Bill Simmons rips Mike and Mike, ESPN for being ‘in the bag for the NFL’

Bill Simmons released the first installment of his new self-titled podcast “The Bill Simmons Podcast” on Thursday, and he wasted no time taking aim at his former employer.

In the second part of a two-part episode launch, Simmons went after ESPN and ESPN radio hosts Mike Golic and Mike Greenberg for their handling of the coverage surrounding Deflategate.

“I thought it was hilarious when [NFL Commissioner] Roger [Goodell] finally decided to give his interview and it was with Mike and Mike,” Simmons said, as transcribed by Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated.

Simmons and his cohost and longtime buddy John O’Connell mocked the interview, with O’Connell sarcastically calling it “hard-hitting” and Simmons saying Goodell knew to “buckle up and put some shoulder pads on” for the appearance. Simmons also taunted Golic’s interviewing style. From there, the discussion moved to the World Wide Leader’s seemingly slanted coverage.

“Granted, I’m a little biased here from what my experiences were the last two years at ESPN,” Simmons said. “The way everyone else was covering Goodell’s role in this whole story versus the way ESPN covered it, it was embarrassing. I couldn’t believe nobody called out ESPN about it because you had Dan Wetzel at Yahoo, you had Sally Jenkins at the Washington Post, you had all the people in Boston, you had different radio personalities, and people really going after how the NFL was handling this, how Goodell was handling this, all this stuff. And especially in the weeks after the broken cell phone thing, when it came out that they had obviously leaked stuff, that something really legitimately shady was going on, and yet if you went to ESPN you didn’t see anything.

“Charlie Pierce on Grantland was the only person who went after them. They didn’t really do anything until that giant Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham’s Outside The Lines investigation. It’s hard to come away from that and not think that ESPN is in the bag for the NFL—because they were.”

You could argue that the Outside the Lines report made the NFL look bad by uncovering the league’s mishandling of Spygate. It also tossed out a few tidbits that attempted to make the Patriots look bad all over again. Perhaps the most embarrassing thing that happened in the wake of the OTL report was ESPN conveniently editing a reaction piece to it that one of their own writers had put together.

Simmons had a well-publicized breakup with ESPN earlier this year, and you know he is going to take as many shots at his former employer as possible now that he has the freedom to do so. Thursday was probably just the start.