The Simmons Site

I'm positive that Simmons gets more traffic. But I imagine that more sports fans overall know Rick Reilly, because he has decades of back columns.

 

Peter King or Mike Wilbon, if Wilbon still counts as a writer. Mainly because both are on network TV. What's Simmons' exposure beyond the Web? The number of people that watch Football Night in America or watch the NBA on ABC must dwarf the number of people that read Grantland or listen to the BS Report.

Fame meaning would recognize the face, it has to be one of those or Schefter. The NFL is that big.

 

I don't know if Simmons is the most famous. I'd guess probably yes. But there's no way in hell Adam Schefter is more well-known than Simmons. I know this wouldn't hold up in a court of law, but on Twitter, Schefter has 664,000 followers. Impressive, no doubt.

Simmons has 1.4 million.

As for the site and expectations about it and whether it's lived up to those...

It's lived up to mine so far. In a month or however long it's been online, here are the stories I've enjoyed the hell out of:
Alex Pappedamas on The Wire
Klosterman's JUCO piece
The Jeter Diary
Brian Phillips on Federer
Bryan Curtis on a backboard and his father's suicide
Pierce's National story
The oral history of the National
Jay Caspian King on Ichiro
Caspian King on LeBron's meltdown
Jones on the Jays
Klosterman on DVR

Some others I'm probably forgetting. And there are other stories that have been really good, including a couple of Simmons' NBA pieces.

Again, it's a month old. There have been comments comparing it to the New Yorker and saying how poorly it compares - in so many words. If you have a New Yorker subscription, you have online access to their entire archive. Go back to 1925, go back to those first issues. Was that a great magazine? Did Harold Ross look like some type of genius? Could you see what the future held for the magazine? Could you see the potential for the groundbreaking profiles, like "Hiroshima" or the one on Hemingway? Would you be able to tell that the magazine would one day produce White, White, Gill, McPhee, Capote, Shawn, Remnick, Thurber, Frazier, Orlean, Kael, Hersh, Grann, and on and on and on and on and on? Could you tell it'd be a magazine that would offer up the best in fiction and nonfiction?

Or go to the SI vault. Check out the first few years of the magazine. Would anyone have predicted it would eventually produce Jenkins, Deford, Kram, Zimmerman, Plimpton, Kirkpatrick, Smith, Nack, MacGregor, (good) Reilly and on and on and on and on? If so, you must be able to see more in those early stories on bridge and yachting than I see.

Yes, in today's world you're expected to produce immediately, you're expected to emerge fully formed, especially it's from the ESPN womb, especially if you have some of Simmons' arrogance.

Maybe down the line there will be 15,000-word investigative pieces mixed in with 500-word stories on Hollywood's 24 Sexiest Couples - and there are only 24 of them! Maybe the art will expand and mix with the stories a bit better.

Maybe.

All I know is that so far the site has met my expectations and they were fairly high. Those stories I listed, that's a pretty good percentage of stories that have captured my interest in six weeks. Compare it to, say, your favorite monthly or, yes, even weekly magazine. It'd probably compare pretty favorably.

 

That's a pretty good take on it, really.

 

Bill Simmons is the most famous sportswriter in the country and it's not close, if you're focusing on "writer." Wilbon's in the discussion if you still consider him a writer, but he isn't doing much of that these days.

 

If you polled a representative sample of Americans, Albom would crush Simmons in popularity. There are very few old people and non sports fans who have ever heard of Simmons. So the better question is who is most popular with what part of the population.

 

But are we talking people who read or everybody? TV is powerful.
Sunday NFL countdown is huge. Fame among the casual fan, the guy who's not on Twitter and just watches with his buddies once a week, Schefter and King rule that demo. And its a very large demo.

 

But 90% percent of those people who are familiar with Albom don't even know he's a sportswriter.

 

Totally agree.

But does anyone care about/notice the site without him?

 

My point of disagreement is that it's been so spotty and featured some completely awful, awful pieces. It has been wildly inconsistent and downright illogical at times. And maybe that's a product of a site still feeling out what exactly its goal is, but how can you allow for all the factual errors? It's not like they don't have the payroll to hire a few decent copy editors.

 

Since five people have guessed this person already, it was not hockeybeat.

 

If Prepster Bill is so famous, how come ESPN didn't call the site "Simmons"?