Bill Simmons rolled out the first several episodes of his new podcast this week, and those who have wanted to hear his take on what went wrong with ESPN have not been disappointed.
Simmons has already spent a significant amount of time bashing his former employer on “The Bill Simmons Podcast.” In Friday’s edition, he ripped ESPN management for doing hardly anything to help Grantland succeed.
“Websites are like plants,” Simmons said, as transcribed by Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated. “You have to water them. Unfortunately, ESPN is good at building stuff and creating stuff, launching stuff and building stuff. But there comes a point where you have to decide what does this mean, how can we get from Point A to Point B to Point C to Point D to Point E.
“My biggest issue behind the scenes the last two years was like ‘Help me, help us.’ We were not even on their mobile page until I think January. We just had this tiny little hyperlink at the bottom of the ESPN Mobile site. You can say they supported with salaries and bandwidth and all of that stuff and that’s fine but there is more that goes into it.”
Simmons added that the people working on Grantland felt certain people at ESPN were “not trying to make us succeed, which is a weird feeling when everyone is busting their ass.” Things clearly got worse after Simmons was suspended a year ago for making these comments about Roger Goodell. He then angered his bosses by appearing on “The Dan Patrick Show,” where ESPN personalities are forbidden from going on-air as guests.
Simmons says it got to the point where it was obvious ESPN was trying to make him look bad.
“There were 20 F-U’s,” he said. “They knew I was not coming back. He’s not coming back and we have to position this that when it all hits a head, we can blame Grantland, [the site] did not get enough traffic, he was difficult, and all the s— that wasn’t true. Part of the reason we didn’t get traffic was that they didn’t promote the site.
“I remember the first week of May I sent an email to all the higher-ups. I said, ‘You guys realize you only led ESPN.com with Grantland once in April? Literally once. Do you care or not?’ We have no mobile presence at all, we don’t have an app, 46% of our traffic is coming through our main page which is absurd for a website. We are getting no help from other parts of the company. People seem to think ESPN was so helpful for us, and it was actually the opposite. Anyone else would have been helpful. And we had great writers. That’s what killed me.”
Simmons is doing his own thing now with his podcast and will soon be doing work for HBO. If you look at some of the stuff he has already said about his former bosses (and don’t forget his criticism of Mike and Mike), it’s clear there is going to be no shortage of ESPN bashing.
