Rick Reilly leaves Sports Illustrated - now confirmed by NYT

Let's say you're ESPN and you hire RR for $2 million.

What do you have him do to get a return on your investment?

Write for The Magazine? Write for dotcom? Work at E:60?

He's always struck me as a big awkward on television, though no more than Kornheiser was at first I guess. You could probably have him lock horns with Wilbon pretty easily on PTI when Tony was inbetween MNF gigs.

But will RR have enough motivation to give The Mouse a return on all that coin? Obviously he's ridiculously talented. But I think it was pretty obvious to everyone he didn't quite have the weekly hunger he did when he first got that back page. Maybe this is the spark he needs to be the old RR again.

It will be interesting, though, to see SI try to reinvent itself in the coming months. I imagine this is a bit of a morale blow, whether RR had gotten lazy or not.

To be honest, I bet ESPN smells blood in the water, and will now try to go after people like Smith to see if they can bleed SI to death.

 

ESPN is just going to show animated Riley on all it's shows.

 

Hearing he will not write for the .com. That's Simmons' domain. But podcasts and videos? Seems like a logical once-a-week duty.

 

Hypothetical:

You're ESPN. You're going to spend by the truckload to get Rick Reilly. Clearly, to earn out, you're going to have him on your air as much as possible. Only makes sense.

But you're also buying his authority and throw-weight as a columnist. So you want him on the back page of your magazine, 'natch.

If you're Mr. Reilly though, you just got off that particular merry-go-round.

So the question becomes, will Rick Reilly have a column in the magazine?

Or does he do two/three features a year and earn the rest as a talking head?

Or does he write not at all and get his own show?

 

Let me see if I have this straight:

Dan Patrick used to write a piece for the final page of ESPN the Magazine, a place that may now be the dominion of Rick Reilly, who used to fill the final page of SI, which may now be the sole proprietorship of Dan Patrick.

The only question I have is, Where does this leave the great "Beers with ..." feature?

 

Patrick's piece was basically ghosted by John Hassan off a taped interview done with the subject ...

Next?

 

Will SI create a specialy whiny-voice font for Patrick?

 

Jeebus ... I could build a nice ballpark up here for that much.

 

Leatherheads has been pushed back to April...if it stays there, clearly the studio (Uni) thinks it's a dud like so many of Clooney's movies are (sadly -- Michael Clayton is the second-best movie I've seen all year [behind Ratatouille] ) because April's not much of a month for romantic-comedys-set-in-the-1920s-at-the-beginning-of-the-NFL movies.

But RR made plenty of $$$ from the movie to live off of for a few months, for sure.

RR will be joining ESPN just a few months ahead of the WWL's big West Coast HQ opening at LA Live. Wonder if they're planning on him moving to town to be their LA-based star?

 

Wouldn't Bill Simmons be their LA-based star?

 

Not since late yesterday.

 

I know Simmons is hated on this board, but couldn't you make the contention that Simmons is more popular amongst the average-Joe than Reilly is?