Bill Simmons' deal with ESPN was set to expire this year and I was sort of hoping he would leave and start his own site. I wanted to read him unfiltered, allowed to crush media types without tip-toeing around colleagues at the Worldwide Leader, like he used to do before he made it big and had his own little site. People still would have read him religiously. They still would have downloaded his podcast. They still would have read his books.
(Or maybe I'm just speaking for myself.)
Alas, Simmons is set to sign a new deal with ESPN, per Deadspin. He no doubt will get millions on this deal, which says a lot about how media has transformed in the last decade. Given that in the last year Simmons has continued to bang out funny columns, done about four podcasts a week that in addition to Simmons' friends and ESPN colleagues are now featuring higher profile guests (Jim Nantz, Kevin McHale and David Duchovny are three recent examples and Nantz and McHale were major gets given the way he has joked about Nantz's contrived calls and crushed McHale's pathetic tenure as Timberwolves general manager), wrote a book that rose to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list and came up with the very concept of the widely acclaimed 30 for 30 series, it's probably money well spent.
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