If FOX will still take him.

I seriously doubt FOX kills this deal.

I generally understand why radio folks that I don't personally like are successful, but I have never understood how Cowherd has a career. He must have a huge audience of people that tolerate him because they can't find anything better.

Beaumonty Jones is my new fave. I started calling my youngest daughter Beaumonty because we were coming home from basketball practice while he is on. She wasn't impressed.

Cowherd tends to be upfront and honest. He is basically a sports shock jock, and he generally does not care if some people get upset because of it. He has definitive opinions that might go against commonly held beliefs but he can clearly explain why he believes what he does. He is also not afraid to admit when he was wrong about something. These are traits that many people love for radio.

It would rather kill its deal with Cowherd than mess up the one they have with MLB.

I think you are overestimating the value that MLB places on the feelings of those that might be offended. I could be 100% wrong on this one but I feel in circumstances like this, MLB believes this too shall pass.

Tarcone, it's Bomani.

@ $36/month? Hell no.

That price point makes little sense considering you can get all of the ESPNs and more for $25 a month on Sling TV.

They'll probably pull themselves out of the Sling deal first, which they can do if they lose a certain # of subscribers.

+1

I dont believe CC even believes half the shit he says. I think he takes the worst of Stern, and mixes it with the worst of Rome (I happen to really like both) and produces the worst show on radio. I actually bought Sirius JUST because of Cowherd. I like to listen to sports in the car on OTA I have no other options during his time slot, so I bought Sirius exclusively to have an option.

Dola - I'd gladly pay $10/month or so for ESPN but not much more.

I might be in the minority, but any TV service without DVR is a no-go for me. I don't want to go back to a world of sports programming altering my life plans. I wouldn't pay $36/month for ESPN all year, but if it was the entire ESPN family with ESPN3 and everything else, I might go close to that for college football and basketball seasons. Then just about the only thing I'd miss about cable/satellite is UFC on Fox Sports 1.

Pity the shark didn't bite Grantland in the ass as it jumped over.

When you reach the point of posting articles about Drake & some dude that has presumably even less talent since I've literally never heard his fucking name before, the shark has been vaulted.

Good idea for a site, the direction has ultimately failed to the point where I simply not only can't abide seeing their crap anymore but to where I actively hope whomever thought that worthless bullshit warranted space dies in a fucking fire.

I'm gonna call that last sentence a bit of an overreaction.

FWIW it was the #1 trending item on Twitter in the US today.

I'll grant that it would have stood better with a clarification, along the lines of "whomever thought it belonged on what was supposed to be a sports site ..."


Speaks volumes about the incredibly limited value of Twitter for anyone with a f'n brain. It's not entirely useless but a large portion of its user base apparently is.

It's supposed to be a "Sports and Pop Culture site"...says it right in the header.

Well that's a mix that ain't worth a tinker's dam.

It sucks on radio when I've heard it tried, sucks even harder to have some pretty good sports content buried with utter garbage articles.

Seems like a strange thing to be upset by. Grantland has ALWAYS done pop culture articles.

Yeah. I go to the site more often for the pop culture articles than the sports. Sportswise, I always read Maple Leafs' and Bill Barnwell's stuff, but other than that...

Especially when there's SO much going on in the sporting world this time of year that should be covered instead. Baseball playoffs are only two months away, football teams might start practicing sometime soon, basketball teams are only a couple months away from starting practice, people are probably golfing in golf events. Where is the coverage?!

Honestly, I could let ESPN go, as long as I can have the BTN.

Good job, Kodos! You've finally found the silver lining to being an University of Indiana football fan.

It's Indiana University, sir. ;)

Also, you're still looking for that Silver lining in Detroit, I imagine.

Disney stock hit by ESPN fears - Aug. 5, 2015

I've known it's been around, I've rarely seen it. Suddenly every "push" I get from them on social media is stuff that I have exactly zero interest in (and that's being generous), rarely a sports related article directed to my attention for the past several weeks.

That has almost surely colored my perception of what they're doing and in what ratio. And perception is an enormous driver for virtually all media, they may not have changed one single thing but my perception of them has gone from probably 70% positive to probably 90% negative in a matter of weeks.

Well then stop caring what they do on social media and use this - The Triangle « - as your link to it. (Although they do some good features too.) I mean I agree it's gotten a little more pop culture than I'd like (hate on Simmons all you want, but back when he wrote he certainly put out sports-related articles that were worth reading), but they do a very good job delineating Sports/Pop Culture. Especially compared to, say, ESPN.com, which I've been back to maybe like 3 times since the redesign.

(Seriously, for anyone who doesn't have it or something similar, I can't recommend TheScore app highly enough. It legitimately just gives scores, and standings, and stats.)

I'm not sure if there's been anything else where I would love to be able to press the fast forward button and see how things shake out 5-10 years down the road than everything related to bundling and sports.

This is quickly becoming one of my all-time favorite FOFC posts.

So social media has colored your perception of the site? Seriously, that's pretty lame dude.

I'm interested too. Seems like a model that can't continue to sustain itself like this with more and more cutting the cord. I'm also interested to see how this impacts TV contracts in the future. Will they actually start clawing back in the other direction?

Bear in mind here, it's their social media I'm referring to, not random social media or something. They choose what they hype to their FB followers, what they consider important enough to try to ensure that I'm aware of.

The number of times I've ever organically visited Grantland in its entire existence is almost certainly single-digits. That's not a site -- nor are 99.99% of sites -- that I sit around and think "oh, let's go see what's there today".

I hit my aggregator site/browser home page, FB, two newspapers, one sports site, this musty joint and on most days 1-2 music sites of my own accord. Oh and I guess Google counts there since it gets hit when I'm in search of something specific, which is multiple times a day. Virtually everything else comes from some prompt. Either a social media prompt/hype/link from a site's own doing or something that's been shared by a friend/acquaintance that catches my attention enough to look closer.

One of the older tendencies I'm aware of with mass media is that consumers perception of you is exponentially affected by what you promote. The classic example that was used to teach the importance of promotion & positioning (what is usually called "branding" now) was the radio station that got low marks from listeners as a source for traffic & weather over several years despite being #1 for news. They shot to the #1 unaided recall position within 3 months by making one & only one change to their traffic & weather coverage: 5-10 times an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week they hyped themselves as having "traffic & weather together on the 5s". Their coverage didn't change one iota, the only change they made was that they emphasized the amount of coverage they did. Suddenly, the listeners considered them THE go-to source for traffic & weather in the market. THAT is the power of promotion/branding, say what's important to you & people will generally believe it's important to you.

That same phenomena has worked in reverse with me & Grantland. They may have changed absolutely nothing except what they promote within my line of sight ... and in doing so they've made a rapid shift in how I perceive them overall.

A reality show featuring JimInGA searching the Internet is something I would support.

Hence why I called it lame. If the content is the same, what part of that content they choose to focus on in promotion should be irrelevant for current consumers of the product.

So if (tries to find example) AMC aired The Walking Dead one hour a week but hyped a 23/7 block of "All Kardashians All The Time" to fans of TWD you don't find it reasonable those TWD fan perceptions of the network would be influenced by that?

No, they shouldn't. That's just silly. Does it reduce the amount of time they air TWD? And let's be honest, your view is far more analagous to people deciding not to watch TWD because of Kardashian promotions, for a one hour Kardashian show.

I mean the fact that Fox runs a traitor news network doesn't have any impact on my watching television shows on their broadcast network. :p

Noooooo, if there's something decent at Grantland then I'll still consider looking if it comes to mind. Same as I'd watch TWD while thinking the Kardashian channel was utter shite overall and that those responsible for making it shite should be boiled in oil. A preferable situation would be if the decent content were somewhere that wasn't cluttered by utter garbage and I'm rarely to not at least acknowledge that a better option exists. Not expecting it to occur doesn't discount the option of at least wishing it did.

How bout this ... how bout we just agree that at least ONE of us has a very fucked up way at looking at things? :)

They shouldn't, and its silly, but Breaking Bad fans lost their fucking minds at the overpromotion of Low Winter Sun (especially when Low Winter Sun turned out to be a not so good show) during Breaking Bad. It was... ridiculous, but the hate was pretty widespread.

Indeed. And like you said, it was ridiculous. And quite a lame reaction.

Well that's putting it mildly ;)

Just for the record, there has been no change at all in what Grantland pushes on social media. Everything goes out on Twitter; most (but not all) things go out on Facebook.

Remember, you don't see everything a site pushes to Facebook. There's an algorithm, largely random, that only shows you a small slice of what's posted. It sounds like you've had some bad luck in terms of what's wound up in your feed vs. what you'd prefer to see. That's all that's going on here.

Yes, I'm very familiar with the algorithm.

Just looked at the FB page itself, of posts timestamped as the past 24 hours, it's 9 sports & 7 non. Of those, my feed got hit with 0/3.

Of those tagged by FB as "yesterday", it's 6 sports/7 non (including several nons that repeated themselves in the past 24 hours). I believe I got 0/2 of those.

All told, it's virtually 50/50 for the past two days ... that's just a site killer for me when the closest thing to even barely passing interest of the 14 non-sports items is a Meryl Streep movie I give zero fucks about.

{shrug} I'm not the target, so I'll move on.

It's not really random. They throttle it until companies pay. It's a weird strategy in my opinion.

Switch to Twitter where there currently isn't weird walls blocking you from getting news you want pushed to you.

Well, yes, there's the shakedown model too. (One that Twitter desperately wants to move towards.)

See? Isn't that easier than railing against the stupidity of a change that didn't actually happen?

Umm .. what changed is my perception, based on what is put in front of me voluntarily by the g.d. site. Perception IS reality, like it or not. You can defend it {shrug}, I can hope those responsible for writing garbage articles about garbage performers like f'n Drake diaf. {shrug}

It should have been -- and could have been -- a topnotch sports site. Instead, it opted to pander to the lowest common denominator, same as TMZ.

Like I said, you can defend 'em,well within your rights ... I have the same right to say fuck 'em.

Is it any wonder the Thrashers left Atlanta? :D

Well, there really isn't much in sports uglier than bad hockey.
:D