For what it’s worth, I’ve always thought that Deadspin’s beef with Simmons is mainly about five things:

Okay. Again, you responded to a passage about reputation (of which Keri already had a very good reputation) with a discussion about popularity. There is no doubt Bill Simmons was, and is, a more popular media personality than Jonah Keri. But! There is also little doubt that Jonah Keri was a well-known and well…

Boy, you’re really dedicated to....some kind of narrative about why Deadspin occasionally posts negative things about a guy who deserves negative posts but for some reason other than the reasons he deserves negative posts.

That last point is the key. Simmons is a low brow hack. He needed the A-list sports and culture writers he brought in to gain a level of artistic/intellectual credibility he could never get on his own because he is neither artistic nor intellectual. He writes poorly edited, overlong screeds filled with tired ideas and…

This half-assed post has 96,000 clicks and over 300 comments in under 3 1/2 hours. Does that answer your question?

Because at the core of Deadspin is an ethos of self-awareness, of knowing exactly what one’s product is, and from this perspective no transgression is in greater need of being unmasked than this quality’s narrow failure.

Okay. Here’s the paragraph I believe you’re responding to:

I haven’t enjoyed Simmons since i was 20 in the early Aughts. It took me a LOOOOOOOOONG time to give Grantland a chance, because I figured it would just be a bunch of self-important windbags blabbering almost incoherently about pop culture nonsense in a way meant to convince people how cool the author (thought he)…

Hardy har har. There’s a deep well of stories about Simmons being a petulant little brat, many admitted by Simmons himself.

By the time Grantland launched, Keri had already written a bestseller, and his writing had appeared in many major publications. Obviously being attached to the website of a writer as popular as Simmons increased his visibility, but also it was well-respected writers such as him that lent sophomoric Bill Simmons’s…

I check a good number of other sites for news and satire and stuff as well. Certain writers on here are pretty good, others aren’t.

His writing sucks.

I guess? But I think the real problem with Grantland was that, to continue the analogy, the studio budgeted 10 million dollars for their prestige project then hired a director who demanded the studio fund a 100 million dollar prestige project.

I’m actually ashamed to have loved reading Simmons’s stuff so many years ago. It’s just terrible. He’s not a particularly good writer, and he’s not that smart. In my early twenties, I was just such a mark for any/all pop culture references. Maybe that part hasn’t changed tooo much, but just enough to never want to…

I remember a Deadspin that was once pretty annoyingly effusive about Simmons. As the years go by they just have far less positive shit to write about him. Once upon a time he was a unique, interesting sportswriter. Now the only unique or interesting things he does involve his ongoing descent toward maximum hubris.

It feels more like (d) - he really meant it, but knew it was a shitty thing to say, so if there was blowback, he can always claim retroactively, “geez guys, I was tooottallly joking!”

Because he’s amazingly petty. He goes to Twitter whenever someone says something mean about him.

This has been your latest edition “Am I talking about an annoying media personality or the American President?”

Keri also actually knows his shit, whereas Simmons always has been a Trump-level bullshitter.

This shit is actually gambling and everyone seems to turn the blind eye. It’s kinda brilliant but disgusting at the same time.

lol@paying real money for RNG ‘mystery boxes’