ESPN announced the sudden shuttering of Grantland on Oct. 30 without much of an explanation behind it ... until now, that is.
John Skipper, the president of the Worldwide Leader in Sports, recently sat down with Vanity Fair to shed light on the move.
"I made the decision," Skipper said. "There was no influence from [ESPN corporate parent] Disney on this. And I made sure that I divorced my feelings about Bill [Simmons] from this decision because I would never let that affect the people who are there."
Skipper referenced Bill Simmons, the founder of Grantland and co-creator of ESPN's 30 for 30 documentary film series, who was fired from the network in May.
Two months after getting fired, though, Simmons inked a deal with HBO to launch his own weekly talk show. In October, four Grantland staffers left the sports-feature website to join Simmons, presumably at HBO. One of the four staffers was offered a job to become Grantland's new Editor-in-Chief, Skipper divulged.
"We lacked a full understanding of the bonding nature between Bill and those guys," Skipper says in hindsight.
As part of his sitdown with Vanity Fair, Skipper explained that "the decision was made the week before we announced it."
"In the weighing of a decision like this, you look at the resources, the time, the energy necessary to do this well and balance that with the things you get from it," Skipper said. "This was never a financial matter for us. The benefits were having a halo brand and being Bill Simmons related."
He added: "I loved the site. It pained me to make the decision. It was not without difficulty."
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