ESPN had to see this coming.
After firing Bill Simmons in May, the outspoken sports personality has quite a few things to say about his former employer. In debuting The Bill Simmons Podcast on Thursday, October 1, Simmons fired a few shots at the Worldwide Leader in Sports during a segment about Deflategate and how ESPN handled its coverage involving NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.
"I'm a little biased here, since my experiences at ESPN the last two years. But the way everyone else was covering Goodell's role in this story versus the way ESPN covered it, it was embarrassing," Simmons said as part of two podcasts now available, as reported by Entertainment Weekly.
"And I couldn't believe no one called out ESPN about it. You have Dan Wetzel at Yahoo, you had Sally Jenkins at the Washington Post, you had all the people in Boston, you had different radio personalities, and people really going after how the NFL was handling this, how Goodell was handling this, all this stuff.
"Especially in the weeks after the broken cellphone thing, when it came out that they had obviously leaked stuff and something really legitimately shady was going on, and yet if you went to ESPN, you didn't see anything," Simmons continued. "It's hard to come away from that and not think that ESPN is in the bag for the NFL, because they were."
In 2011, ESPN extended its television rights with the NFL for $15.2 billion, to air games on the network through 2021 — something that Simmons seems to be referring to here.
Remember, ESPN fired Simmons after 14 years with the company after he ripped Goodell over Deflategate and earned a three-week suspension from the network. It didn't take Simmons long to find his footing, though. In July, he inked a deal for a new HBO talk show. The digital space via podcasts is another area that Simmons will contribute to.
Something tells us this isn't the last time Simmons mentions ESPN.
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