It's been five months since Bill Simmons got the can from ESPN. There's been a lot of talk about Simmons' star power in that intervening time. For people outside of America born in the internet era, he's basically the way in on US sports. In the five months since his sacking, there's been a lot of anticipation about what the new, ESPN-free Simmons media personality would be like. When it was good, the BS Report was some of the best radio on the internet. There was a possibility that Simmons, exiled by ESPN and out on his own in a space with very few restrictions on content, would be an even better broadcaster - angrier, edgier, funnier.
October 1st arrived yesterday and Simmons released two pods to the internet ether. Maybe I am alone, but I found the whole the episodes - one with Cousin Sal of the Jimmy Kimmel Show, one with corporate litigationist and celebrity Republican JackO - very long and pretty underwhelming. There's a basic dereliction of production that irks. The name of the pod couldn't be less imaginative. There's no audio stings at the beginning. The ad reads - especially the mailbag spots - halfway through, were clunky as hell.
Simmons also promised F bombs and bad language. There was none of that.
Most disappointingly, for me, anyway, Simmons had barely anything to say on his own departure from ESPN. I had expected Simmons would be on a revenge mission. He promised he'd discuss the circumstances around his sacking down the line. But bar a few jibes at the Big Bellbottom and Mike Golic impression, Simmons more or less had left the guys who sacked him be. Sure there was critique of Deflategate reporting by ESPN, but he's been doing that on Twitter for months. I had presumed he might be holding something up his sleeve.
Maybe he's just rusty. Inevitably the pods will improve with time. But my fear is that Simmons, tied down to HBO, will sit back, look at his largesse and think 'well, this isn't so bad' and give the keys of his podcast over to his mates. Simmons had positioned himself a sort of dilettante, a sports guy who speaks truth to sports power. There wasn't enough of that Sports Guy in the first episodes of his new podcast and I wonder if those five months on the sidelines in Malibu have changed him as a broadcaster for the worse.
If you like podcasts, have you checked out any of Balls.ie's brilliant pods?
