Atlanta actually did use the real information. So no indictment of audience is warranted by this example.

A reporter got what was coming to him after he asked an insensitive question to Draymond Green.