Grantland Remember
- Thread starter NorCalVU10
- Start date
Speak for yourself. I thought it was the dumbest site on the Internet.
95% of it was lame, contrived content just for the sake of publishing it.
I hope Bill Simmon's HBO show bombs too.
Such a Shoop hate. Dumbest site on the internet? That would almost be a compliment given whats out there. Site was home to a lot of talented writers.. not everything worked but could always find a good read. I will miss it. Simmons show is something entirely different.. finding good talent seemed to be a strength of his, tv personality he is not so it will depend upon the format.
NickleDimer
Post 'Til Your Fingers Bleed
Agreed here. I visited every once in a while and rarely found anything worth reading. The only 2 articles I can recall enjoying from that site was one about the beginnings of WFAN in New York, and one about the beginnings of using computers to evaluate baseball.
http://grantland.com/features/don-imus-mike-mad-dog-fall-rise-first-all-sports-talk-station-wfan/
http://grantland.com/features/2015-...iello-jack-armbruster-moneyball-sabermetrics/
Everything else was either NBA stuff that I didn't understand, a ham-fisted attempt to integrate the sports and entertainment worlds together in a single article, or total garbage.
Grantland is a perfect example of too much of a good thing. When Simmons first got to ESPN, I thought much of his writing was excellent. I remember he wrote a lenghty column titled "The Atrocious GM Summit" where he mocked all the horrible decisions NBA GM's made with their teams but formulated it as if they had all gotton together to celebrate their incompetance. It was funny, well-researched, and accurate. Brilliant sports writing.
The bigger you get, the more pressure there is to sustain. But you often can't produce the same quality with increased frequency. Greatness doesn't just come shooting out your ass.
I haven't read a single thing Simmons has written in > 5 years. I can't take him anymore. He may have an encyclopedic memory of games he attended as a kid, but so what? We all do. He is a novice when it comes to sports. The guy is like 45 and he's still making snarky, Tina Fey-esque fart jokes on Twitter. For basketball insight, I'd rather read or listen to Brendan Brown (Hubie's son & Knicks radio guy), Brian Windhorst (covers the Cavs) or Zach Lowe.
Simmons is insufferable....but he thinks he's witty and funny and there's nothing worse than someone who made it big, got rich, and now thinks he has the Midas touch. His audiance is the bottom of the barrel (eg, college kids who think they're cooler than they really are).
Right around the time Grantland launched, Amy Winehouse died. I knew very little about other than a) she was a singer from some non-US country, b) she was fuggly, and c) she seemed be a desperate attention seeker with her wild & crazy antics. But almost immediatley, Grantland had a headline up that was titled something like "The Importance of Amy Winehouse's Death" or "Why Amy Winehouse's Death Should Matter to You."
Like a fool, I clicked on it because I assumed (incorrectly as it turned out) that I was missing something about this person. Maybe there was a backstory about her life, her music, etc. So I scrolled throught his endless, 8,000 word essay waiting to find out what her importance was. Nothing. The entire piece was froth.
I got the impression the Grantland offices are full of these millennials who have been self-appointed tas the world's foremost authority on ANYTHING happening in sports or culture. So they just launched, someone who is semi-famous dies young, it's their obligation to "find an angle" and write 8,000 words on it.
Quick! What should we say about Amy Winehouse?!?! We're Grantland!! This is our thing!! Just throw something up on the board and see what sticks!!
There was no story there. Sad? Yes, of course. But Amy Winehouse was a 1-hit wonder addicted to drugs. End of story. There was no importance to her death, at least not for me. 20 addicts probably died in West Baltimore alone in the time it took GL to finish that piece. I never went back to GL after they wasted my time with "the importance" of Amy Winehouse.
Grantland was gluttonous. Irrelevant. Unnecessary. And from what I understand, a tremendous cost center for ESPN. Good riddance.
And the short-lived Grantland Basketball Hour was an embarrassment for the network. Simmons actually had the nerve to whine about it being on Thursday nights in Primetime and not getting enough promotion. This guy was one lucky break away from being a career bartender/valet parker living in a 1 BR apartment in Quincy.
The bigger you get, the more pressure there is to sustain. But you often can't produce the same quality with increased frequency. Greatness doesn't just come shooting out your ass.
I haven't read a single thing Simmons has written in > 5 years. I can't take him anymore. He may have an encyclopedic memory of games he attended as a kid, but so what? We all do. He is a novice when it comes to sports. The guy is like 45 and he's still making snarky, Tina Fey-esque fart jokes on Twitter. For basketball insight, I'd rather read or listen to Brendan Brown (Hubie's son & Knicks radio guy), Brian Windhorst (covers the Cavs) or Zach Lowe.
Simmons is insufferable....but he thinks he's witty and funny and there's nothing worse than someone who made it big, got rich, and now thinks he has the Midas touch. His audiance is the bottom of the barrel (eg, college kids who think they're cooler than they really are).
Right around the time Grantland launched, Amy Winehouse died. I knew very little about other than a) she was a singer from some non-US country, b) she was fuggly, and c) she seemed be a desperate attention seeker with her wild & crazy antics. But almost immediatley, Grantland had a headline up that was titled something like "The Importance of Amy Winehouse's Death" or "Why Amy Winehouse's Death Should Matter to You."
Like a fool, I clicked on it because I assumed (incorrectly as it turned out) that I was missing something about this person. Maybe there was a backstory about her life, her music, etc. So I scrolled throught his endless, 8,000 word essay waiting to find out what her importance was. Nothing. The entire piece was froth.
I got the impression the Grantland offices are full of these millennials who have been self-appointed tas the world's foremost authority on ANYTHING happening in sports or culture. So they just launched, someone who is semi-famous dies young, it's their obligation to "find an angle" and write 8,000 words on it.
Quick! What should we say about Amy Winehouse?!?! We're Grantland!! This is our thing!! Just throw something up on the board and see what sticks!!
There was no story there. Sad? Yes, of course. But Amy Winehouse was a 1-hit wonder addicted to drugs. End of story. There was no importance to her death, at least not for me. 20 addicts probably died in West Baltimore alone in the time it took GL to finish that piece. I never went back to GL after they wasted my time with "the importance" of Amy Winehouse.
Grantland was gluttonous. Irrelevant. Unnecessary. And from what I understand, a tremendous cost center for ESPN. Good riddance.
And the short-lived Grantland Basketball Hour was an embarrassment for the network. Simmons actually had the nerve to whine about it being on Thursday nights in Primetime and not getting enough promotion. This guy was one lucky break away from being a career bartender/valet parker living in a 1 BR apartment in Quincy.
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NickleDimer
Post 'Til Your Fingers Bleed
The footnote obsession was laughable. It got a little boring though and needed a change. The INET reached a saturation point of whiny people that like to write about obscure details without any real substance behind it. Some might call that type of stuff "shallow and pedantic". Sitting side by side with Nate Silver's stuff made them look antiquated and silly.
The Grantland writers were smarter than you (and me) and they made sure that everyone knew it.
NickleDimer
Post 'Til Your Fingers Bleed
Sounds like a classic case of not following newsgroup rule #1: if you don't like it, don't read it.
What sucks most is that this just feeds Simmons' massive ego even more. I'm sure he's happy as can be that his site died shortly after he got booted. In his mind it validates his greatness.
I enjoyed some of the content on there, especially the work by Zach Lowe, Jonah Keri and Jonathan Abrams (his NBA pieces are fantastic).
Shoop, I never read that Amy Winehouse article but she was indeed talented. She may have only had a commercial hit or two but she has a bunch of good songs. I saw her perform at Coachella in 2007 before things got real bad and she put on a damn good show, great voice.
Shoop, I never read that Amy Winehouse article but she was indeed talented. She may have only had a commercial hit or two but she has a bunch of good songs. I saw her perform at Coachella in 2007 before things got real bad and she put on a damn good show, great voice.
It's not about Amy Winehouse. It's about Grantland feeling compelled to write 30,000 words about her overdose.
I can't believe the outpouring of support on Twitter
I can't believe the outpouring of support on Twitter
This whole argument is a rehash from when Simmons left ESPN and how cool it is to hate on simmons so its all kind of BB2N, but to deny that there were good writers at grantland is silly. I don't think I've read a simmons piece since the page 2 days but the likes of lowe, kerri, barnwell, mcindoe are all really solid. Im not a college football guy but I know friends that are thought holly anderson was good. Do people actually go to ESPN proper? That site is a dumpster fire.
Here's an example of real sportwriting. I'm not even a fan of USC football but I couldn't turn away from this piece by ESPN.
http://espn.go.com/college-football...ow-usc-hopes-recapturing-glory-failed-trojans
http://espn.go.com/college-football...ow-usc-hopes-recapturing-glory-failed-trojans
Keyshawn Johnson, a former Trojans wide receiver who remains close to the program, says Haden "didn't get his hands greasy" with his search. More troubling -- according to Riki Ellison and multiple other sources -- the AD was swayed most of all by then-senior associate athletic director Mark Jackson, who was the ultimate Carroll confidant.
Jackson, a Boston native, was an assistant under Carroll in the late '90s with the Patriots and had for years been Carroll's eyes and ears in the Trojans locker room. "He was Pete Carroll's stool pigeon," says Ellison, whose son Rhett was a tight end for USC from 2008 to 2011. "Mark Jackson was Pete's mouth and intelligence inside USC football." But now Jackson had Haden's ear, and sources say he took complete advantage of it.
Jackson campaigned right away for Sarkisian's hire and urged Haden to use Carroll as a character reference. At the time, Carroll was still close with Sark, still texting him several times a week. So when Haden contacted Carroll, the coach recommended his protégé for the job. According to a source, Jackson then was part of Haden's inner circle during the selection process, along with senior associate athletic directors J.K. McKay and Steve Lopes.
Jackson, who is now the athletic director at Villanova, did not return phone messages asking for comment. But he is the one who sources say laid the groundwork for the Sarkisian hire. On the surface, besides the role of the search committee, the university had vetted Sarkisian simply by calling Sark's mentor, Carroll.
You can replace Grandland with fivethirtyeight and it would be the same thing.
I actually liked a few of the writers, like Barnwell/Mays for football and Zach Lowe for hoops and even Mark Titus was solid for college hoops. But all that culture crap and other things were just over kill.