Wait, let me first gargle with Draino for the similarity of that title to AJ Daulerio's work on Deadspin. It's not like I needed my taste buds anyway. I was wondering the other day, are there any sports bloggers who, like Simmons, could come off the Internet bench and immediately gain a large following at ESPN? I put together a top 3 list.
1. The Cavalier from Yaysports.com ESPN loves cartoons and multimedia in general, and The Cavalier's humor is PG, so it would be a great fit. Plus, The Cavalier's essays are pretty funny, too. I could see this working, as long as they didn't force The Cavalier to hit a certain word count.
2. Matt Ufford from The Prelude. Yes, I picked that particular site on purpose. Although some of the humor on WL and KSK would be banned at ESPN, I've been quite impressed with the football column he has on AOL's Fanhouse. I think he could balance the funny and serious nicely.
3. NOIS Sports Blog. Oh, I know, you're already telling me he'd be too controversial because of the race issue. But why should he just limit his gifts to race topics? I'd love to see a serious-sounding editorial about whether Romo's dating of hot women makes him less able to properly throw a football, or claiming that George Mitchell's report is biased against baseball players.
What's your list? By the way, Bill Simmons Week dies a terrible death today; let's not talk about my sense of timing in programming this against Christmas, ok? Check back tomorrow for a video interview.
Hmm...good question.
ReplyDeleteI like MJD's work. His daily word over at the Fanhouse is one of the only posts that I read daily. Plus, his football-related stuff at Deadspin is better than any running diary that Simmons has put up in the last three years.
Ufford has the whole multi-persona thing going on with Captain Caveman - so I would have to agree that he would have to slant more towards the "Matt Ufford" persona to be successful at an ESPN-like company.
Skeets over at TBJ would have to be right there as well - even though a lot of his 'work' has been done on podcats and such. If anything, Simmons' recent rollout of the BS report is hacking what the fellas at TBJ are doing. JE would just have to convert it to paper.